For anyone still curious about the exact role of Will Jacks in this England Test team, the key is probably to see him as a kind of a tell, a set of entrails, a weather vane on the state of the game.
The first rule of Jacks goes like this. If you can see Will Jacks on your TV screen, it’s bad. If Will Jacks is bowling when you wake up something has gone wrong. If Will Jacks is batting something has also probably gone wrong.
And yes, the flaw in this equation is the obvious fact that if you can’t see Will Jacks things have probably also gone wrong. But it is less certain. If you can’t see him, there is still a glimmer of hope, perhaps even the dream of the Zero Jacks day, where everyone else does their job, and nothing is seen of Will Jacks at all.
Not so much here, however, on the third day of this third Test in Adelaide, when a great deal was seen of England’s newly enthroned No 1 off-spin option. This was another day when Australia asserted their own first principles of high-skill, high-intensity Test cricket, the sporting equivalent of making everyone sit down and have a proper dinner together because it’s good for you; and in the process pushed the match and the series definitively out of England’s reach.
It wasn’t always an easy watch. Opening up after tea, Jacks bowled an over so offensive it should probably have been pixelated for the TV audience, a debauchery of long hops, longer hops and leg-side half-volleys. For a while he seemed to be operating to a deliberate short-ball plan, dragging it down so often and so far he should perhaps have been warned by the umpires for excessive short-pitched bowling.
Eventually he got a wicket doing this, drawing Usman Khawaja into a loose cut. But even then the rip on the ball felt like a point for Australia, another note in the margin on exactly how Nathan Lyon is going to win this match on the fourth day. The years, the planning. The contracts. Day three, Adelaide. Heat and dust. How have we come to this, then?
None of it is Jacks’s own fault. He’s a seriously talented cricketer. He’s already part of a select band with both a Test five-fer and an Indian Premier League hundred. He could probably bat in the top five with the right prep. He even feels like a favourable headline in the making. Indomitable Will. Will to power. Although not on the current tour, where he sounds instead like something closer to a question. Will Jacks? No. No, he probably won’t.
This is the key bodge of this part of England’s planning and selection. Here we have a highly talented cricketer being used in a non-talent role, used as a hedge against the weakness of others, basically there for when either the batting or the bowling goes wrong, like taking your nice new racing bike upstairs and using it as a clothes hanger.
So Jacks wheeled away through the afternoon, arm held distinctively high in his approach, like a man trying to keep his watch out of the swimming pool. Jacks can bowl this stuff, has the levers, the flex, the rip. He just hasn’t done it enough. And it shows at this level. As Travis Head eased towards another fine, fluent Adelaide hundred, he feasted on the short stuff, then flipped Jacks straight for six when he pitched it up.
There were some Busby Berkeley dance spectacular fields from Stokes as the seamers laboured on and the thought occurred that, for all the theory and the culture baggage, what is happening here is Australia just have seriously high-class bowlers, and certainly better bowlers than England. And everything, all the jazz, the buzz, the waffle basically flows from that.
England have picked generalist bowler-batters before, the do-some-bits merchants. A Mike Watkinson. An Adam Hollioake. The point with Jacks is that he represents a 180-degree turn on some very specific planning for the role. The spectre at the feast on exactly the kind of day you groove and polish your spin bowlers for is Shoaib Bashir, who really was supposed to be doing this.
Instead Bashir has become the Theo Walcott of this Ashes tour, out there having a sunshine break quite near some other people playing sport. It is possible to feel uneasy about the strangeness of Bashir’s professional existence to this point, the fact England have used him as a hunch-pick, have projected him on to this brutally public stage, only to shuffle him off again when the gamble failed.
Perhaps this is all simply an extraordinary bonus interlude in the sporting life of Shoaib Bashir. Perhaps he’s got some great stories to tell. But while it was always a deeply odd, forced-agriculture kind of way to make someone into an Ashes spin bowler, it is also worth remembering Bashir did well at first, arriving late for the tour in India in early 2024 with 10 first-class wickets to his name and standing up to the challenge.
What has happened to him since is what happens to every other spin bowler, the need to learn, to plateau a bit. The difference here is being asked to do it in public, with so little other fallback or matchplay routine.
It is also not the fault of Stokes and Brendon McCullum that county cricket isn’t offering up ready-made spin bowers of the right age – an issue of culture, conditions and the general death of the red-ball game – something this England regime has, come to think of it, been quite happy to contribute to.
By the end Jacks, an ever-willing team man, Jacksy, Basement, All-Trades, had one for 107 in 19 overs, on a day England might have hoped to squeeze their way. It seems likely his frontline role here will remain a footnote, a jog of the memory in some rainy-day highlights package. But in many ways it speaks to the whole picture of centralised selection, neglect of the levels below; and the surprise intrusion of caution as defeat has loomed closer.
