Australia batsman Steve Smith hailed his bowlers’ best performance of the Ashes series so far, as England ended a disappointing day two of the fifth Test firmly in the back seat.
Australia have lost the Ashes, though Smith said: “It was a very good day. It was nice to get 481 on board. The bowlers today, it’s the best we’ve bowled all series. They created lot of pressure, made them earn their runs and picked up wickets – it speaks for itself.
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“We didn’t over-attack too much. We put the ball in the right spot. There’s enough in the wicket and we made the batters earn their runs,” he told Sky Sports.
“We haven’t done it too much in this series. I thought we did that well today.”
Smith’s century took him past 500 runs for the series – the first Australian to do so in England since Matthew Elliott in 1997. He will therefore inherit the captaincy from Michael Clarke with runs behind him, but he was keen to nod in the direction of his outgoing captain and opener Chris Rogers, who is also playing his final Test before retirement.
“We’re disappointed we can’t win the series but Michael said before the Test he wanted a lot of fight and character from us,” he said. “We all said we wanted to send him and Chris out on a good note we’re well on the way to that at the moment.”
England pace bowler Steven Finn too was victim to the curse of the no-balls that seemed to spread on Friday, but did make it 100 Test wickets and finished on 3-90. However, he admitted there was plenty of work to do to get anything out of the Test match.
“Australia, credit to them, batted very well and then showed us how to bowl on this pitch. We’ve had a poor day but we’ll come back tomorrow and fight as hard as we can.
“It’s a good wicket. Australia’s bowlers got a lot more out of it banging it on a very good length and hard than we did. We hold our hands up. There’s fight in this yet.”
