Adapt and survive. At times in this Ashes series Rory Burns has looked twisted and crabby facing up to Australia’s pace attack, a man constantly fighting the limits of his own gnarled style.
Not so here. On a rain-delayed third day of the fourth Test, with England’s hopes at a point of crisis, something seemed to clear.
This was a different Burns. Only slightly twisted. Only slightly crabby. Only occasionally at war with his own movements, an opener with the batting stance of a roadkill squirrel propped up on its hind legs in a pair of pads; a man so flinty and rugged he seemed to be staring down mid-on even as Mitchell Starc scorched a short one past his nose.
That maiden Test hundred at Edgbaston had felt like a career high for Burns, something rare and perhaps unrepeatable, reward for all those years of graft and doubt. Here he looked like something else. Not just a player of idiosyncratic adhesion, but an opening batsman of real authority with – whisper it – something luminous and flowing in his strokeplay.
Resuming on 15 overnight Burns batted with a rare certainty before and after tea, providing, in tandem with Joe Root, a bulwark against the disintegration that had seemed imminent with England 25 for two shortly after the start.
For a while Josh Hazlewood tried to bounce Burns out, placing two men deep and repeatedly ballooning the short ball over his head. He hooked one hard for four. Another deflected off his back. The rest he left.
Burns has been a little frantic against the short ball. Understandably so. County cricket does not provide regular 90mph pace trios to help groove your method. But something has changed here. Burns is a problem-solver, a man constantly refining his technique, an example what the tracksuited gurus on the A team tours he was never asked to attend would probably call a Growth Mindset.
Helped by a slower pitch, he swayed and ducked the short ball. Pat Cummins has troubled Burns most. He has a horrible, straight bouncer, aimed right in at the sternum. Burns played him with courage, dropping the ball down off his throat and pirouetting clear when Cummins’ line gave him the chance.
Best of all he scored fluently, not least against Nathan Lyon, whose much-trumpeted mastery of the lefties is looking less certain now. Time and again Burns got back in his crease and cut Lyon off his stumps, a daring, thrilling shot, and occasionally an uppish one.
In between the barrage Burns stood tall and punched Hazlewood through point, a wonderfully pure stroke, before running him down to reach his half-century from 100 balls. As the partnership with Root nudged up past 100 he went to 300 runs in the series, third behind Ben Stokes and He Who Cannot Be Dismissed, at an average a tick over 50.
This is a fine achievement. Five other openers have played in this series. Their combined run tally is more than 100 short of England’s left-hander. In the summer of 2019 Burns has become the Steve Smith of Ashes openers, the outlier, the freak. Look on his respectable numbers and tremble.
There are perhaps two things worth saying about this. First, there is a case now that Burns really is the best of the Other Blokes, the most convincing of that train of pressed-men and fill-ins England have trialled in the post-Strauss years, a lineage that runs through Carberry-Compton-Robson-Lyth-Hales-Duckett-Hameed-Jennings-Stoneman.
Most have also averaged around 30. But 30 looks like clear blue air right now. Plus Burns is managing that rare thing: he’s getting better not worse. Aged 29, and with 126 first-class games behind him, he has not simply applied his own methods and crossed his fingers: he’s settled, grown and fixed parts of his game on the hoof. This feels like a solution to something at a time of missing parts.
In one sense Burns is maybe the most important player in this England team, a living riposte to its most obvious flaws and vices. Here they come, the white ball cavaliers, the fancy boys, garlanded with medals and franchise gold. And there they go again, baffled by the more complex, diffuse challenges, the deeper gears of the oldest form.
Burns stands against this, a product of first-class red-ball cricket, here solely on first-class red-ball merit. If there is an agreeable jauntiness to his manner, something worn and comfortable even in his gear, his boots, his pads, it comes with that sense of a man entirely happy in his own sporting skin.
With England on 166 for two Burns finally went, edging Hazlewood to second slip for an assured 81. England may yet struggle to rescue this game from here. Rain and a little more stubbornness may help keep the series alive. But one thing does seem sure. They have found a Test match opener, and in just the place you might expect.
