Off The Bat – Australia rise from Ashes, England on the scrapheap

Ben Davies - Football Columnist 19:10 20/07/2015
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    • A satirical look at the second Test of the Ashes.

    Off The Bat begins a satirical sifting through of the wreckage of England and their calamitous crash against Australia in the Second Ashes Test.

    A large section of England fans were full of delirious optimism this time last week. The theory went that England’s win in Cardiff clearly showed that Mitchell Johnson was washed up seaweed once again and Steve Smith didn’t really know the right end of a bat when push came to shove. Right? Whoops. In the realms of idiotic knee-jerk reactions, this was up there with the choreography of Gangnam Style. 

    England crushed

    In the end, the deadly duo of Johnson and Smith rose from the Ashes and lorded over Lords. They crushed England so emphatically and so powerfully that the home side were removed from Lords via a scrapheap crane. They had been compressed by the Australians into a 5 metre squared cube of limbs, pads and bats. The best bits of the team will be salvaged and reassembled for Edgbaston, whilst a leaked English Cricket Board document suggested Ian Bell may be better off being recycled into a paper cup.

    The scale of the defeat here cannot be stressed enough — a 405 run defeat. This was the 9th biggest runs thrashing in the history of smashing a little red ball towards a circular piece of rope. The Everest of England’s humiliation was their dire second innings of 103 runs (over 100 less than Smith’s mercurial first innings). In those fleeting hours, Trevor Bayliss’ side showed the structural integrity of a damp tracing paper windbreak in a hurricane force wind.

    Falling Flat

    Whilst the fervently flat wicket at Lords was a real injection in the arm for Flat Earth believers, it was conducive to delivering an England bowling performance as exhilarating as an all day Alastair Cook led workshop on the art of the defencive block. With no pace, no bounce and no spin, England’s men only had gravity to work with and in the absence of Lords doubling as a gravity defying spacecraft (an unforgiveable architectural oversight) there was no chance of that force offering any variety in movement either. 

    The wicketless James Anderson and his blunted bowling colleagues offered no real opposition, allowing the imperious Australian batsmen to confidently accumulate 820 runs across their declaration-ending innings. The top order from Down Under couldn’t have filled their boots any more emphatically unless they had erected a concrete mixer at their crease and poured the resulting mixture into their spikes.

    – #360stats: England vs Australia, Ashes second Test review
    –     VIDEO: Cook frustrated, Michael Clarke praises Mitchell Johnson
    – Trevor Bayliss warns England batsmen ahead of third Ashes Test

    Poetic Pitch Justice

    When allegedly asking the groundsmen to prepare a flat pitch to nullify Johnson and co, England seemed to inexplicably forget that their own bowlers would also have to bowl on the same surface. Imagine Andy Murray demanding Wimbledon deploy 6 inches of sand over Centre Court in a bid to scupper Roger Federer’s ferocious forehand, or Lewis Hamilton getting Silverstone to turn the circuit into a series of canals to give Nico Rosberg a more cumbersome racing line to work with.

    Humiliation was sealed when it transpired that the Australian bowling unit could coax movement out of the wicket where the English couldn’t. Well, we say ‘coax’, this was more a case of cracking the code to the safe with a sledgehammer. A 90mph sledgehammer primarily wielded by Mitchell Johnson — think Jack Nicholson hacking the door down in The Shining.  Suddenly the ball was starting to dance wildly – going from a dull one-two step at your Auntie’s 80th birthday disco to the complete routine of Michael Jackson’s thriller. Four English wickets fell in twenty minutes at the end of Day Two — the self-sabotage was effectively complete, the flat pitch had killed England.

    The home side must surely take a completely opposing approach for the Third Test and guarantee the England bowling attack an uneven surface and bounce. Fingers crossed, Edgbaston may just throw up some history at the end of the month — the first trampoline-based wicket in the game’s history.

    Final Bell For Bell?

    Nothing seemed to work for England veteran Ian Bell this Test – when he tried to block his way out of trouble he was forcibly made to sign up to to a leather diet after swallowing multiple balls from the volcanic Johnson. Bell flipped styles by trying to go on the attack – flirting with the off stump so outrageously that we were surely only a few overs off the 33-year-old stepping into a tightfitting little black dress and leaving his phone number under the wicket bail.  The erratic approaches didn’t work. Indeed, Bell managed just a single run in his first innings. That was Bell’s fifth dismissal for ‘1’ in Tests this year. Bell’s scorecard now has such an abundance of one and two’s that it’s beginning to read exactly like the customary utterances of a microphone technician ahead of a live gig. 

    Commentators predict that Edgbaston will be the ‘last chance saloon’ for Bell. We have our fingers crossed that the England selectors will take that image and run with it – insisting Bell swaps a helmet for a 10-gallon cowboy hat and enters the pitch through a set of swinging wooden tavern doors.  England fans will certainly hope Bell brings his revolver with him to help bolster his frail defence against the new ball.

    Ben Stokes Flames of Humiliation

    Not only was Ben Stokes dismissed whilst running in a match where England runs were irrelevant, he did so by forgetting to slide his bat safely into the crease. In human basics terms, this is the equivalent of forgetting to open your mouth when eating a juicy beef burger.  With the furniture of his stumps completely rearranged and both feet off the ground, he was a goner. It could not have been more of a ‘school boy error’ had he been wearing grey navy shorts and a poorly fitting tie whilst swapping football stickers with David Warner at Silly point. In the end, the self-sabotage, the complete absence of the basics and a lack of patient respect for the context of the game was a perfect encapsulation of England’s performance at Lords.

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