Section:GDN 1N PaGe:41 Edition Date:190827 Edition:01 Zone: Sent at 26/8/2019 19:13 cYanmaGentaYellowb
Tuesday 27 August 2019 The Guardian •41Ashes miracles
It’s just like
19 81 and 2005
all over again
1981
The setup England arrive for the
third Test at Headingley 1-0 down,
with Mike Brearley replacing Ian
Botham as captain.
The miracle Following on at odds
of 500-1, Botham’s 149* – supported
by Graham Dilley’s 56 and then Bob
Willis’s eight for 43 – steers England
from a 92-run defi cit with three
wickets in hand to an 18-run win.
What happened next? Botham
blitzes Australia with the ball at
Edgbaston , taking fi ve for one in 28
balls, and scores 118 in the fi fth Test
win at Old Traff ord. After an Oval
draw, England claim the series 3-1.2005
The setup England arrive at
Edgbaston for the second Test 1-0
down having lost at Lord’s.
The miracle Pull off the narrowest
victory in Test cricket, squeaking
a two-run win after Australia claw
their way back from requiring 142
with three wickets in hand.
What happened next? England are
one wicket away from another win at
Old Traff ord, secure a three-wicket
triumph at Trent Bridge and Kevin
Pietersen’s last-day 158 ensures a
draw at the Oval and a 2-1 series win.2019
The setup England arrive at
Headingley for the third Test 1-0
down, having failed to ram home a
strong position at a rain-hit Lord’s.
The miracle England’s fi rst-innings
67 is their worst Ashes total since
1948 and, chasing 359 to win, they
are reduced to 15 for two. But Ben
Stokes has other ideas – even when
73 are needed from the fi nal wicket.
What happened next? We’ll fi nd out
at Old Traff ord next Wednesday.The 2019 series is showing the key
hallmarks of a great Ashes summer- Australia go 1-0 up ... but England
claw back to 1-1 with a stop-the-nation
Test win: 1981 Win at Headingley
by 18 runs, 2005 Edgbaston, by two
runs, 2019 Headingley, by one wicket. - Charismatic England all-rounder
plays blinder: 1981 Ian Botham, 2005
Andrew Flintoff , 2019 Ben Stokes. - Brilliant fast bowling at Lord’s
shakes up Aussies but England don’t
win the Test: 2005 (Steve Harmison
to Justin Langer and Ricky Ponting),
2019 (Jofra Archer to Steve Smith). - Key Australian injured and misses
a Test with his team 1-0 up: 2005
Glenn McGrath, 2019 Steve Smith. - People ill-advisedly check out of
Leeds hotel too early: 1981 England
team on fourth morning, 2019 Pundit
Shane Warne, on third morning. - Unlikely confectionery reference
at Headingley Test: 1981 Botham hits
his sole six into a confectionary stall,
2019 Stokes claims he was fi red by
two raisin and biscuit Yorkies.
At the end
of the day ...
With the
crowd long
gone and the
TV cameras
turned off ,
England’s
victorious
players
relax and
enjoy a quiet
beer on the
Headingley
square as
the sun sets
on Sunday
eveningTOM JENKINS/
THE GUARDIANJudgmental asterisk
must not be attached
to Stokes’ rampage
All-rounder’s 135 not out after
Australia’s lbw shout was
turned down demonstrated
DRS may not be infallibleRob SmythB
en Stokes: 135*. His
euphoric rampage at
Headingley will forever
be accompanied by an
asterisk. In Wisden it
will simply demonstrate
that he was not out, having
completed a second miracle in six
weeks off his own bat. But to a few,
particularly in Australia, the asterisk
will be an annotation. The Australian
newspaper captured the mood of
a sour minority with the headline:
“Ben Stokes was out, so third Test
heroics should not have counted .”
In case you have been at a digital
detox retreat for the last day and a
half England needed two runs to win
when Stokes survived a huge lbw
appeal from Nathan Lyon. Australia
could not query the decision
because they had wasted both
reviews – the second, egregiously,
in the previous over. With grim
inevitability, a TV graphic soon
appeared to show Stokes would have
been given out on review.
There are some who feel Stokes’s
life-defi ning innings is forever
compromised by that moment;that, in absolute terms, he was
lbw b Lyon 131 and Australia won
the match by one run. There are
many others who would see that
as a joyless, narrow-minded view ,
a refl ection of a world that has an
increasingly ruinous obsession
with accountability and data
to the exclusion of soul and
human experience.
In other sports, including football
and rugby, the TV offi cial is able to
intervene in such circumstances. In
cricket, however, the third umpire
must speak only when signalled to.
As with tennis, there are a limited
number of challenges on each side.
Those diff erent protocols can raise
philosophical questions and seemarbitrary after such an extraordinary
incident. But the rhythms of cricket
make it diffi cult to imagine a
practical solution that would allow
the third umpire to intervene. The
International Cricket Council is
trying to increase the over rate, not
reduce it. If they had to stop the
game to wait for clearance from
above after every appeal it would be
a struggle to bowl 10 overs an hour,
never mind 15.
Stokes did not think it was
out anyway. “DRS has got that
completely wrong,” he said after the
game. “It fl icked my front pad fi rst
and didn’t spin. I thought as soon as
it hit me it was sliding down. I still
can’t believe it was three reds.”
They were three red herrings,
diverting attention from the
preceding mistakes from Tim Paine
and Nathan Lyon respectively.
Paine tried a speculative lbw
review when it was obvious to
the naked eye that Pat Cummins’s
delivery to Jack Leach had pitched
outside leg; Lyon fumbled when he
had the chance to run out Leach
off the previous delivery. It’s
signifi cant that, for all the externalgrumbling, the Australian players
made no excuses.
Stokes’s argument becomes
more persuasive with each look at
the replay. It seems, at least to this
untrained eye, that the ball-tracking
technology missed the defl ection off
Stokes’s front pad and thus followed
an incorrect trajectory from when
the ball hit his back pad. The correct
trajectory may have been hitting the
stumps anyway, although it looks
more likely that it would at most
have been umpire’s call or even
missing leg stump, in which case
Stokes would have survived. The
sense of confusion was compounded
by the fact the graphic wrongly said
“Original decision: out”. So much
for there being no grey areas with
technology.C
ricket, and sport in
general, sold their souls
to technology on the
promise that it was
infallible. If that is not
the case it is far more
alarming than the perceived human
error of Joel Wilson. Had Stokes
been given out, and Australia won
the Ashes because of a technological
error, England would have had every
right to go mad. Wilson, in fact,
had a largely excellent game which
showed considerable moxie after his
hideous performance in the fi rst Test
at Edgbaston. He deserves better
than to become English cricket’s
equivalent of the Russian linesman
in the 1966 World Cup fi nal.
Unless Hawk-Eye produces a
graphic that tracks the path of the
ball from when it hit Stokes’ front
pad, we will never know for certain
whether Wilson got the decision
right or not. It was certainly not, as
most of us thought when we saw it
live, a howler. If there really is going
to be a judgmental asterisk against
Stokes’s innings, there also needs to
be an asterisk against the asterisk.▲ Ben Stokes believes DRS got it wrong when it showed Nathan Lyon had
trapped him lbw with England still needing two runs to win SKY SPORTSRELEASED BY "What's News" vk.com/wsnws TELEGRAM: t.me/whatsnws