ENGLAND AGONY
The Ashes
AFTER the miracle of Headingley kept their Ashes hopes alive, England now need a marathon stonewall across the Pennines to stop merciless Australia killing them off once and for all.
Briefly, when Joe Root’s team took four new-ball wickets during a heady spell in mid-afternoon, their aspirations and those of an Old Trafford ground packed to the rafters were raised to third Test levels.
Not for the first time in this series, however, it was Steve Smith’s blade that blunted them. He fell 18 runs short of becoming the first player in Ashes history to hit a double hundred and hundred in the same Test, but his latest toying with England’s attack set up an Australian charge towards a win that would see them retain the urn with the Oval finale to spare.
When, in the evening gloom, Pat Cummins claimed England’s most prolific first-innings batsmen Rory Burns and Root in consecutive balls — the latter a snorter that snaked past the outside edge to peg back off-stump — it further enhanced the position of strength their former captain had developed.
A chink of light had revealed itself when, with Australia 240 runs ahead, Smith was joined by Matthew Wade in the middle.
Stuart Broad and Jofra Archer were being roared into the crease by the waves of noise from the stands that had greeted each of Ben Stokes’ eight sixes in the wondrous momentum-shifting innings on the fifth day in Leeds; Archer’s removal of Travis Head’s middle stump adding further froth to the gladiatorial atmosphere.
Australia’s innings had got off to its customary dreadful start. Such are the struggles of David Warner right now that negotiating a Broad over would be viewed as a success. This time, he made it to the sixth ball but the plumbest of LBWs made it six dismissals to his new nemesis in eight visits to the crease.
Marcus Harris, another of Australia’s walking wickets, succumbed in the same fashion and when Archer, his high-octane pace returning at an opportune juncture, dismissed Smith-clone Marnus Labuschagne for a first sub-50 score of the series, the home team were showing the kind of competitive bustle so evidently lacking at the start of this match.
In what was arguably the tetchiest day of the series so far, they also got stuck into verbal battles with their Australian adversaries — Stokes backing up Archer with words to Travis Head and Broad waving off Labuschagne from within the team huddle.
At that point, Broad was in the midst of what was shaping to be a reprise of one of his great Ashes spells.
But Smith repelled it — fortune a friend when he dug out a Broad yorker second ball and watched it roll perilously close to his leg-stump — to ensure that English impetus would not develop again.
And when Root opted to tread water the other side of tea by giving his new ball duo an extended breather and sticking with back-up man Craig Overton and Jack Leach, rather than go for one last throw of the victory dice, he took his tally to an astonishing 671 runs in three Tests this summer with an array of audacious strokes.
Such was his mastery that it came as a genuine surprise when he mishit a steepler to long-off. But the damage had been done, reducing the fifth-day spectacle to an attritional fight for survival against Cummins, Josh Hazlewood and a rejuvenated Mitchell Starc.
It is not so much runs as time that will be precious to another full house today as England face an uphill struggle to stop their double dream of World Cup and Ashes glory fizzling out ahead of schedule.
However, following Ben Stokes’ audacious, unbeaten hundred that took them to their 359-run target at Headingley by the narrowest of margins a fortnight ago, coach Trevor Bayliss insisted they could score the 365 more it would require to raise the bar again.
‘It’ll take a couple of our guys to make good hundreds but as we saw in the last Test, anything is possible,’ he said.
‘I’m always positive, We can do it. We’ve had a chat in the changing room, we’re certainly not going out thinking it’s all over. They believe they are good enough to bat for 98 overs and save the game.’