This isn’t a great week to be Tim Paine. Australia’s Test captain has always been vulnerable to criticism: given he first took over the team in caretaker mode, it’s an easy move to question his legitimacy. Double down with the fact he was initially picked as almost a specialist wicketkeeper, with his batting closer to useful than dominant. These shots are cheap, but it was only ever going to take a bad loss or a couple of low scores before people took them.
Anyone’s captaincy will fairly come under scrutiny when a team concedes a fourth-innings chase of well over 300 or after a hefty last-wicket partnership. The same goes for bowling out an opponent for 67 and still losing. You can question Paine’s tactics of putting the field back for Ben Stokes so early and you can question his use of reviews after a late, incorrect referral when Pat Cummins hit Jack Leach on the pad. But knowing what didn’t work is, of course, the province of hindsight.
One obvious incongruity after Stokes’s miracle was seeing Steve Smith in training kit lining up with the support staff to shake a long line of English hands. Smith’s batting had not been hugely missed, with Marnus Labuschagne making 74 and 80 in his place; Smith the former captain might have been an asset on the field in those frenetic final overs as Stokes cleared the boundary again and again.
But that’s not a foregone conclusion. It’s not like Smith the captain was an ice-cold decision-maker: he stressed and fretted, and had defensive impulses, and lacked the personal charisma to rally a group by voice rather than by batting deed. Eight men on the fence may well have been his plan and it may not have been in his power to rein in bowlers losing their heads.
Paine’s leadership was evident in other ways. Even as Stokes was mid-shot hitting the winning boundary Nathan Lyon collapsed to the ground at backward point. He had fumbled a chance to run out Leach in the previous over, then had a leg-before appeal against Stokes turned down that the HawkEye computer would have upheld, but Australia’s last review had been spent. As soon as Paine noticed his spinner on the deck he walked over to help him up.
“He’s a really important player in our side. I said to him that if our players see him dealing with it really quickly and moving on then our younger players are going to do the same thing, and we turn up to Manchester or our next training session in a much better frame of mind.”
It was one instance of an impressive level-headedness. Rather than scratch at the review or the run-out or the catch that Marcus Harris dropped, he looked more broadly, especially to the third innings.
“We could have batted them right out of the game. When you keep giving a team with high-quality players a sniff, whether it’s a Jofra [Archer] with the ball or Stokes with the bat or Root with the bat, they’re going to make you pay – we probably missed a slight opportunity to bat them right out of the game and get 450 in front.”
Of course, the drama of those closing moments will always pull focus to the last few turning points. So it’s worth mentioning the logical fallacy that Paine’s wrong DRS review meant that Lyon’s dismissal was lost.
If the Cummins review had not been sent upstairs, then the next ball would have been bowled a couple of minutes earlier. The entire next over would have been slightly different, both for bowler and batsman. In short, Lyon’s ball to Stokes can only exist in a world where Paine has already taken the review. If Paine doesn’t review, a different ball is bowled, with an unknown result. Something else happens, and one of the teams wins. You can’t unscramble the omelette of a cause-and-effect timeline.
So that just leaves the not-out decision by umpire Joel Wilson. He is being roasted in the Australian media, but after a poor game at Edgbaston he actually bounced back in the third Test with a series of excellent decisions and a 7-1 record against the review system.
The contention that he made a blatant mistake is not fair. Replays suggest HawkEye was questionable, tracking a change of direction after the ball flicked the front pad. The reconstructed ball straightens more sharply than is realistic and apparently smashes leg stump. But watching live it looked more like it might be going down leg, and Stokes’s flurry of movement across the crease increased that impression. It may have been out, but it was at least closer than portrayed, and it would be undermining DRS if umpires tempered their decisions based on which team had challenges in hand.
Paine treated that episode with equilibrium too. “I don’t think I’ve got a referral correct the whole series, so I can’t sit here and bag the umpires – we also had other opportunities to win the game and opportunities on other days with our batting and we didn’t take them, so to sit down and single out an umpire is unnecessary.”
It’s unnecessary, but it is easy. When things go wrong it’s tempting to pick the easy marks to blame. It’s better to remember nothing has ever gone completely right, and that the Ashes are neither won nor lost yet, and that when they are it will be the product of a thousand decisions. It’s up to Paine and Wilson to remind themselves of this, even if a lot of voices tell them otherwise.
