Forty-five minutes into a quietly overcast morning at the Sydney Cricket Ground, Matt Potts came into the England attack from the Randwick End, and immediately began running through his variations.
His first ball was wide and smashed through cover by Travis Head. His second ball was both short and wide and hacked over gully by Travis Head. His third ball was short and straight and smashed past midwicket by Travis Head. His fourth ball was defended with a show of furrowed caution, to loud, mocking cheers from a crowd that had begun to tuck into the day. Welcome to the treadmill, Pottsy. And yes, it’s always like this around here.
By the end of Potts’s next over, with Australia nudging past 200 for two, Head was reeling off strange, semi-ironical shadow shots after leaving the ball, the kind you only ever play with a shampoo bottle in the bathroom.
At one point he unfurled an absurd Mohammad Azharuddin-style whip for two. He’s doing batting impressions now. Give us a Goochie. Do Chanderpaul. Do Travis Head windmilling a 78mph all-sort past deep square leg. Oh yes. Yes that’s really good.
Half an hour later Potts seemed briefly to be in the running for the all-time England record for quickest concession of 100 runs in Tests, as set by Brydon Carse (85 balls) in Perth on this tour. Always pushing the envelope, this team. By lunch England had dished up arguably their worst session of the series, all the more striking because it wasn’t zany or amphetamine-crazed, just a comfortingly retro story of dropped catches and half-trackers.
All in all the session of creeping death produced 115 runs for one wicket (the nightwatchman) in 30.5 overs. There were three drops, two burned reviews, one missed run out. All of it accompanied by the sight of Head pushing on towards 150 from a reclining position, chaise-longueing it out there, the silk kimono, the ivory cigarette holder, the one-handed flay over cover.
None of which was really the fault of Potts, who has simply answered the call because someone has to, at the fag-end of a dying tour, and on the back of very little cricket.
Potts is a skilful, eager bowler, averaging 29 in Test cricket coming into this game. Even at his best he looks willing but doomed, with a likable, chest-out energy, ducking it in off a full length, and with a mannered, soldierly gallop to the wicket, as though his arms and legs have been bound together with lengths of twine, but he’s not going to let it stop him sprinting headlong towards enemy lines.
He looks like the kind of heroic junior paratrooper who says good luck sir as he leaps out of a plane. He looks like Barry Keoghan playing Matt Potts in a Matt Potts biopic. Or at the very least, like Matt Potts doing an impression of Barry Keoghan playing Matt Potts in a Matt Potts biopic.
This was not Potts at his best. But then, what did anyone expect? His only real role at the SCG is to underline something about the team and the setup that chose him, to illustrate once again how vaguely England have managed not just their bowlers on this tour, but the whole notion of bowling under the current no-details setup.
Stats are for prats. Practice is for dorks. The basics of cricket are for losers. On the other hand, sometimes the homework really is non-negotiable. Like every other seamer Potts came into the series without proper preparation. Bowlers need rhythm, miles, time to work our their own mechanics.
Potts came to Sydney having not played a proper game without the word “other” next to it since September last year. Before that it was the Hundred. Before that a couple of games in July. But yeah, come and fill a hole for the team without a regular bowling coach, and for a regime that has treated him a bit weirdly over the years.
Potts was a Bazball early adopter, a fanatic for the regime. He played five Tests then disappeared to the overflow area. He wouldn’t be on this tour if Jamie Overton hadn’t retired after that grudging one-off Test at the Oval (this is what they’re picking ahead of you: a bloke who doesn’t actually want to play).
He wouldn’t be in the team if Jofra Archer, Gus Atkinson and Mark Wood weren’t injured. If Chris Woakes hadn’t limped off. If Ollie Robinson hadn’t gone full maverick influencer. If Sam Cook or Josh Hull had worked. Potts is here because someone has to be. He’s the dogged jar of pesto lurking at the back of the fridge, a little rusty but still doing a job.
It was probably always going to play out like this for England’s bowling attack, a game of last man standing, the bunker staff doggedly seeing it through. It is one of the founding tenets of Bazball (as was) that Test cricket is a batting game, that what matters above all is batting intent. This has always seemed at best half of the story. In practice, and certainly in Australia, this is a game of bowling lengths. Get that right and everything else follows.
While England’s batting always gets to hog the main character energy, this tour has also been lost in the bowling fade-outs, in its oddly careless version of preparation. This might seem paradoxical given the relative averages (batting: horrible; bowling: decent). But it is in the field that so many chances have passed.
Potts and Brydon Carse went for 101 wicketless runs off 16 overs on day two with the game in the balance, before pulling it back later in the piece. Carse has been an open pressure valve all tour, often padding his own stats once the innings has galloped off, a solution to the problems he helped to cause. Lengths and lines have been scattered. Josh Tongue is seen as a “point of difference” because he bowls full and actually at the stumps.
It isn’t hard to see where this lack of control comes from. This England setup lost patience with one bowling coach for talking too much about pitch maps. The hierarchy has circulated at least one briefing document on what it wants from fast bowlers that seems almost laughably basic in is analysis, which basically says, yeah, bowl quick, be good, be a bit like Kagiso Rabada. Do that.
It was on display again as Australia batted through the day. The hundred came up for Potts in 15.1 overs, Head smashing a half-tracker into the crowd over midwicket. Carse finally got rid of Michael Neser using the shock tactic of pitching it up and swinging it away. Even when they were ahead it always felt that England were chasing the game.
Potts pulled it back a little, seemed to remember how to do this, found a better length. His figures will look gruesome. But he shouldn’t feel too bad, or be judged on it either way. He is basically filler here, a body, an underprepped conscript, but one who is still willing to put himself on the line.
