Adelaide, then, and a second Test that, after all the distractions, seems to have come around quicker than Cameron Bancroft after Jonny Bairstow’s hello. England are 1-0 down but have some hope. Their fans should relish the sensation, because if the team lose it will likely be the last time they feel it in an Ashes until Australia come over in 2019.
The second Test tends to be the point at which a series pivots. In Australia, since the war, neither side have lost the second Test and gone on to win the series. And even Ben Stokes, who has just landed in New Zealand, cape ready in his kit bag just in case he gets the all-clear, will not be able to turn it around if England are heading to Perth 2-0 behind.
Adelaide is not necessarily the spot England would choose to make a stand, since they have lost so often there but then you would spend a long time looking for a corner of Australia where that is not the case. The only place England have won more than they have lost is the old Brisbane Exhibition Ground and no one has played a game there since the 1930s. England have suffered a couple of especially traumatic defeats at Adelaide in recent years, though. They were skittled by Shane Warne when, shudder, the game seemed to be easing towards a draw in 2006, then scattered into the wind by Mitchell Johnson, who took seven for 40 in the first innings in 2013.
In between, they did score that famous, therapeutic, victory in 2010, when Alastair Cook and Kevin Pietersen seemed to bat through night and day before Australia were bowled out late on the last afternoon. It was just before the first rain fell in what turned out to be the wettest December day in the city since they started keeping records.
Jimmy Anderson has been around long enough to remember all three Tests. Though, given the playing conditions in this match, who knows what his recollections will be worth. This, of course, is a day/night Test, only the seventh played and the first in Ashes history.
Which, many reckoned from a distance out, gives England a gambler’s chance of winning, because it makes the match a crapshoot. Nobody is sure who will better handle the pink ball, or exactly how it will behave under the floodlights but there is an idea it will swing as the night closes in, which would suit Anderson just fine. It might explain why the batsmen on both sides seemed to agree the day/night Test was a bad idea. “It’s probably not a series where you need to do it,” said Cook the last time he was asked. Steve Smith agreed: “We always get the viewers and the crowds out, so I don’t think there is any issue there.”
The irony is that Adelaide has, they say, the finest light of any ground anywhere. As the writer John Harms explained in his essay about the place, good judges “say there is no better seeing ground anywhere in the world. Pure light. Good sight screens. Easy to see the ball on the wicket’s surface”.
The good judge, in this case, was JL Mosey, who (no word of a lie) scored 37,283 runs in local club cricket, so he knows a thing or two about how they play the game in South Australia. “If you can’t make runs at Adelaide Oval,” Mosey once told Harms, “you can’t make runs anywhere.”
At night, though, it’s another story. “It does quicken up – probably the fastest wicket around Australia at night, so that’s going to be interesting,” Darren Lehmann said this week. For batsmen day/night cricket works in reverse of the usual horror movie rules. It’s when the lights come on that they get jittery. Lehmann, keen as ever to extract every last, little advantage, also pointed out just how much more experience his side have in this format than England. “You’re more comfortable in your preparation when you know what you have to do to get ready,” said Lehmann. “So the lead-in is a lot more normal for us than other teams, having done it twice. This is the third time so we’re pretty comfortable where it sits.”
Australia have played three day/night Tests, two at Adelaide and another in Brisbane, and won the lot. England won their only day/night Test too, although West Indies lost so many wickets at Edgbaston during the morning and afternoons the game hardly made it into the evenings. Add in the two day/night Tests Pakistan have played in the UAE and you have a small pool of matches to try to draw conclusions from.
After spending a tiresome amount of time doing the sums, the Guardian can reveal that in those six Tests, 30% of the wickets fell when the floodlights were on. Which is exactly what you would expect in a single session of the day’s play.
Those wickets did fall in clumps and rushes, though, and there have been some spectacular collapses under the lights by Pakistan and Sri Lanka in particular. Seems it is easy for a batting team to get spooked in the evening session. That aside, everything else about this Test seems a little uncertain, as if it could break either way. Which, for England fans at least, is a slightly better feeling than the crushing sense of inevitability they have often carried into this fixture.
