Two Tests, two emphatic losses. This time it is Australia sending panic through rival ranks. Their win in the second Ashes Test at Lord’s was built upon the mountain of first innings runs that the much-debated pitch demanded but also, you’d have to say, by a side whistling a slightly more exuberant tune.
As they take 10 days to regroup now, England might actually take solace from the way Australia emerged from their own moment of crisis in Cardiff with renewed focus and far better for some small but symbolic line-up tweaks. Australia’s only great concern heading towards Edgbaston is a literal headache for in-form opener Chris Rogers.
Everything reliable and good about this England side a single game ago provided the antithesis of Australia’s win here; Alastair Cook displaying the same mettle as Steve Smith and Rogers but not as able to spread a vibe of assuredness through the rest of the order; veteran quick Jimmy Anderson going wicketless in a Test for the first time in half a decade as Mitchell Johnson returned to Hell’s Angel mode; the contrasting fortunes of batting wunderkinds Smith and Joe Root tallying to a total discrepancy of 255 runs across four days.
Since the 2013 Ashes series much has been made of the way Australia have started to resemble the better traits of their coach – the sheer Lehman-ness of this side – and you certainly can’t imagine any of his men advertising Slater and Gordon lawyers on their bat as England’s captain now does in an unfortunate portent of some major personal crisis.
If you cast your mind back to the 2009 Ashes you’ll remember that Australia’s undermining of Ravi Bopara forced England into the series-shaping selection of Jonathan Trott, a good enough example that sometimes it’s better to keep a struggling batsman in than dismiss him. Now it’s Australia who have been energised and renewed by moving on. The inclusion of Mitchell Marsh and Peter Nevill was an unqualified success, the burly all-rounder providing partnership-breaking wickets and exuberant yeehaws and the keeper bouncing around behind the wicket in the expectation of catches like the proverbial kid on Christmas morning.
Both will face tougher days than this and benefitted from the freedom of their team’s ascendancy by the time they were involved, but the way Nevill in particular arrived at the crease in the first innings with such nerveless and busy intent seemed to spur Smith along further in his late-innings flurry. In their breezy 91-run partnership Smith moved from 173 to 215 and in helping him there with such ease Nevill helped relegate England to a period of tired ignominy as the total passed 500.
Importantly in the context of what transpired a week earlier, neither of Australia’s inclusions was named Shane Watson. The discarded all-rounder cops an outsized amount of grief for one so dedicated to his game but he’d also become a totem of vulnerability for Australia, a six-foot tall novelty front pad to go with the wags dressed up as sauce bottles and Guinness cans in the crowd. At Lord’s Marsh nipped out the partnership-breaking, spirit-sapping wickets that have eluded Watson in recent times and in the second innings provided an alarming portent of the ball-striking that could to take entire Tests away in a single session.
Notwithstanding the reliable service of Cook and Stuart Broad and the new ascendancy of Ben Stokes, you wonder what changes of their own that England can make to alter the tone of the series as drastically as Australia did here. One of Gary Ballance or Ian Bell will probably lose his spot to reshape the faltering top order but the most deserving replacement is in-form Jonny Bairstow, no great mystery to the Australians at this point.
Rejigging the batting order is a far greater task if Ballance is the man to go. Then there’s paceman Mark Wood, who by Australia’s second innings looked a bowler short on energy and ideas. His efforts against Smith in particular were like a man trying to crack open a bank vault by ramming into it with his head.
In the past week you can’t have escaped the factoid that the last time Australia lost the first Test of an Ashes series but still took the urn was in 1997 and in the immediate aftermath here it feels as though they’ve restored the earth to its rightful axis with England losing once more at Lord’s. The 405-run margin brought to mind as grisly an Ashes image as Graeme Hick and back in Australia, Channel Nine’s post-game programming of an Absolutely Fabulous re-run really rammed it all home; it was the 1990s all over again.
