Section:GDN 1N PaGe:40 Edition Date:190801 Edition:01 Zone: Sent at 31/7/2019 20:08 cYanmaGentaYellowb
- The Guardian Thursday 1 August 2019
(^40) Sport
Cricket First Ashes Test
Root can defi ne
the series by
his move to No3
The battle between
England’s captain and
best batsman and a
fearsome Australia pace
attack is the Ashes
at its most basic, says
Barney Ronay
alia pace
hes
says
T
here are the usual signs
that it is getting closer.
The Ashes white noise
starts to fade. The Ashes
hum starts to die back,
wider current of Ashes
anxiety to fall away. And suddenly
Test cricket begins to pare itself back
to the basic, atomic level business of
Australian bowlers against English
batsmen, Baggy Green in the fi eld
against starchy whites at the wicket.
Look back and cricket’s oldest
two-hander has so often pegged
itself out this way. Hence, perhaps,
the strikingly emotive response torelic in a place where strong, noble
outdoorsy men perform valiant,
nation-defi ning feats in the middle
of all that clear-blue Australian heat,
in the land of the rapidly softening
new ball.
The importance of English batting
against Australian bowling is wider
than this: not just a defi ning contest
in most Ashes series but a dynamic
that cuts across the basics of the
sport and of the relations between
these two nations, at least in the
infl amed sporting imagination.
In cricket’s class structure
batsmen have always been
gentlemen and bowlers the players,
the workers, agricultural hands
there to provide the staging for
their elegantly swiping lordships.
In this view of cricket bowlers are
revolutionaries too, Bolsheviks
inverting the class system, the
only people on the pitch allowed
to strike, bloody, tear down and
generally overthrow their opponent,
to question their basic pluck and
courage.
When David Warner said he
saw fear in the eyes of England’s
No 3, Jonathan Trott, at the Gabba
six years ago this was more than
simply shithousery. It was cultural
shithousery, something buried in
the deep Australian sporting soul,
the voice not only of one crowing
Australian, but of those that
crowed before him, the noble dead,
stretching right back through these
generational collisions.
In an interesting twist the two
series the English tend to remember,
the Bodyline tour and the 2005Ashes, were thrilling inversions
of this dynamic, with English fast
bowlers mimicking Australian
aggression. Either side there is
a history of English resistance
to Australian fi re, from Hobbs
and Sutcliff e putting on 105 on
a Melbourne sticky, watched by
a captivated Don Bradman, and
discussed in print 60 years later by
Richie Benaud (one of the most holy
Australian moments in all Australian
cricket dom, a vast groaning six-tier
cake of Baggie Green goodness)
through to Lillee and Thomson
and their gleefully punkish acts
of high-speed vandalism against
a particularly baleful and doomed
England order.
Ever since then the fate of most
Ashes series has been defi ned by
England’s ability to resist this force:
from Warne, McGrath and Lee, to
Harris and Johnson and now to
Cummins, Starc and Pattinson.
And so back to Root and to No 3.
There has been a degree of weary
harrumphing at his unwillingness
to move up the order. It is an easy
point to make. What’s one spot?
What relevance could three or four
have when the real variables are
pitches and bowlers and shine on
the ball? What diff erence does it
make when England have been
opening the batting with a series of
interchangeable polystyrene tailors’
mannequins for the past three years?
But Root is right. History suggests
this is not a decision to be taken
lightly and not only because his
own batting numbers say so. Root
averages 53 in the middle order and40 in the top three. He averages 28
in his past 11 innings at No 3. Clearly
something is going on here.
Like any self-respecting,
neurotically obsessive world-class
top-order batsmen Root is right to
focus on the details. This could be a
defi ning series for England’s captain,
in a format and a contest where so
often how a player feels, the idea
of being settled, of being able to
channel energy the right way, has
made such a diff erence.T
op-order Test batting
is a complex business,
a matter of angles and
pressure, just as in
England the job of a
No 3 is diff erent, less
about walking out and leading from
the front , more about defence and
protection and adaptability; not
least in this England order that packs
all its power towards the lower-
middle end.
There are two other key points
about that move and about the
need for Root to be sure. First, it is
striking just how much better he
is than everyone else in England’s
batting. Nobody else in that top
eight averages anywhere near 40,
bar Jason Roy’s one-Test eff ort. Root
averages 49. Second, and related,
history suggests the feats of one
England batsman can defi ne a series.
It is clearly vital in these
circumstances for Root to be sure
of the fi ne detail of his role. The
spectacle of one English batsman
leading the way has been a theme
from David Gower’s majesticJoe Root’s announcement that he
will move up one space to bat No 3
for England in today’s fi rst Test at
Edgbaston.
It is the smallest of changes,
the kind of tweak that might
pass unremarked in any other
less-storied sport. But this is not
any other sport and Root to three is
a shift of England’s own supporting
architecture, a pre-series riposte to
Australia’s greatest strength, and a
move that may well defi ne how the
start of this series plays out.
Beyond this it is a change that
twangs away one of the big fat major
chords of cricket’s most relentlessly
self-mythologising contest. An
England captain at No 3; a potent
Aussie pace attack; fi ve clear Ashes
Tests stretching away over the dog
days of late summer. This is a kind of
sporting perfection.
Forget the No 3 slot, which is
largely an Australia-based obsession.
This is a country where fi rst drop is
another of those sporting details to
be tearfully fetishised, another holyEngland’s
top-eight
and their
averages
Jason Roy 38.50
Rory Burns 22.28
Jos Buttler 35.87
Joe Denly 24.16 Ben Stokes 33.89
Joe Root 49.03
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