“I don’t think a groundsman has ever been under as much pressure as the guy here this week.”
Ben Stokes had a smile on his face during his final pre-match press conference of this Ashes series at the Sydney Cricket Ground, as he responded to a question about the likely nature of the pitch for the fifth Test, which starts on Sunday morning.
This is no laughing matter, however, for Adam Lewis, curator of the SCG, who has already been moved to defend the greenish tinge at the edge of the strip a day before a single ball has been bowled.
In a surprising twist to Australia’s obsession with grass lengths in the week since England’s two-day victory in Melbourne, Lewis also described how he “shuts out the noise” while rolling, mowing and watering the SCG strip.
“I don’t scroll, I don’t have social media, so I try and keep all that negative energy away from me. We just put our own pressure on ourselves,” Lewis told Australian media on Friday, talking, to be clear, about producing a pitch for other people to play cricket on.
Lewis also pronounced himself “happy with the colour” and predicted “a nice even surface” with “good carry” for the seam bowlers.
By Saturday lunchtime, Stokes and his fellow tour selectors had yet to settle on the team that will be culled from England’s 12 for this Test. This is likely to boil down to a straight choice between Matthew Potts, a like-for-like replacement for the injured Gus Atkinson, and Shoaib Bashir, who has played one proper game of cricket since July.
There were no clues, however, in Stokes’ own reading of the SCG surface, which was refreshingly honest on the mysteries of how a pitch can develop over the course of a match.
“I looked yesterday and looked the day before as well,” the England captain said. “I mean, we try and act like we know what we’re doing when we’re looking down at the pitch and rubbing it and knocking it, but no one really has a clue, to be honest. You can only try and give yourself the best chance by thinking, ‘what XI do we need to give us a chance of winning this?’”
“We’ll have a final look, at some point at training. But I think we all play a good game by looking like we know what we’re doing when we’re looking at the wicket.”
Stokes did promise that this would be a genuinely vital occasion for his England team, despite heading to Sydney already 3-1 down in the series and with the scent of home now in their nostrils.
“This is a big game because we’re walking out there representing England,” he said. “The Ashes, unfortunately for us, hasn’t gone the way we wanted it to, but we’ve got one more game in a big series and it’s a real big one for us.
“So although we can’t get the thing that we came here for, we’ve still got a chance to go there and win a game of cricket for England.”
Stokes also paid tribute to the deciding factor in the series; Australia’s vastly superior seam bowling, key to the hosts’ three straight wins when the contest was still alive.
“I think the one thing you take away from the Australia team in particular is the amazing execution with the ball that has put us under heaps of pressure,” he said. “There’s a big difference between what Australia are able to do with the ball compared to what we’ve been able to do with the ball.
“We know that, we own that, we haven’t been able to execute as well as we would have liked to.”
