Nathan Lyon exposes tourists’ flaws and eases into Australia’s record books | Geoff Lemon

A picture


For Nathan Lyon it had been a case of wait and wait and wait.It was 6 July this year when he took a return catch from Jayden Seales, wrapping up the second Test against West Indies in Grenada with his career worth 562 Test wickets.Right behind Glenn McGrath’s 563, Lyon might have anticipated a week before moving to second place on the all-time Australian list, an off-spinner of modest flair and self-belief sitting behind the market leader in both those traits, Shane Warne.Instead, Lyon was left out in Jamaica, spitting plantain chips even as Australia’s four quicks humbled West Indies for 143 and 27.That meant four and a half more months until the next Test, the start of the Ashes in Perth.

Never mind, he could pass McGrath in front of a home crowd.Nope.Two overs in the first innings, none in the second, England folding twice too quickly to need a spinner.Then to Brisbane, an angry Lyon left out for four quicks again.He was back for Adelaide, but more waiting was imminent.

Australia batted first,The second day was a stinker,A heartbreaker,A backbreaker,A bowler-breaker.

The gauge nudged above 40, but the lived experience was well beyond numbers.The sun bit.It clawed.It was so hot that spectating in the shade with a cold drink was taxing.The only contest was about which group of people were more mad: the cricketers in the middle, or the group of New Zealanders on the hill dressed as traffic cones.

One lot were paid handsomely and looked after by medical professionals, the other were presumably rolled out of their tubes of fluorescent sweaty foam at the end of the day in a slurry of human sous vide.In any case, a smart team, a sensible team, an adequately equipped team, would have known that this was a day to make Australia suffer.They would have known about Lyon’s numbers and angst and edginess, and solemnly pledged to make him wait some more.Had his spells worn on into a wicketless afternoon, he might have started to unravel.As might Pat Cummins on his return from troublesome vertebrae, when a ruthless team would aim to push him to re-breaking point.

Instead, with Lyon brought on for the 10th over of England’s first innings, it was suddenly a case of wait no more.After Ollie Pope’s harried and harrowing tour had added a few deeply confused shots in a matter of minutes, Pope stretched his front leg down at Lyon’s third delivery and flicked it, catching-practice style, from outside off stump to midwicket.Three balls later Lyon produced off-spin perfection, drawing Ben Duckett’s defence down the wrong line before turning past it to the left-hander’s off stump.There went career wickets 563 and 564 in his first over, letting Lyon relax into the rest of his day’s work.Cummins was already in the book by then, looking every millimetre his usual self: full pace, the slight angle in at the right-hander, the slight deck away, hitting the pitch from a perfect wrist.

First he achieved the rare feat of getting Zak Crawley out to a sensible shot: the right ball to defend, the right line to play down, nicking anyway.In his subsequent spell Cummins did the same for Joe Root, shuffling slightly wider but only trying to keep the ball out, Cummins moving clear of any other bowler by dismissing Root for a 12th time in Tests.Both bowlers’ returns, both so easy, felt calculated as insults to the visitors.All this angst about England’s preparation and their failure to acclimatise: whether they should have played one game, no games, 10 games, mini golf, whether they should have moved to Fremantle for five months on a working holiday visa to be baristas.Then there is Cummins, rolling up after five months without a first-class match and, like seasonally relevant religious figures, delivering the immaculate.

He added Jamie Smith’s wicket via the pull shot later, while two remain to fall on day three.This is, to risk an observation as blindingly obvious as the Adelaide sun, the difference between having really good bowlers who keep on putting the ball in the right place, and having Brydon Carse.It’s not that the Australians didn’t have to work for their wickets, it’s that their work was quality and their reward commensurate.Jofra Archer, on the other hand, toiled into the second morning to take five Australian wickets, only for his teammates to have him back out there batting for the last hour of the day.By stumps he had outscored seven of them.

Some can take the heat.Some are taken.
cultureSee all
A picture

Jimmy Kimmel on Trump’s Rob Reiner comments: ‘So hateful and vile’

Late-night hosts reacted to the murder of legendary director Rob Reiner and his wife, Michele Singer Reiner, as well as Donald Trump’s 10-minute tangent about Christmas snakes.“This is the kind of weekend that makes you wonder if things will ever feel good again,” said Jimmy Kimmel on Monday evening, after a couple days of horrific news: the terror attack at a Hanukkah celebration on Australia’s Bondi Beach, a mass shooting at Brown University in Rhode Island, and the “murder of one of our greatest directors and patriots, Rob Reiner, and his wife, Michele Reiner”.“What we need in a time like this, besides common sense when it comes to guns and mental health care, is compassion and leadership,” he continued. “We did not get that from our president, because he has none of it to give. Instead, we got a fool rambling about nonsense

A picture

The Vietnam War ended 50 years ago. But its lessons live on in The Quiet American

Alden Pyle (Brendan Fraser) was a “quiet American”, says Thomas Fowler (Michael Caine) to a French policeman. “A friend,” he adds, as the lifeless corpse of Pyle stares back at him with a wretched expression.This is the scene that opens Phillip Noyce’s Vietnam-set political drama before the film flashes back a few months earlier to 1952 Saigon, where Fowler, an ageing Englishman, lives leisurely as a journalist reporting on the first Indochina war. When Pyle, a young American aid worker advocating for US intervention, falls for Fowler’s 20-year-old Vietnamese lover, Phượng (Đỗ Thị Hải Yến), the jaded reporter’s tranquil existence begins to unravel.At Pyle and Fowler’s first meeting at the Continental hotel, it is clear that Pyle is anything but “quiet”: handsomely bespectacled, the American idealist is attentively reading Dangers to Democracy, a book on foreign policy

A picture

‘Fans stole my underwear – and even my car aerial’: how Roxette made It Must Have Been Love

‘We had 2,000 people outside our hotel room in Buenos Aires singing our songs all night. David Coulthard later told me that all the Formula One drivers were staying there and were annoyed because they couldn’t sleep’In my early 20s, I was in the biggest band in Sweden. But after Gyllene Tider [Golden Times] collapsed, I was depressed for two years. At first, Roxette only got together when Marie Fredriksson, our singer, wasn’t busy with solo stuff. To keep her in the band, I needed to make it successful, so I was very motivated

A picture

From Eleanor the Great to Emily in Paris: your complete entertainment guide to the week ahead

Eleanor the GreatOut nowJune Squibb stars in Scarlett Johansson’s directorial debut, which premiered at Cannes and tells the tale of the eponymous Eleanor, a senior citizen recently relocated to New York, who strikes up a friendship with a 19-year old – and then stumbles her way into pretending to be a Holocaust survivor.LurkerOut nowA hit at Sundance, this is the story of a lowly retail employee who happens to strike up a friendship with a rising pop star, becoming the Boswell to his Johnson, if Boswell was part of a pop star’s entourage. But the path of friendship with a famous person never did run smooth, and the uneven power dynamic soon prompts some desperate manoeuvring in this psychological thriller.Ella McCayOut nowEmma Mackey stars in the latest from James L Brooks (his first since 2010), a political comedy about an idealistic thirtysomething working in government and preparing to step into the shoes of her mentor, Governor Bill (Albert Brooks). Jamie Lee Curtis co-stars as Ella’s aunt

A picture

‘Like lipstick on a fabulous gorilla’: the Barbican’s many gaudy glow-ups and the one to top them all

The brutalist arts-and-towers complex, where even great explorers get lost, is showing its age. Let’s hope the 50th anniversary upgrade is better than the ‘pointillist stippling’ tried in the 1990sThe Barbican is aptly named. From the Old French barbacane, it historically means a fortified gateway forming the outer line of defence to a city or castle. London’s Barbican marks the site of a medieval structure that would have defended an important access point. Its architecture was designed to repel

A picture

Maria Balshaw to step down as director of Tate after nine years

Maria Balshaw is to step down as the director of Tate in 2026, after a challenging nine-year tenure when she steered the organisation through the Covid-19 pandemic and had to deal with fluctuating attendance figures and financial instability.Balshaw, who joined as director in June 2017 after a celebrated spell as the leader of the Whitworth in Manchester, said it was a privilege to serve as director but now was the time for her to move on.She said: “With a growing and increasingly diverse audience, and with a brilliant forward plan in place, I feel now is the right time to pass on the baton to the next director. My greatest thrill has always been to work closely with artists, and so it is fitting that Tracey Emin’s exhibition will be my final project at Tate.”Balshaw was described as a “trailblazer” by the Tate chair, Roland Rudd, who said she “has never wavered from her core belief – that more people deserve to experience the full richness of art, and more artists deserve to be part of that story”