Cricket Bloody Hell

GH on a day when order gave way to chaos

Cricket marches backwards into the future. It pores over its past to divine its possibilities. As ever more data is collected, ever more patterns are detected, and uncertainty trades at a discount to accountancy. Then reality takes a hand.

The preceding weeks have been dominated by the absences of Pat Cummins and Josh Hazlewood, and thereby the subtraction of their 600-plus Test wickets from Australian aggregates. Joe Root arrived with thirty-nine Test hundreds in his kit bag and was anointed the ‘best batter in the world’ by Marnus Labuschagne, even if England promised ‘balls-to-the-wall’ preparation then played a beer match instead.

Today? Today, it all went to hell. Mitchell Starc took seven for 58, so that Cummins and Hazlewood were hardly missed; Root made 0, but then Labuschagne and Steve Smith, who have been lousy with runs, also failed. In all, nineteen wickets fell for 295 on what was, in all frankness, a very good batting pitch. Bazball, eh? Who knew it was infectious?

The urn walks

It recalled the first day of the last Test summer, which featured seventeen wickets, although it was also a reprise of 2023: England, so freewheeling they might just have returned from Burning Man, versus Australia, like the kids in a classroom of a strict teacher when someone has let off a stink bomb trying hard to maintain composure but finally collapsing in giggles. Oh, and there was us, watching all predictions go crazily astray.