Root stops the rot and roars back
IT was hardly a repeat of seven years ago and the MCG sprinkler celebration but at least England knew when they wandered towards the same Bay 13 yesterday to applaud the Barmy Army there would be no whitewash this time.
There have been eight Ashes Tests in Australia since those giddy days when Andrew Strauss’s England won by an innings in both Melbourne and Sydney to retain the urn gloriously and each one has ended in crushing defeat.
So even if a fourth-Test draw on a sorry excuse of an MCG pitch is a case of too little, too late in another Ashes series defeat in Australia, the rot has been stopped and Joe Root was able to smile again on his 27th birthday.
And Root reckons the momentum from bossing the draw at Melbourne can help them nick a victory in the final test in Sydney.
Root said: ‘In terms of our squad, character is something I never question. After three tough games and tough results, to come back with a performance as good as that was extremely pleasing for me as a captain.
‘They’re the sort of responses you want to see from your players. That’s a fairer reflection of us as a side.
‘We’re a better team than we’ve shown on this trip. That’s a benchmark now for us to move forward and try to make sure we go one better in Sydney and get that win we want.
‘Of course we didn’t want it to be a whitewash, but we came into this game fully excited about winning.
‘It wasn’t hard to get the guys in the right frame of mind for that.
‘They had a lot of disappointment coming away from Perth and they were desperate to prove a lot of people wrong and make sure we get something good out of this tour.’
Make no mistake, another 5-0 humiliation would have been extremely damaging to a very different England team from the one that unravelled so bitterly in 2013/14, when their best ever coach, Andy Flower, felt compelled to resign.
Not least, a whitewash and all the recriminations that go with it could have been potentially ruinous to the captaincy and batting of their most significant player, Root, before his reign has really begun.
England have lost their biggest star in Ben Stokes — and his return seems as far away as ever — so the last thing they needed was for their other hugely important cricketer to go through the trauma of a 5-0 defeat on his watch.
Root is a tough cookie but the tame way he surrendered his wicket in this Test was a worrying sign of the mental disintegration that can come from the uniquely brutal environment of a losing Ashes tour.
The captain can at least now be encouraged by a performance he described as much more like the real England and there is no reason why his side should not be able to build on it and win the final Test in Sydney starting on Thursday.
Alastair Cook’s unbeaten 244 — a record Test score for a visiting player at the MCG — earned him the man-of-the-match award.
He said: ‘The lads have been good on this tour. We just haven’t done ourselves justice on the field. We’ve had too many people out of form to put Australia under pressure for longer periods of time.
‘In this game it was nice we did it for longer. We just weren’t good enough to get over the line.
‘Now we’ve got one more chance to do that in Sydney.’
That elusive victory might already have been achieved had there not been so much rain on the fourth day here and a pitch that brought Test cricket into disrepute had not so stubbornly refused to deteriorate as this match went on.
That should take nothing away from the extraordinary Steve Smith, who has now batted for almost 250 overs and more than 30 hours in this series to amass more than 600 runs and become the biggest difference between these sides.
Smith again never looked in trouble yesterday during his 23rd century in only his 60th Test and, when the ball does not move sideways, he is right up there with anyone who has ever played the game.
The Australia captain finished 102 not out but admitted the surface was ‘very unresponsive’, which prompted MCG authorities to announce a review of preparation methods. ‘I don’t think it’s good for anyone,’ Smith said. ‘It hasn’t changed over five days, and if we were playing for the next couple of days it probably wouldn’t have changed at all. ‘It’s got to find a way to have some pace and bounce, or take some spin or do something.’