Ashes 2023: England’s horror show with the bat tips second Test in Australia’s favour

At 11am on Friday, England were 278/4 and looking quite reasonably at Australia’s first innings score and beyond. An hour and a half later, they were all out for 325, instead looking quite realistically like going down 2-0 in the Ashes.

This was no ordinary horror session from England, this was the sort of session that would give a regular bad session nightmares – the final six wickets lost with just 47 runs added to the score – the Test match slipping from England’s grasp as quickly as they could shovel it into the hands of the nearest obliging Australian fielder.

Cricket is a land populated with superstitious beasts and in hindsight as portents of doom go, losing your captain to the second ball of the day should perhaps have been an indicator of the English misery that was to follow.

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It was a bitter blow to England’s hopes. Stokes had been seemingly the lone calm head the afternoon before, steering his side out of the short ball trap they had ensnared themselves in to ensure they finished the day dreaming of taking the upper hand on Day 3.

As dreams go it would prove to be one of the more fanciful, if it was hanging by a thread two balls into the day, then barely 10 overs into the session it had officially evaporated – every remaining recognised batsman back in the changing room, just the overly long tail flapping about unbecomingly in the Lord’s gloom.

Stokes perhaps can be forgiven for his dismissal, after all these things can happen from your first ball of the day – a leading edge to Mitchell Starc and yet another good catch from Cameron Green a more justifiable end than those that would follow.

To lose one key batsman early on is unfortunate, to lose two smacks of carelessness, and unfortunately for English fans thoughtlessness seemed to be the order of the morning.

Some mitigation can perhaps be made for the repeated failure against the short ball on the afternoon of Day 2, adapting your approach in the heat of the moment can sometimes prove easier said than done. But with the benefit of an overnight break and plenty of time to consider a counter to any Australian bouncer barrage, England’s response on Day 3 was pretty pathetic.

Australia are a bowler down in this Test, perhaps even more crucially than that they are without their spinner, Nathan Lyon, and with him a man expected to bowl a healthy proportion of their overs. On top of that, repeatedly bowling bouncers is hard work, the short ball ploy was not one Australia could afford to keep up indefinitely – unless that is what they wanted to grind their own bowlers into the dirt.

England then had extra incentive to keep their opponents out in the field, this was an occasion where patience was really the more aggressive approach, forcing Australia to toil for any wickets, putting as many overs as possible into the legs of their bowlers.

Instead they had their feet up in the dressing room half an hour before lunch, appetites potentially spoiled having been spoon fed a homemade English batting collapse.

By the time rain and bad light brought an early close to play in the late afternoon, Australia were 221 runs ahead, and even without Lyon, batting with seven wickets still in hand. It leaves them overwhelming favourites to win this second Test and England needing the miraculous to have any hope of stopping them.

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