Good slogan. Put it on a T-shirt.

There’s an Ascent of Man quality to the cordon on that photo.

Jonny Bairstow is a saggy-butt delusionist.

Yes I think this is right. If you bat on too long in the first innings and in retrospect discover you overdid the runs but need to bring more time into the game, you can always declare earlier in the third innings (and build your batting strategy around the premise that you’re going to do that, so hopefully your batters will be able to score at an appropriate rate). But if you discover you declared too soon in the first, you can’t guarantee recovering those runs in the third. So you need to have a good reason not to bat on in the first.

On the other hand, The King is right to say Stokes had correctly judged the value of snaffling an opener was very high, and in a sense Khawaja’s feats vindicate his decision. I’d add to that the point you make about time in the game. England were clearly trying to accelerate the game more than Australia, and certainly more than Khawaja(!)

For reasons I never understood, cricket captains often claim not to be making decisions based on weather forecasts – notably unlike F1 team managers, another results-driven business where weather plays a big role in the outcome. But with the expectation of lost time to rain, England’s decision to accelerate the game was logical (though I don’t think it was coherent with the relatively cautious batting in the run-up to Root’s century and the quick bash before the declaration) and the analogy to three-day games of yore is valuable. The expected gain in time from declaring wasn’t just the time saved from the two English wickets sacrificed, but from the time taken out of the Australian innings if a wicket or two fell. Indeed it Khawaja had gone in that spell, the Australian innings would have been a lot shorter in terms of time as well as runs. People only seen to be concentrating on the runs, but time was clearly the half of the equation that was occupying England’s minds.

I’m not sure I’m clever enough to deploy real option theory with much insight on the first innings declaration question.. In theory, because the uncertainties are greater in the first innings than in each subsequent innings – the third being the most common declaration innings – the value of the real option to continue batting (ie not declare) would be relatively high. Hence the controversial nature of Stokes’s first innings declaration.

If you look at old first class and test scorecards from the fifties and sixties, declarations at 7, 8 or 9 down were relatively common. Bowlers weren’t expected to deliver many runs and those they delivered came slowly. Uncovered pitches made the variation in batting conditions more extreme than they are now. Still, declaring late on day one to leave the other team with an awkward 20-30 minutes and to give one’s own team two bites of the new cherry was fairly standard practice.

Yes, first class matches were shorter back then (three days), requiring more funk around declaration than most tests. But this 2023 Edgbaston test was a very flat pitch and the expectation was the loss of a day of cricket at least to rain.

That declaration was not some bizarre concoction – it was an innovative decision only because, in recent times, such decisions have become very unusual in those particular circumstances.

Very few people are talking about the counter measures that the Aussies deployed – slowing down the over rate to a penalty-inducing extent. Lyon bowled around 1/3rd of the Aussie overs on Day One but still we lost 6 overs from the day even after taking the full 30 minutes for failing to manage 15-per-hour.

My rating: 8/10 to Stokes for the tactical innovation, but it would have been 10/10 had England taken a wicket on Day Obe and then won the test. 1/10 to the Aussies for the “slow down beyond reason” tactic -it would have been 0/10 had the Aussies lost the match.

We are in the realms of what cleverclogs like Ged might call “real options” and the “value of (im)perfect information”. That possibility of messing up the third innings might lead the risk-averse to prefer taking runs they’re reasonably confident are on offer right now. The other side of this equation is that batting on in the first innings until the tenth wicket falls will eat up game-time – and if weather and the length of the opposition innings go against you then you may regret having let so much time slip. You could end up finding the only way to set the opposition a meaningful target within a time you can realistically bowl them out would require scoring at an uncomfortably high run-rate throughout the third innings. If your priority is ensuring there’s time in the game (especially one you know may be affected by rain) to take all twenty wickets and force a win, then declaring (especially before a prime bowling slot) is arguably the risk-averse option.

Aside from the imponderability of the what-ifs, that we don’t know how the other choices would have turned out and therefore how much e.g. a declaration (but also less visible choices about how quickly batters press the accelerator or how defensive the bowling tactics are) really costs in terms of runs and time, these decisions are also all interlinked, or at least later decisions depend on the outcomes of earlier ones. This complicates any post mortem analysis, and declarations made on day one are more complicated than third-innings declarations. For the latter, the risk-reward ratio of the target you set is more straightforward to evaluate and a lot of the optionality – your ability to reach for the “undo” button – is lost. If you see the opposition racing towards the target and you realise you left them too much time, you can try to slow things down and bowl more defensively, but you no longer have the power to change the runs equation with the bat. Aside from what Yer Maj has sagely said about declarations getting over-analysed because they’re so visible, whereas many other decisions that alter the game to a similar degree are more easily overlooked, I’d suggest first- and second-innings-of-a-match declarations get too much attention because people are so used to more legitimately critiquing third-innings declarations. Analysis of those earlier declarations should be made only with a big dollop of “nobody really knows” – not just what would have resulted if the choice had been made differently, but what chances the declaring team retained to unwind some of the effects of that decision should they regret it later.

Safer ground than arguing “what would have happened if…” is examining the logical coherence of a decision within the context of other choices being made around the same time. You could make a decent case that if England were set on having at least four overs against the Aussie openers that evening, they should have told the batters to start having a proper swipe a bit earlier, instead of only putting the pedal down after Root’s century and just before the declaration. That could well have ended up with the batters all out for a similar total to the one they ended up declaring on, but gained a few more valuable overs before the close. Or they could have ended up not losing a wicket, and either declaring at the same time with a few more runs in the bank or with a similar score and a few more overs to bowl. Or they could have got all out earlier and for a lower score, with the trade-off of getting a few more overs in. The outcome of having a swipe sooner wouldn’t have been guaranteed, and for the sentimentals and statisticians it would have put Root’s chance of completing a century at risk. But it would have been more consistent with the logic of declaring.

Unfortunately most of the declaration criticism I’ve seen has been of the “they could have scored 20-50 more runs, somehow nothing else in the game would have changed at all, and those runs would have made Australia’s fourth innings target ungettable” variety. “If seeing 7 or 8 wickets go down had led them to believe there was no point batting into the second day, and they were now committed to bowling a few overs before the close, they should have backed up that decision by telling the batters to step on the gas a few overs earlier” seems to be a niche position, despite not being reliant on so many what-might-have-been.

The irony being that 124kph nude nuts is essentially the only type of bowling Hayden could actually deal with.

Usually, for a batter, it’s a leave and then they do a bit of ‘gardening’.

Badger Nixon placed on ‘gardening leave’.

Sounds ideal really. Can I have a little bit of gardening leave?

Rehan to Notts, nature is healing etc