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| The cauldron of capitulation - A World Record crowd watched on Boxing Day at the MCG - © Simon Helle Nielsen |
I’ll start with the cheer and then resume the misery, happy
New Year, may 2014 bring less batting collapses and a few won tosses…
A new approach to Ashes blogging, same old result for
England. I have allowed time for reflection and for frustration to fall, but
unfortunately it hasn’t.
Now 4-0 down, and watching Mitchell Johnson cradle his 3rd
Man of the Match award of the series, the English language is running out of
negative vocabulary.
Due to technical difficulties, combined with the fact the
Sports Gazette team are strewn across Europe and the Middle East, our live blog
was a no-go for the fourth Test.
I decided that rather than produce five days of miserable
conjecture in which I desperately search for positives, one post would suffice,
and time would be needed for digestion.
So on the eve of the fifth test, and the final part of
England’s horror-film Test match tour, it’s time.
For a while, it looked as if my enforced standing-down had
resulted in a change of luck for England, but hope has just led to increased
despair. (As Grant Yardley’s day-by-day descriptions neatly illustrate.)
Yet again Alastair Cook stood miserably as he watched
Michael Clarke win the toss, and my mind wandered to an Only Fools and Horses
episode in which Rodney called tails despite knowing it was a double-headed
coin, I’m not sure Cook would see the humour in the comparison.
On this occasion, tradition got the better of Clarke. The
MCG is often a good place to bowl first, the drop-in pitch looked a tad green
and Australia would bowl first.
Batting first, for the first time in the series, England
posted a disappointing 255.
Whilst it was below par on a pitch that had offered less
than Clarke had hoped for, it did at least demonstrate a change. Brad Haddin
hadn’t yet batted England out of a game, and it was their highest first-innings
score of the tour.
With Australia behind in a match for the first time in the
series, and with the England bowlers finally having some runs to defend,
something new happened, a contest.
For the first time since The Oval Test this summer,
Australia’s aggressive batting came under some kind of scoreboard pressure, and
it faltered.
Wickets for Anderson, Broad and Bresnan, as well as one for
Ben Stokes saw Australia collapse for 204 despite Haddin’s customary fifty.
Starting the second innings with a 51run lead, Alastair Cook
went on the attack, his quick fifty was supported well by the more reserved
Michael Carberry, and the opening partnership of 65 took England’s lead to 116.
From this point the collapse was as impressive as it was
startling, the openers both fell LBW and Joe Root ran himself out, before Ian
Bell added the pièce de résistance. Chipping his first ball straight to
Mitchell Johnson in embarrassing fashion.
Kevin Pietersen led a recovery with 49, but after Stokes and
Bairstow had got in and got out, once again the tail was blown away with the
last four batsmen contributing one between them.
Australia duly knocked off the runs, Chris Rogers scoring a well
crafted hundred as he cements his own reputation as more than a blocker, and
Shane Watson bludgeoned a half-century of his own.
In this Test, England had not wilted under scoreboard
pressure after a big first innings total, they had taken the initiative and
then handed it back to the Australian’s gift-wrapped neatly with a bow.
If this was the horror film I referred to earlier, it would
be one in which the first hour was littered with deaths caused by a mysterious
foe.
As the fifth Test in Sydney begins, the murderer will have
been unveiled, and the supernatural element put to bed, but they rarely stop
killing at this stage, they invariably go out with a bang…
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