Quantcast

Match Report:

Scorecard

Root and Malan drag England back into first Test

After an entertaining morning session saw Australia’s lead almost reach 300, Joe Root and Dawid Malan fought back strongly to keep England in the first Test

A defiant, and occasionally dazzling, third-wicket stand between skipper Joe Root and his Yorkshire teammate Dawid Malan has lifted England from a position of hopelessness to within sight of the lead after three days of the opening Vodafone Ashes Test.

England began their second innings shortly before lunch today after another pummelling from Travis Head (152) this morning, and eyeing a deficit of 278 from which position only one Test team has ever legitimately won a Test.

Head explodes to thrill Gabba with hard-hitting 152

That team was Australia, who at Colombo in 1993 gifted Sri Lanka a 291-run first innings advantage before they scrapped their way to a lead of 180 and snuck home by 16 runs.

Beginning tomorrow 2-220  – still 58 runs in deficit – England remain a mountain of work away from setting Australia a challenging target, noting that India successfully chased down 329 to claim a famous win at the very same venue not 11 months ago.

But given their travails of the first two days, the fact England enter day four with buoyancy if not quite brimming is a testament to the character and competence of England's third-wicket pair whose stand has so far yielded 159.

Not only is that the most productive third-wicket partnership for England in Australia since Alastair Cook and Keven Pietersen piled on 175 at the MCG in the Test where they last secured the urn down 11 years ago, both were forced to seek medical treatment late in the day.

Malan, who will resume tomorrow 80 not out after more than four hours at the crease, suffered leg cramps following an attempted pull shot while Root – answering his critics with an unbeaten 86 – sought attention after being struck on the left thigh by Mitchell Starc.

The pair joined forces an hour after lunch, when the dismissal of openers Rory Burns (13) and Haseeb Hameed (13) left the visitors in familiarly fraught territory at 2-61 and more than 200 runs adrift of making Australia bat again.

Hameed had again showed sufficient fight, albeit with minimal flair, to suggest his wicket will become increasingly prized as the Ashes campaign plays out.

After he fell grazing a catch behind from a delivery fired into his ribcage, Australia immediately switched to plan A against Root with his recent tormentors Josh Hazlewood (who has dismissed him eight times in Tests) and Pat Cummins (seven) operating in tandem.

However, unlike day one when Root came and went without finding a run, the 30-year-old withstood the onslaught and now looms as the batter Australia must remove if they are to capitalise in their dominance of the first two- and a-bit days.

Having taken 11 deliveries to chisel a solitary run, Root found his timing and helped himself to 25 off the next 28 balls he faced.

That spree included sweet boundaries off his nemeses Hazlewood (clipped through mid-wicket), Cummins (straight drive) and his former Adelaide Premier Cricket teammate Nathan Lyon (vicious pull shot).

After the break, Root blossomed into an even greater array of strokes as he overtook the cautious Malan despite the left-hander's 50-minute head start and reached 50 with a reprise of the pull-shot boundary off Lyon.

It was the world's top-ranked Test batter's fourth score of 50 in his 12 most recent Ashes innings during which he's averaged an uncharacteristically lean (by his standards) 32.50 and pocketed four ducks.

He also surpassed another Yorkshireman and ex-England captain Michael Vaughan's 2002 record of 1481 runs to become his country's highest Test runs-scorer in a calendar year.

Root's tally currently stands at 1541 at an average of 67 and it's that sort of recent form plus the lack of penetration Australia's bowlers were able to muster today that has the Ashes opener suddenly back in the balance.

In a worrying echo of last summer's series loss to India, Starc (1-60 off 14 overs), Cummins (1-43 off 14) and Lyon (0-69 off 24) were unable to find any assistance in the Gabba pitch that had proved so problematic on the first two days.

Of potentially greater concern was the fact Hazlewood bowled just eight overs for the day and none in the final session, although he remained on the field throughout suggesting he's not carrying a major injury.

As Malan joined his skipper on 50, Cummins turned to the occasional leg spin of Marnus Labuschagne but might have hoped he could enlist speedster Jhye Richardson who was on the field for much of England's second innings in place David Warner.

In what may yet prove his most influential blow of the Test, England all-rounder Ben Stokes laid Warner low with a short, sharp delivery yesterday that struck the opener in the ribs.

Team officials reported today Warner had undergone scans that showed no break, but the 35-year-old suffered severe bruising and it's not clear if he'll be sufficiently fit to bat in Australia's second innings.

Stokes bouncer leaves Warner with rib injury

Stokes had also been sent for medical assessment before play began today, and while those scans showed no structural damage to his left knee he did appear down on pace when bowling this morning and finished the innings with unflattering figures of 0-65 from 12 overs.

He was immediately targeted on taking the ball today by Travis Head who was the last Australia batter dismissed, bowled by Mark Wood as he stepped away and tried to flay him T20-style through the off-side in a search of a final runs flurry before the innings ended.

His 152 from 148 balls faced represented the second fastest score of 150-plus in an Ashes Test after Adam Gilchrist's 152 from 143 at Edgbaston in 2001.

"You're just in the moment": Head on dazzling 152

But perhaps more significantly for a player whose suitability for Test cricket has been perpetually questioned since his debut in 2018 and has been cut from Australia's starting XI and contract list in the past year, it took his tally to 1305 runs at average 43.50 in his 20th Test.

To put that in context, it's more runs than Ricky Ponting (1183) at a better average than Steve Smith (40.03) and with more scores above 150 (two) than Greg Chappell (none) at the same point of their respective careers.

Yet Head's stunning 85-ball hundred in the final session has already been relegated to second-fastest century of the match.

He was easily overtaken for that honour by England left-arm spinner Jack Leach who yielded 100 runs from just 73 balls bowled.

Leach's 1-102 was the most expensive 13-over innings effort in Test history, easily exceeding the previous benchmark of 0-90 by Zimbabwe's Heath Streak against South Africa in 2005.

Head's handy lower-order partnerships with Starc (85 for the eighth wicket) and Lyon (29 for the ninth) lifted Australia's lead to 278 when the innings ended 48 minutes before lunch.

Root's men began their pursuit in the knowledge that, were they to somehow conjure a victory, they would not be the first English team to have done so.

However, that feat was achieved in circumstances even more unlikely than turning the tables on a rampant Australia.

It came at The Oval in 2006 when, after trailing Pakistan by 331 on the first innings, England were awarded the match on forfeit when rival skipper Inzamam-ul-Haq instructed his players not to take the field after tea on day four in protest at being penalised for ball tampering.

An opposition walk-off briefly loomed as England's best hope when struggling opener Burns was adjudged lbw for his second duck of the match, albeit at the end rather than the start of the innings' first over.

Burns showed better judgement in reviewing today's fireball from Starc than in walking across his stumps on the opening morning, with fully functioning ball-tracking technology showing it would have bounced over the top of his stumps.

There was no such reprieve eight overs later when the left-hander wafted at a lifting ball from Cummins that keeper Alex Carey plucked at full stretch above his head in a throwback to his former sporting life as an Australian rules footballer.

At 1-23 and still more than 250 in arrears, England were at risk of not pushing the match into a fourth day.

By stumps, they were setting it up for a potentially intriguing finish.

Australia XI: David Warner, Marcus Harris, Marnus Labuschagne, Steve Smith, Travis Head, Cameron Green, Alex Carey (wk), Pat Cummins (c), Mitchell Starc, Nathan Lyon, Josh Hazlewood

England XI: Rory Burns, Haseeb Hameed, Dawid Malan, Joseph Root (c), Ben Stokes, Ollie Pope, Jos Buttler (wk), Chris Woakes, Ollie Robinson, Mark Wood, Jack Leach

Vodafone Men's Ashes

Squads

Australia: Pat Cummins (c), Steve Smith (vc), Alex Carey, Cameron Green, Josh Hazlewood, Marcus Harris, Travis Head, Usman Khawaja, Marnus Labuschagne, Nathan Lyon, Michael Neser, Jhye Richardson, Mitchell Starc, Mitchell Swepson, David Warner

England: Joe Root (c), James Anderson, Jonathan Bairstow, Dom Bess, Stuart Broad, Rory Burns, Jos Buttler, Zak Crawley, Haseeb Hameed, Dan Lawrence, Jack Leach, Dawid Malan, Craig Overton, Ollie Pope, Ollie Robinson, Ben Stokes, Chris Woakes, Mark Wood

Schedule

First Test: December 8-12, The Gabba

Second Test: December 16-20, Adelaide Oval

Third Test: December 26-30, MCG

Fourth Test: January 5-9, SCG

Fifth Test: January 14-18, TBC