Josh Tongue defended England’s performance on the opening day of the second Ashes Test after Australia reached 339 for five at stumps – after losing the toss at the start of the day and two wickets to Joe Root’s part-time off-spin towards the end of it – and Kevin Pietersen described the English display as “absolutely shambolic”.
Having won the toss and chosen to field England dropped two catches and conceded 36 extras, including 12 no-balls, while David Warner and Steve Smith – who ended the day unbeaten on 85 – both scored half-centuries and Travis Head sprinted to 77 off 73 balls before becoming the first of Root’s victims. “It’s been absolutely shambolic,” Pietersen said. “You have overhead conditions, you have a wicket to suit your bowlers and you’ve got bowlers running in at 78, 79, 80 miles an hour. It’s one thing swanning around saying, ‘This is a wonderful team to play in, we’re creating the best environment.’ But this is not Ashes cricket. I just hope the coach is giving them the biggest hammering and saying it’s absolutely not good enough.”
But Tongue, who bowled both of Australia’s openers including a fabulous delivery to dismiss Warner for 66, insisted the scoreline did not reflect the quality of England’s performance. “We were really unlucky in the first hour – going into lunch they could easily have been four or five down,” he said. “But I felt as a unit we stuck at it really well.”
Warner felt England’s bowling across the morning session had been excellent, before Head led a counterattack in the afternoon. “It was quite challenging,” he said. “We felt they bowled extremely well with the new ball, it swung around and nipped a fair bit. Our gameplan was simple: anything that was a bit full hit square to try to score, and just hold your line if the ball nibbled. Then Trav’s Trav, it’s the way he plays. Lucky he’s on our team because he can take it away from you in a half-an-hour patch. That’s what you get from Trav, he applies the pressure back on that bowling unit.”
Warner was batting when Just Stop Oil protesters attempted to disrupt the game soon after the start, and while Jonny Bairstow dealt with one of the two paint-toting pitch-invaders he combined with the England captain, Ben Stokes, to shepherd the other away from the wicket. The MCC later confirmed that a spare strip had been earmarked in case protesters significantly damaged the wicket, but it has received much less attention and would have taken considerable time to get ready to play.
“Me and Stokesy didn’t really know what to do,” Warner said. “We’d been warned beforehand it might happen and in that instance, we wanted to protect the wicket. Obviously we saw what happened in the billiards a month or so ago [the World Snooker Championship in April]. It’s a touchy situation, you don’t want to be involved but for us it was about stopping them from getting on to the wicket.
“It was quite confronting because you don’t know what to do in that situation – usually you just let people run their course but because they potentially could damage the wicket we felt that we had to try and intervene. I didn’t feel in any danger, I was just worried about that chalk.
“We were actually told to stand away and just be careful, but we knew what they were trying to do to the wicket so it wasn’t about manhandling them like Jonny, it was about protecting the wicket. I don’t know what chalk does to the wicket but it would have been a long delay and we don’t want that.”
Tongue described Bairstow as “a bit of a hero”, after the wicketkeeper carried the protester to the relative safety of the boundary edge, but revealed that Jimmy Anderson “felt a bit weird” after he was exposed to the powder that was thrown on the outfield. “My back was turned at the start, then I think I heard Jonny just shouting, ‘No!’, and I saw him running,” Tongue said. “What he did was obviously a good thing because if they’d put the powder on to the wicket who knows where the game would be now. For myself I probably wouldn’t go towards them just in case they had anything else on them.”
