There 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 field 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 to Joe Root’s announcement that he will move up one space to bat No 3 for England in Thursday’s first 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 define 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; five 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 first drop is another of those sporting details to be tearfully fetishised, another holy relic in a place where strong, noble outdoorsy men perform valiant, nation-defining 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 defining 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 inflamed 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 2005 Ashes, were thrilling inversions of this dynamic, with English fast bowlers mimicking Australian aggression. Either side there is a history of English resistance to Australian fire, from Hobbs and Sutcliffe 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 cricketdom, 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 defined 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 difference 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 and 40 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 defining 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 difference.
Top-order Test batting is a complex business, a matter of angles and pressure, just as in England the job of a No 3 is different, less about walking out and leading from the front, more about defence and protection and adaptability.
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 effort. Root averages 49. Second, and related, history suggests the feats of one England batsman can define a series.
It is clearly vital in these circumstances for Root to be sure of the fine detail of his role. The spectacle of one English batsman leading the way has been a theme from David Gower’s majestic floppy‑hatted brutality at No 3 in 1985 to three hundreds in the series for Chris Broad opening in 1986‑87; to Ian Bell’s wonderful stand-alone hundreds at Trent Bridge, Lord’s and Chester Le-Street at No 5 in 2013.
This time around England’s batting is power-packed but undeniably brittle, part of the wider tide of first-class cricket around the world. The Test team has given a debut to six top-order batsmen in the past two years. None has yet made a hundred.
The default opener Rory Burns has spent time this week at Surrey with Neil Stewart, his youth team coach, working on the basics of batting and a technique that when it goes, really goes. Alongside him Jason Roy will attack every time, even if attacking is only selectively the right thing to do. England have the capacity to fall apart like an overly dunked digestive biscuit against a fine, high-pace Australian attack.
Pat Cummins has 94 Test wickets at 22, James Pattinson 70 at 26. They have one possible weakness. They have played two Tests in England between them. They will face in Root a No 3 who averages 54 at home; who has 11 hundreds in 43 Tests in England; and who must feel there is an edge to be seized or lost by thrusting himself forward to meet the challenge. History suggests he may just be right.
