England’s MCG triumph is a genuine coup – and a picture of what might have been | Barney Ronay
Na-na na-na na-na na na na, Duckett’s on the piss.On the piss.Duckett’s on the piss.Don’t take me home, please don’t take me home.And while we’re here, stand up, stand up, please do stand up if you love a two-day Test on a pitch as green and ridged as an under-ripe roasting potato.
For an hour in mid-afternoon on day two at the MCG England’s top order finally did the thing,The clocks stopped,Dogs miaowed,Birds flew backwards across the sky,And Test cricket turned into darts.
This was probably always coming in some form.The universe tends toward entropy.In England all things are, in the end, shirtless men singing Sweet Caroline.As England’s openers set off in pursuit of 175 to win this fourth Test at the midway point of a strange, restless day of fast-forward cricket, junk cricket, cricket off its meds, there was a sense of barriers dissolving, of a top order intent not just on playing the old favourites, but playing them all at the same time.Ben Duckett kicked things off with three fresh-air swipes in his first five balls.
He crunched Mitchell Starc off his pads.He whirled his bat like a club.He was almost bowled, almost caught and almost caught-and-bowled.Absurd walking ramps were essayed.A forward defensive drew vast pantomime roars from the banks of English fans.
Zak Crawley stood still and hit Michael Neser’s seventh ball high over long-off for six, a beautifully crisp moment of clarity in the middle of all that heat and noise.The opening partnership reached fifty off 6.5 overs.Duckett walked off shortly after with 34 off 26, yorked playing a kind of cave-ball defensive bunt, but having also produced surely one of the strangest active top-order Test innings in the history of this ground.And there was more too, as Brydon Carse walked out at No 3 with more than a hundred runs still required for victory.
Ideally Carse at this point would have raised his left elbow to the skies and ground his way to 27 off 117 balls, thereby genuinely sticking it to the man, freaking out the squares and subverting the dominant paradigm.He didn’t do this.Instead he played every conceivable cricket shot, pure movement, unchoreographed shapes, free-flowing physical ballet, en route to a horrible six.There was a vague sense of desecration about all this.Australia venerates Test cricket.
This matters here.It speaks to the land, the culture, the triumphant separation from the colonial past.In Adelaide they agonise about letting you in through the media entrance without a collar.In Melbourne the G at Christmas is a secular cathedral, a temple of chino and blue twill shirt, a fixed cultural point.Except, now Duckett is out there playing meth-ball.
Carse has gone out to bat in chaps.Brendon McCullum is lounging back so far in his chair, feet up, he’s in danger of disappearing into a ball of pure human insolence.And as England walked off at tea, 77 for two and going along at six and a half an over, the ghost of something long since pronounced dead on the table, the Bazball that dare not speak its name, had never felt so horribly alive.Albeit, only alive in in a desiccated way, leathery and Botoxed, pumped full of meds, telling everyone it’s never felt so young.This was not a vindication of anything.
But it was a note of grace, a tick in the box for all that,England’s approach to batting made perfect sense here,A successful chase and a four-wicket win was a reminder of the basic logic of playing this way on a pitch that just kept on seaming,And right now there are two things worth saying about it,First, any England team winning a Test in Australia is a real thing.
On day two here, England bowled Australia out for 132 a bowler down, then smashed an excellent attack around the park on a tough pitch.In doing so they completed a first Test win since Sydney in 2011.This has been a place of annihilation, collapse, trauma, careers in turnaround.Whatever the state of the series, this is a genuine achievement, and a tick for the regime.But let us be clear also: it is by no means a vindication of another losing tour, or of a failing executive tier.
In fact, this is the opposite,What winning in Melbourne says is: here is what you could have had,Here is evidence that Australia were vulnerable, and for good reason too,They came into this game with three all-time bowlers missing,Mitch Starc has had to play every Test.
The batting isn’t really there.This team was vulnerable.Yet England just weren’t ready to press their fingers into those tender points.They kicked off in Perth playing jet-lag cricket, eyes wide, still trying to work out what day it was.A properly prepped, balanced and weaponised team might be doing more than simply taking a dead rubber on a wonky pitch.
Instead a talented, biddable, slightly raw group of players has been betrayed at times, by short cuts and poor planning,A backroom energy that was initially inspiring, and whose spirit flickered here again in that chase, hasn’t known how to transform an idea and a set of slogans into a winning machine,Or at least, not yet, anyway,Victory here will stand on its own,But it must also serve as a reprimand, a note of internal frustration about complacency, slackness and how easy it is to miss these opportunities.
England will now have a fair chance of winning in Sydney too, and of chasing this series right to its hypothetical finish line.They turned cricket into darts here.They did the thing, finally, that they always promised to do.But who knows how the southern summer might look now if they’d started running a little earlier.
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England’s MCG triumph is a genuine coup – and a picture of what might have been | Barney Ronay