Australia v England Third Test, Day Two Report Card

Featuring reasoned debates, notes, learnings, Snicko and heroics

Reasoned Debates
Grade: C

England resumed on the second day, looking to take the final two Australian wickets quickly and get batting. Unfortunately for them, the bowlers inexplicably decided to try to take the wickets via a run out from the cover point boundary. Worse still, they forgot to put a fielder out there to inflict the run out, meaning that Mitchell Starc could cut the assorted short balls to the boundary and ease his way to another half-century.

Y’know, I quite like Starc batting below Pat Cummins. It really drives home the Australians’ theory that batting orders don’t matter. (See also: Starc batting below Marnus Labuschagne, Cameron Green, Josh Inglis, et al.)

The half-century also meant that this series swung back to being Starc’s Ashes. Alex Carey must now take a seven-fer to regain the ascendancy

Eventually, Jofra Archer and Ben Stokes had a reasoned debate about what was going on, calmly offering suggestions back and forth, making their respective cases for their points of view. The end result? A change of tactics to ‘fucken aim it at the fucken stumps, for fucken fuck’s sake’, which saw Archer pick up five wickets, and Australia bowled out for 371. More than England might have wanted at the start of the day, but still roughly 180 runs short of par, by any sensible reckoning.

Because this was a flat batting pitch. How flat? No wicket in the first over for Starc levels of flat.

In fact, Starc took no wickets whatsoever throughout the day. For how long is this team expected to carry him?

Notes
Grade: D

Indeed, there were no wickets in the first eight overs of the innings, if you can imagine such a thing, with Ben Duckett and Zak Crawley easing their way to 0/33.

At which point, Cummins decided to unleash an unplayable delivery to Crawley that just touched the outside edge and flew through to the keeper.

Ollie Pope therefore made an appearance at the crease. He was skittish and indecisive, seemingly completely out of his depth, out of rhythm, and making bizarre choices that had most onlookers scratching their heads and going ‘wait, what’s going on here? Is this kind of scattered behaviour really up to Test standards?’

Oh, no. Wait. Sorry. Those were my notes for Snicko. We’ll come back to that.