A Simple Game

GH remembers the basics

The first morning of this Adelaide Test, the ground staff had allocated a single pitch on the western extremity of the square for the bowlers warm ups. Onlookers were treated to the incongruous sight of English and Australian bowlers politely alternating, as though involved in a casual bowl off with the same set of plastic stumps.

Except it was no real contest. When he wasn’t unobtrusively smashing the top of off, Scott Boland never strayed wider than a fourth stump line or deviated from a length of between three and five metres. Brydon Carse and Josh Tongue, meanwhile, bounced the ball one way or another, as though the stumps were not there, or in use purely for morale purposes. Just practice, of course. But England have invested a lot in practice on this tour, on the earnest inconsequentiality of nets, and you are urged always to train as you mean to play. Here we go, then….

Flash forward an hour, and Carse was bowling an opening spell featuring four no-balls and four four balls, while Tongue would fade after a promising start; flash forward a day and Boland was bowling with such precision meanness that Alex Carey could stand up to the stumps, and, in due course, take a quicksilver rebound catch. To paraphrase Bill Woodfull in the corresponding Test of Bodyline: both teams are out there are trying to play cricket, but one of them seems rather more serious about the skills necessary to succeed than the other.