JOE’S MEN ARE LEFT ON ROPES
Australia quicks pile on the agony to leave England with a battle to stay in the series
JOE ROOT and Rory Burns took blow after blow from the Aussie attack in the Manchester gloom and for hour after hour they could not be moved.
But when push came to shove, yet again England’s batsmen found ways to trip up and fall short of their ultimate destination.
Their patience and skill in surviving and thriving for as long as they did for their twin half-centuries was commendable, but the sheer excellence of their opposition – in this case Josh Hazlewood – was too much as he removed the pair within 11 balls.
Jason Roy fell to Hazlewood, too, for a bright and brisk 22 to leave England 200-5 at the close and still 98 runs away from avoiding the follow-on, with
Ben Stokes and Jonny Bairstow with work to do on day four. Both Burns and Root left the field battered and bruised after taking hits to the knee, the hands, the shoulder and other more sensitive parts of the body.
Root had to call for reinforcements after seeing – and no doubt feeling – his box being split in two by a Mitchell Starc thunderbolt, but on he went. It was bloody hard work against the outstanding Hazlewood and the relentlessly hostile Pat Cummins.
At no stage did the runs really flow on a pitch that Steve Smith, Marnus Labuschagne and Tim Paine made look tailor-made for batting.
Every run was appreciated heartily and every boundary greeted like a long-lost brother who had travelled the globe to arrive at a surprise birthday party.And for that both Root and Burns must be given credit in the way they coped with whatever Australia threw at them and continued their stand.
Burns, in particular, was magnificent in his judgment of line and length as he was peppered with plenty of short stuff. It had worked before in the series, but here he was watchful, leaving well and waiting for the ball to come to him as he collected his second 50 of the series.
Added to his first Test ton at Edgbaston, Burns is personally having a reasonably good series in a department where every other player on both sides has failed to impress.
He surely deserved a second hundred but, on 81 and after 64 overs with the ball finally starting to move late, he could not avoid a ball angled across him that took the edge to second slip. With Burns back in the dressing room, Root knew he had to keep things together, but he seemed almost powerless to stop himself getting pinned on the pad to one that nipped back at him for 71.
It was an oh so familiar dismissal of Root for an oh so familiar type of score and, in fact, he should have been caught by the keeper on 54 but the ball luckily split Paine and DavidWarner at slip with neither moving.
Root remains England’s best batsman and, of course, he has the ability to score big hundreds but, in his recent matches against Australia, he has found them hard to come by.
In his last nine games against these bowlers, he is yet to reach three figures to make the reasonable comparisons between him and Smith in 2015 now redundant. And Roy’s move down the order did not quite work, either, with a mess being made of his middle stump – the ball after he had cut
confidently for four.
DOWN AND OUCH... Every run was greeted like long-lost brother