It is the UK that is living through a cold snap, but in balmy Perth they were playing in a snow globe. The scenery was static, solid, but everything else was constantly getting shaken up, bits flying in unpredictable directions. The crowd roared, commentators gibbered, the glitter never settled.
Unlike the first day England were not batting at the start, though they were not long delayed. At which point a pattern quickly emerged, one that almost perfectly repeated that established on the previous day, while also being completely different. The bowler who was useless was good, the marginal, unconvincing snickometer-based review that was not out was now given. Some things were both precisely the same (Australia’s tactics against England’s tail, how the tail reacted to Australia’s tactics) and also, at the same time, completely the opposite (the outcome).
It is good, in these awkward, perplexing circumstances, to have at least one thing you can rely on, and unfortunately for England that thing has been Zak Crawley. It was Australia who came into the game with questions over their opening partnership, questions they neatly if temporarily sidestepped by playing two different opening partnerships neither of which was their actual opening partnership, and one of which contained the person who would win the match in a couple of hours of wildly incongruous, completely irresistible genius.
But if Crawley’s awkward prod, Mitchell Starc’s brilliant leftwards dive, and the opener’s second duck of the game started England down another spiral – this one destined to be terminal – it was another single shot that really decided the game. The issue for England, the one that made this one impossible to recover from, was that this single shot was played three times by three players in the space of 10 minutes and six balls, as the guts of their innings were spilled in a single repeated act of self-evisceration.
After the chaos of the opening day and a bit, Ben Duckett and Ollie Pope gave themselves a couple of hours to remove from the game the echoes of constantly crashing crockery. They were only ever spinning plates. At lunch it was 59 for one: Pope was on 24 off 48, Duckett 28 off 37, England’s lead 99. One respected former Australia international, working the game as a television analyst, confidently predicted over his prandial curry that they were about to score “a million runs”. But those plates were already starting to wobble, and just eight balls after the interval the first one toppled.
Scott Boland had been almost irredeemably useless on Friday, but was a different proposition with a different ball, his lengths reined back by a crucial few feet, and a few cracks starting to show in the surface. Belatedly, deservedly, he was rewarded. Duckett was squared up and deflected the ball to second slip, where Steve Smith took a fine low catch. Joe Root joined Pope, England’s lead 105.
And then it happened. Three balls into his next over Boland sent down a tempter to Pope, full and wide. Pope saw a ball that was there to be driven and threw his bat at it. He had done plenty of this already, and really it was more luck than judgment that had allowed him to survive his first 25 Boland deliveries. He would not make it to 27. Alex Carey, the wicketkeeper, stepped in front of first slip to take an easy catch.
And then it happened again. Three balls later, Boland sent down a tempter to Harry Brook. Brook saw a ball that was there to be driven and threw his bat at it. This time it flew to Usman Khawaja at slip, whose reactions may have slowed but not by enough to fluff those.
And then it happened again. Perhaps Brook had not seen Pope’s dismissal before he came out to bat. He could have been looking the other way, tying his shoelaces, in a quiet corner willing himself into the ideal mindspace for his brand of often brilliant, reckless batsmanship. Root, on the other hand, had, from the perfect vantage point at the other end, seen two teammates punished for responding to the same question with the same regrettable answer, had felt the ground shift, the match situation change, the pressure on his own shoulders swell.
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And then Starc bowled, full and wide, a ball that was there to be driven. Instinct took over. The ball clipped his inside edge and crashed into his stumps. England led by 116. Largely thanks to some rapidly accumulated late-innings runs from Gus Atkinson and Brydon Carse, less rescuing what had gone before than hinting at what was to come, they hauled that eventually to 204. Not nearly enough, not when Travis Head is in this kind of mood.
Of course, this is this England, a team that refuse on a point of principle ever to rein themselves in. Remorse just slips off them, like honey from an oiled spoon. It is a compulsion that makes them so compelling, and so many of their Tests so entertaining. It might also have stopped them winning a few more of them.
