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“Cricket’s cricket, it’s time in the middle,” Zak Crawley said after Day 2 of England’s only Ashes warm-up match.
While the opener is technically correct, anyone who watched some of the highlights from the team’s match against the Lions will be wondering just how much this fixture has in common with the start of the Ashes series next week.
The subject of England’s warm-up, or lack of it, has been a much-talked-about one with captain Ben Stokes picking a fight with the ‘has-beens’ who said the visitors should have done more to prepare for the biggest series on their calendar.
Nonsense, said Stokes, what do they know? And besides, the cricket calendar has inflated since the days of Michael Vaughan and Phil Tufnell were playing.
Harry Brook, for example, had just 20 days between captaining the T20 side against New Zealand and facing the Lions. No need to worry though as one of England’s main hopes slipped easily back into red ball cricket with a score of, um, two.
The England first XI are at Lilac Hill in Perth, 13km away from the Optus Stadium where the Ashes will begin next week but footage posted from the match ponders the question of why even bother.
England won the toss and chose to bowl – because of course they did – and the Lions put on 375 with Stokes taking six wickets. Good news for any fan of an England persuasion but when you read that three of Stokes’ wickets were caught by Jofra Archer, you begin to ask questions.
Highlights of Stokes’ sixfer show that almost every dismissal was from a hopeful hit off a not-too-threatening ball, the kind of delivery that Steve Smith dreams of when he shadow bats in hotel corridors. Stokes, to his credit, looked rather embarrassed as the wickets kept tumbling – choosing to put his head in one hand with a smile as keeper Jamie Smith laughed.
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In defending his team’s schedule, Stokes told the BBC it would be “balls to the wall for everyone” in this mini-Test match and preparing for a flat pitch in Australia may have made sense many years ago but conditions Down Under have changed in recent times.
In the most recent Ashes in Australia, Nathan Lyon was the fifth-highest wicket taker and Mark Wood was the only Englishman who took more than him. England’s spin option, Jack Leach, mustered only six. Lyon is also the leading Test wicket-taker at the Ashes opening venue, outdoing the trio of Starc, Hazlewood and Cummins.
As for England’s spin option this time round, Shoaib Bashir was chosen for the Lions squad meaning turning duties fell to Joe Root who scored his first hundred on Australian soil, alebit it was hundred runs conceded for one wicket.
Even with bat in hand, Root may well go into the first Test feeling a little undercooked considering he lasted all of 12 balls in England’s innings. With the senior side leading by 51 runs and just one day remaining, it is hard to see Root having an extended time at the crease before being asked to step out into a cauldron of Aussie fans baying for blood.
The positive was a hundred for Ollie Pope at No.3 while his competition Jacob Bethell managed just two for the Lions but Stokes’ dismissal by Will Jacks and caught by Bashir is a very visual reminder to discount spin at your peril. Oh, and Mark Wood got injured as well.
A week out from the start of a series that England have a genuine chance of winning, almost everyone knows how they will go about it. If they win the toss, they will put Australia in to bat, confident they can outscore them in the fourth and final innings. Chances are they will do so without a spin option which could prove to be a masterstroke or disaster depending how the Optus Stadium pitch evolves over the five days. England will also certainly go out on the attack and look to launch Lyon into the top tier of the 60,000-seater stadium.
Since Brendan McCullum arrived and Stokes was installed as captain, England have had no problem creating an ‘us against the world’ mentality but that only makes it more crucial than ever to walk the walk as well as talk the talk. Failure to do that and England’s solitary warm-up match may well be used as one of the defining moments of when it all went wrong.
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