If the Trent Bridge defeat taught us anything, it’s that Australia have become experts at losing remarkable Tests Allons enfants de la patrie, le jour de stepping away from the TV, collapsing on the floor and whimpering quietly as you rock back and forth with the passage of each dot ball est arrivé : on the most insurrectionist of days, the most dispiriting and status quo-confirming finale . But as we wake to the inevitable avalanche of what-ifs, some (what if Stuart Broad’s shoe hadn’t been in need of such urgent, obvious repair before lunch?) more pointed than others (what if we’d had specialist batsmen skilled in the art of … batting?), it seems fair to take a moment and reflect on the emerging specialty of this New Australia side, shorn of its near-past majesties and in desperate search of a post-McGrath-Warne identity: we have become experts at losing remarkable Tests. As a spectator, you always want your fifth day nail-biters to stretch into the shadows, with keepers standing up even for express pace, a ring of fielders called in close, tailenders swinging at wides on crumbling wickets, and your heart in a jar before every ball.
If the Trent Bridge defeat taught us anything, it’s that Australia have become experts at losing remarkable Tests
Allons enfants de la patrie, le jour de stepping away from the TV, collapsing on the floor and whimpering quietly as you rock back and forth with the passage of each dot ball est arrivé: on the most insurrectionist of days, the most dispiriting and status quo-confirming finale. But as we wake to the inevitable avalanche of what-ifs, some (what if Stuart Broad’s shoe hadn’t been in need of such urgent, obvious repair before lunch?) more pointed than others (what if we’d had specialist batsmen skilled in the art of … batting?), it seems fair to take a moment and reflect on the emerging specialty of this New Australia side, shorn of its near-past majesties and in desperate search of a post-McGrath-Warne identity: we have become experts at losing remarkable Tests.
As a spectator, you always want your fifth day nail-biters to stretch into the shadows, with keepers standing up even for express pace, a ring of fielders called in close, tailenders swinging at wides on crumbling wickets, and your heart in a jar before every ball. Sunday’s dénouement didn’t quite live up to the ideal, with the Test expiring to the soft click of the third umpire’s replay button and Australia’s many, many practitioners of international cricket human rights law left with that most unsatisfying of fires on which to toast their outrage: the legitimate, audible nick.
But Australia’s last wicket stand was an all-time classic in a Test which was most notable, perhaps, for producing two specimens of the genre. Indeed, without the pesky intervention of lunch, Australia, guided by the suddenly-lusty strokemaking of Brad Haddin and James Pattinson, would have surely galloped on to victory. But then lunch came – evil, concentration-breaking lunch – and with it went Australia’s hopes of pulling off the miraculous. If there’s one lesson to take out of this Test for the ICC, it’s nothing to do with DRS, the Code of Conduct, the moral probity of Hot Spot or whether it’s time to get Snicko on the payroll: it’s that they should abolish lunch.
And abridged as the final movement was, there was much else to savour besides. We had Broad fiddling with his shoe, a masterly display of time-wasting to cap the marvellously restrained hour or so of on-field deadpan comedy he produced on day three after he refused to follow the example of Adam Gilchrist and, um, that’s it and walk. There was Pattinson’s six off Graeme Swann. And if nothing else, Jimmy Anderson’s dance after Marais Erasmus ruled Haddin caught behind, in which the English paceman leapt forward, arms outstretched, with the glee of an eight-year-old flush with first mastery of the demi-plié, made this a fifth day to remember from the perspective of contemporary dance.
“Reach for the stars! Make dreams come true!” Anderson seemed to be saying. It was a celebration in keeping with the melodrama, so intense it was almost camp, that predominated through much of the Test.
In the moment of defeat, Haddin dropped his shoulders and removed his helmet to reveal a shockingly pale and tension-withered face – a pointed contrast to Alastair Cook, England’s perma-cool young captain, who always looks like he’s just returned from a gap year on Capri that mainly involved fixing himself Aperol spritzers, learning to make cavatelli, and flirting with rich Brazilians. The guiding clichés of Australia’s rivalry with England demand that all the Australian players look vibrant and sun-kissed, and all the English players drawn and confused, like child labourers on the brink of starvation working a pit up north.
Australia, of course, can still do limber with the best of them (see Agar, Ashton), but the contrast between Haddin and Cook was telling. The cliché has been upended and even England’s unimpressive players are now physically impressive: from Steven Finn to Chris Tremlett, England has become a laboratory for the production of fast bowlers with viable second careers as Bond villains. For Australia, this is not the way things were meant to be. Suddenly, we are the reverse of what history has told us we should be; suddenly, we have become dutiful supporting actors in someone else’s victory drama.
From the World Cup semi-final against the West Indies in 1996 to the return fixture three years later, against South Africa, the exhilarating escape was the backbone on which Australia’s recent cricketing greatness was built. Australia, of course, can still go chasing waterfalls, as when running down 310 to beat South Africa at the Wanderers in 2011. But increasingly, the unlikely victories feel like embarrassments (Sydney 2008 v India) or aberrations (Wanderers 2011) beside a more reliable supply-line of heroic defeats and nerve-shredding draws (as against South Africa in Adelaide last year).
To be fair, this was a defeat to rank with the very best of them: Kolkata in 2001 and Edgbaston in 2005. Even the passages of play where nothing much happened, as when Ian Bell was doughtily gathering the singles that would send England trickling towards their second innings lead, were suffused with unbearable tension – a tension, perhaps, produced by the realisation of everyone present that England are not quite as good as everyone thought they were, and Australia nowhere near as bad. But it’s hard not to escape the feeling that in the tense, fifth day finales to come over the nine remaining Tests in these Super Ashes – and there are sure to be several of them – Australia will be more appropriately cast in the role it performed so well on Sunday: that of the squeaky underdog, stitching desperate last wicket stands together in pursuit of unlikely glory.
Maybe that’s overly pessimistic. Trent Bridge left us, it has to be said, with a number of encouraging signs. Just as Shane Warne, in the early 1990s, single-handedly revived the art of wrist spin, Agar, in one Test, may have sketched out the beginnings of an entirely new type of cricketer: the off-spinning all-rounder who is valued more for his batting than his bowling and is loved by England and Australia alike. Ed Cowan, very generously, offered two excellent reasons – his first and second innings – why he should not be picked for the second Test. Phillip Hughes, displaying a new-found maturity, showed that he has added a critical tool to his arsenal: the ability not to get out cheaply by playing only through the off-side. And Chris Rogers, as they say, “looked the part” – of a grisly, 35-year-old veteran prepared to grind his way to multiple centuries over the next nine Tests.
There was collective progress, too. There can be little argument that Australia, right now, are playing with the best lower order on the planet (wow). And if the explosions of indignation across the internet are anything to go by, we also boast the deepest bank of knowledge among ordinary citizens on the topics of DRS, Aleem Dar’s recent umpiring record, Erasmus’s fitness for video review office and the biological causes of Stuart Broad’s shoe problems of any country in the world. The sheer depth of casual, everyday expertise on Dar’s historical approach to first slip dismissals, in particular, that we’ve all been exposed to over the last few days has been truly extraordinary. Hats off, Australia.
Sportswriting convention commands me to say that in years to come, we will look back on this defeat and realise what a wonderful, sporting role Australia played in a thrilling contest. But the truth is that in years to come, we will mainly look back on this result and realise how much it sucked. Later, once that feeling has subsided, we’ll remember what we feel right now. It’s entirely unoriginal, it’s been said by many others, but it can’t hurt to repeat it: Test cricket, bloody hell.