For Australia’s fast bowlers this year’s Ashes has been all about versatility and balance. Like one of those Chinese tile puzzles, pieces have been slotted into and out of place in a careful and deliberate line of progress towards an eventual aim. The right components have been employed at the right time. The same has applied on the field, where tactical approaches have shifted with the moment.
Take the short ball. The past two Ashes series in Australia have been dominated by bouncers on pitches suited to bowling them, and the Lord’s Test this year was dominated by Jofra Archer’s scone-botherers on a pitch that was not. Archer got carried away for a minute. Australia’s bowlers, uncharacteristically, never did.
Their head coach, Justin Langer, had already said after Lord’s that his team had no interest in getting into a “bouncer war” in the third Test. “We’re here to win the Test match, not see how many helmets we can hit,” he said. “You can’t get out with a bruise on your arm.”
What they did instead was use the short ball sparingly but effectively, mostly through the person of Patrick Cummins, while bowling fuller by default to make the best use of some movement in the air, some movement off the surface and the constant movement of English batsmen to and from the pavilion.
Archer is no fool either, quickly correcting himself to find a fuller length at Headingley and take six wickets in the first innings. But where previous Australian attacks might have felt the need to retaliate to his London bombardment by setting off the air‑raid sirens in Leeds, this one had Josh Hazlewood treating fast bowling as a far more dispassionate art.
Hazlewood has been one of Australia’s moving tiles: he missed the first Test while still building back up from injury, with Peter Siddle preferred to be the steady third presence supporting Cummins and James Pattinson. Hazlewood then joined Siddle and Cummins for the second match so Pattinson take a precautionary injury break, before Siddle was rested for the third Test and Hazlewood took on the role of controlling bowler.
There was some risk in using him, given that he bowled superbly at the start of the Lord’s Test but looked far less effective at the back end. Short of a gallop, even a Test with two days lost to rain looked to have tuckered him out. But England were unable to probe this possible weakness in his next outing, as he knocked the top off their innings before hoovering up the dregs in bowling them out for 67.
Hazlewood’s effort was all about the aforementioned discipline and control. Opening his day, he set up Jason Roy with seven in-duckers that came in at an angle and threatened the pads. He gave Roy a sense of confidence with a wide shorter ball to be pummelled, then angled two more in, before the final wider one was pitched up fuller and moved off the seam. The drive was essayed and the edge was a formality. Then two balls later, at the start of Hazlewood’s next over he did the opposing captain, Joe Root, with a ball that moved away slightly at the perfect length, leaving the batsman stuck neither forward nor back. That edge was unavoidable.
It was there that Cummins came into effect. He had closed out the first Test at Edgbaston with some judicious short balls. Here he accompanied Hazlewood’s good length with three overs of mainly short balls at Rory Burns, who fended more than once near short leg. The England opener got a break as Joe Denly took a Cummins over.
The off-spinner Nathan Lyon was brought on to threaten the patchy left-hander but that would be his only over for the innings. With the first ball of the next over Cummins nailed Burns in the chest, tested him again with Burns slicing to point while clearly only half-forward, then gave him a proper bouncer over his right shoulder. Burns hooked at it without control and gloved it to the wicketkeeper.
That set the innings truly off its axis and Pattinson’s full balls at pace drew loose drives from Ben Stokes and Denly. Then it was back to the original pairing: Hazlewood working away in the channel outside off stump to get Jonny Bairstow to nibble, then setting up Jos Buttler with the most blatantly obvious plan by bringing in a short cover, only for Buttler to hit a full-pitched ball straight there.
Cummins felt confident that Chris Woakes was also weak against short bowling and it was telling that the first ball after lunch, when England’s collapse was not yet terminal, was short, down the leg side, and received a glove that it never deserved. Archer’s wicket was taken trying to duck a bouncer and leaving the periscope up.
As one surveyed the ruin of England’s batting card, it also told a tale of Australia’s thoroughness. Just as has been the case with the rotating cabal of fast bowlers, every player knew his part and every player did it.
