Players and commentators talk a lot about playing each ball on its merits, but actually it’s not always that good an idea. Ben Duckett and Zak Crawley gave an illustration why in the 2023 Ashes.

It’s a mad but completely true fact that England haven’t had a settled opening partnership since Andrew Strauss retired in 2012. Let’s quickly run-through who’s had a stab at opening since then (excluding the other half of that partnership, Alastair Cook).

In chronological order (deep breath)…

1. Nick Compton
2. Joe Root
3. Mike Carberry
4. Sam Robson
5. Jonathan Trott
6. Adam Lyth
7. Moeen Ali
8. Jos Buttler
9. Alex Hales
10. Ben Duckett
11. Haseeb Hameed
12. Keaton Jennings
13. Mark Stoneman
14. Rory Burns
15. Jack Leach (twice)
16. Joe Denly
17. Jason Roy
18. Dom Sibley
19. Zak Crawley
20. Ben Stokes
21. Alex Lees

Three of those players averaged over 40: Joe Root, Jack Leach and, so far, Ben Duckett.

No-one else has averaged more than 31.33.

Only five others have averaged over 30: Nick Compton, Sam Robson, Rory Burns, Joe Denly and Zak Crawley.

The bar for being considered a viable England Test opener has dropped a touch.

Cook lite

It has been a bit of a production line – one for some reason calibrated to churn out mediocre products. The sameyness of the records is striking. We’ve seen a lot of batters averaging mid- to late-20s and pretty much all of them boast strike-rates in the region of 35 to 45 runs per 100 balls.

The average innings has been characterised by studious watchfulness before either getting out to a pretty good ball or ‘giving it away’ after running out of restraint.

That’s of course a generalisation – we’re talking about hundreds of innings here – but those strike-rates don’t lie. Whether knowingly or not, a lot of people tried to imitate Alastair Cook and it is a mark of Cook’s freakish psyche that he proved wholly inimitable.

But there have always been other ways of going about things.

Cook and Strauss averaged 40.96 as an opening partnership, but that was actually a sizeable step down from Strauss’s partnership with Marcus Trescothick, which averaged 52.35, and Trescothick’s with Michael Vaughan, which averaged 48.76.

It was good to bat with Marcus Trescothick. Marcus Trescothick hit the ball.

Ben Duckett

Before the Ashes began, an incredible statistic was doing the rounds that Ben Duckett had left only eight of the 605 deliveries he’d faced as a Test match opener. According to Andy Zaltzman. Test openers ordinarily leave about a quarter of the balls they face.

When the series got underway, Duckett continued in a similar vein, playing at the first 100 deliveries he faced before leaving two of the 134 balls he faced when making 98 at Lord’s.

He wasn’t happy about this.

“One of them should have been a wide and the other one was probably over my head, so I was gutted,” he said.

Duckett is comfortable with his approach, in large part because he has been given the green light by his coach and captain.

“If I think back to maybe three years ago, I was thinking that I could never be an opener in Test cricket because of how I play, and then actually last summer I was like, ‘why not?’” he told the Independent. “Why do I have to bat like Sir Alastair Cook or these great openers of the past?”

Why indeed? It’s not like it was working for anyone else. Other than the occasional, not-very-serious flirtation with an alternate approach, England spent literally years frustrated with square pegs for not going through round holes without ever seriously considering the hole’s part in this interaction.

More shots

One very obvious reason why the flirtations referenced in the previous paragraph never came to much is because playing more shots tends to mean playing more bad shots and if there’s one thing you can count on in this day and age, it’s that the bad shots of a losing side will take on colossal significance.

Why did the team lose? Why are they so terrible? Cue a montage of all the bad shots.

We’re as guilty of this as anyone, but in our defence, we don’t do it to be critical. We do it because it’s funny and maybe also as a bit of a coping mechanism.

Ben Stokes and Brendon McCullum have brought about basic everyday competence with the bat because they don’t care about bad shots. We’ve already written a whole thing about this and we don’t want to reproduce great tracts of it here. The jus of it is that they see the bigger picture, which is that a batter who sometimes plays the wrong shot is nowhere near as bad as a batter who’s always worrying about playing the wrong shot.

And do you know what’s also true? Playing more shots probably means playing more good shots too and this brings benefits that extend beyond the mere runs you score.

Proactive batting

Before Cook and Strauss and before even Trescothick and Vaughan there was another England opening partnership that warrants a mention. Between 1990 and 1995, Graham Gooch and Mike Atherton averaged 56.84.

Those who only remember late-era Athers or only know him by reputation won’t really appreciate what he was like in his early-20s before back-knack began to diminish him. This was the best of Atherton – a period in which he averaged 45 and scampered frequent singles with age-defying fitness freak Gooch.

Because that was what their partnership was built on really: not leaves, but singles.

It was far from the helter-skelter scoring-rates we’re seeing right now, but at the start of an innings, when catchers were in position, Gooch and Atherton worked the gaps. They worked the gaps until they were filled, at which point the risk of dismissal reduced.

That is proactive batting.

In 2013, we described Kevin Pietersen as the only upper order England batter prone to trying to set his own field. All the others at that time played according to what they were presented with. A good few people misread this as a call for more six-hitting and reverse sweeping. That wasn’t at all what we meant, so we tried to clarify.

Our gripe was that while playing the ball on its merits is almost universally regarded to be ‘a good thing,’ that kind of passive, reactive batting can leave the player pretty much helpless against the best bowling. If every ball merits either a leave or an honest, respectful defensive stroke, you don’t go anywhere, you stagnate, and eventually you get out.

Graham Thorpe was the player we eventually alighted on as a less emotionally loaded example of a proactive batter. Like Pietersen, or Atherton with Gooch, Thorpe would actively seek out scoring areas and exploit them in a bid to force the fielding captain’s hand. Hard-running was a big part of this (although boundaries are always more persuasive).

Pretty persuasion

England have an almost entirely proactive batting line-up these days. There are plenty of unignorable manifestations of this, but a few subtler ones too, such as the tendency to advance down the pitch to quicker bowlers that Jarrod Kimber has written and done a video about.

The openers start as everyone else means to go on.

The early parts of Zak Crawley’s 189 at Old Trafford brought a good few reminders that he is the most gifted inside-edger in world cricket, but his and Duckett’s inclination to lay bat on ball undeniably has an impact.

Bowlers always feel in with a chance against them, but with their opposite-handedness and a difference of 25cm in height, they’re a bloody nightmare for settling on a line and length. Singles often ensue. Throw in the fact that both of them will definitely – definitely – try and smash every bad ball to the boundary and it can be hard to retain an attacking field for long.

Crucially, there are growing signs that the two of them are content to adapt to these resultant field settings rather than being seduced by their own boundary hitting. This is actually when they start looking good.

After eight fours in the first five overs of their second innings at the Oval, Duckett and Crawley nurdled. It didn’t last that long – only 10 overs or so – but nurdling can be positively murderous when the bad balls are also being put away. With men on the boundary and few catchers, England’s openers were cruising – yet the alternative for Australia felt worse.

This is the point at which you can start playing the ball on its merits – once you’ve earned it.

About this article

These longer features are only possible thanks to our Patreon campaign and the dozens of magnificent people who contribute to it each month. We simply wouldn’t be able to carve out enough time to do these longer articles without that funding. If you like the site and enjoy the features, please at least have a think about contributing for a little while. Piffling amounts are more than welcome and you can cancel any time and we won’t hold it against you.

If you’re new to the site, ignore the paragraph above and just sign up for the email (which is free).

It’s almost time to start looking ahead to the Ashes again, but before we get back to that, let’s first look back on the Ashes. Specifically, let’s look back on ‘looking ahead to the Ashes’ by revisiting our 10 things to watch out for from before the series, so that you can all see how massively wrong we were about absolutely all of them on account of being an idiot.

To recap, the 10 things we advised you to watch out for were…

1. Suggestions that this could be as good as the 2005 Ashes
2. Ollie Robinson’s wicket celebration
3. David Warner being either rubbish or not rubbish at cricket
4. James Anderson’s opening spell
5. James Anderson losing his rag at something
6. Travis Head’s head
7. England’s openers
8. “Doctored pitches”
9. Ben Stokes’ bowling
10. Michael Neser

Of those, we can skip over Michael Neser and (utterly bizarrely) doctored pitches too, because somehow neither featured. We also have very little more to say about suggestions the series could be as good as the 2005 Ashes. In some ways it was better, but mostly it wasn’t for the reasons we outlined previously.

Ollie Robinson’s wicket celebration was witnessed 10 times. Australian batters repeatedly fell victim to his 124kph nude nuts in the first half of the series, but then he had one of his now-traditional Ashes back spasms and England didn’t dare pick him again. The end result was another disappointing series for Robinson in which he averaged the same as Stuart Broad and was the most economical bowler on either side.

Or should we say equal most economical bowler? (Yes, we should.) James Anderson’s opening spells were characterised not so much by mastercraftsmanship and cascading wickets as rucks and rucks of dot balls. He bowled okay, but on this occasion neither batters nor spectators were blown away. Nor did we really get to see Jimmy losing his rag at something. He mostly had the confused, slightly downbeat air of a man who had misplaced his rag a while ago and was no longer sure of its whereabouts.

David Warner being either rubbish or not rubbish at cricket is a harder one to assess. Warner averaged 26.04 in England at the start of the series with zero hundreds to his name. He then averaged 28.50 across the series and still didn’t reach three figures. He was quite resolute at times, which we suppose is not rubbish, but there were definitely rubbish bits too.

England’s openers by contrast certainly were worth watching – so much so that we’re working on a whole separate article about them, so let’s leave this at that for now.

Before we finish with the big one, we first have to acknowledge what happened with Ben Stokes’ bowling. “Anyone who’s seen The Prestige will know that some tricks are performed at a cost,” we wrote at the start of the series. “It feels like every time Ben Stokes bowls an over, another chunk of his cricket career dies.” England’s captain bowled 14 overs in the first Test; picked four right-arm fast-medium seamers to bowl ahead of himself in the second; and gave up all pretence of being an all-rounder by the third.

We’ll tell you what was still going strong at the end of the series though – the ‘tache that is the magnificent central feature of Travis Head’s head. Well, we say ‘still going strong’ but what we actually mean is ‘going strong again’ because our man had a full shave mid-series.

This unexpected development confirmed our suspicion that Head has Homer Simpson facial hair, because within a day he was looking stubbly and dishevelled and within a week he was sporting the full mo’ again. Performance of the series, really. Well played, Travis Head.

> The Travis Head look is complete

Hey you there! Yes, you!

• This is where you can sign up for the King Cricket email
• This is where you can help support the site through Patreon

The 2023 Ashes has sogged and then at the last moment unexpectedly fizzled to its conclusion. With five Tests in 46 days, immediately following on from the World Test Championship final, it’s been a lot to take in. What do you actually remember of it?

The series itself resulted in a 2-2 Ashes retention for Australia. This seems to us no more or less fair an outcome than several alternative scorelines. We’d quibble with a 5-0 to either side, but anything between 3-1 for one side and 3-1 for the other wouldn’t have felt too colossal a miscarriage of justice. England’s dominant moments were obviously far more striking, but that perhaps distracts from the fact Australia had plenty of their own.

What would have been a fair result? What’s fairness got to do with anything? It was 2-2 and that’s that.

The overall feel

We have a strong desire to describe this as “a series of three halves” in a nod to a Kevin Keegan quote which we’ve just discovered is not actually a Kevin Keegan quote at all – it just sounds like one. (There are so many great Keegan quotes but “I’d love to be a mole on the wall in the Liverpool dressing room” never fails to make us smirk.)

Australia were robust and professional in the first half; England were a mad, scary batting typhoon in the middle half; and then the third and final half at first looked like it was kind of dribbling out thanks to what is always referred to as “the Manchester weather” and then subsequently what is for some reason never described as “the London weather“. However, a ball change and a break in the clouds ultimately delivered what was really the first batting collapse of the series right at the finish.

Maybe that final session was a fourth and much smaller half. If it feels like the fractions are out of control at this point, maybe the total is still right. It certainly felt like two misshapen series squeezed into one.

The specifics

Anyway, the five Tests. And again we’ll ask, what do you actually remember?

Off the top of our head, Edgbaston gave us Ben Stokes’ first innings declaration and Pat Cummins’ admirable and feisty effort with the bat in Australia’s run-chase.

Lord‘s had Stokes’ in-defiance-of-reason second innings 155 and we’re honestly not sure what else without going and looking it up. Oh no, wait, we remember – it was the Test of a trillion bouncers. And that long-range stumping thing.

We’ll always remember Headingley for Mark Wood’s perfect arrival in the series and then, even though it was only three weeks ago, we already have only a hazier memory of Harry Brook marshalling England’s chase in the final innings before Wood and Chris Woakes finished the job.

Old Trafford was obviously Zak Crawley flaying Australia’s bowlers here there and everywhere before Jonny Bairstow did much the same, all culminating in a bit of a fizzle-out.

Finally, The Oval was this week and somehow we’ve already forgotten the first innings. Was it Harry Brook again? After that, the match was obviously noteworthy for Stuart Broad’s final shot, his bail-swapping shenanigans and then his last ball in Test cricket deciding the final scoreline – all of which rather drew the spotlight away from Chris Woakes.

It has been a rapid and dizzying series. Gelatinous new memories have been squidged out by even newer ones before they’ve had chance to crystallise. So we ask you yet again: what do you actually remember?

The series is over, but the pace of this series means we’ve still got quite a bit of catching up to do. You can therefore expect a fair bit more Ashes stuff from us in the next week or two. Sign up for the email here and get free tickets for the dissection, you ghoul.

It’s a weird feature of cricket that you can go out in style but then still carry on playing for the whole of the rest of the day and probably a good chunk of the next day as well. Stuart Broad ended his batting career gloriously.

Never mind the artifice of the guard of honour, the key detail was that we got to see the greatest batter the game has ever seen play his finest shot one last time. Not only that, but James Anderson then seized the moment and promptly got himself out so that it also proved to be the final ball he faced in Test cricket.

On this occasion the Stuart Broad hook shot went for six, but it would have been just as appropriate if he’d been caught out after utterly skying it. Therein lies the brilliance of what has been the ultimate six-or-out shot and also the purest distillation of Broad’s particular brand of nonsense-brilliance.

Night-night, Nighthawk.

• Get the King Cricket email
• Have a think about supporting the site via Patreon (and maybe even do so)

It’s quite possible you didn’t. He only scored nine of them in 82 balls after all.

You have options in Test cricket. You can choose how you go about things. We would argue that England’s hare approach to batting at the minute is actually a lot more interesting for being pitted against Australia’s tortoise method. Contrast is important. Even the three founders of Freebass made sure they used different parts of the fretboard.

If both teams take the helter skelter shotmaking route, the game becomes hare v hare, best hare wins. That to us is less of a thing than an inter-species race which allows you to compare methodology as well as ability. Who cares which hare’s faster. Show us some different animals!

So it was that Australia – whether deliberately or because of some sort of inactivity virus sweeping through the camp – set about putting overs into the English bowlers’ legs.

Earlier this series, Mark Butcher made a comment about how many wickets Stuart Broad had “in his legs”. Up until this point we had no idea a bowler’s legs also contained wickets. We had always understood them to be purely receptacles for overs. Given the absence of Moeen Ali and the age and records of the various members of England’s attack, Australia’s method made sense. There simply can’t be much room for many more overs in those English seamers’ legs.

So it was that Marnus Labuschagne batted like a delivery sponge, passively absorbing ball after ball, looking for all the world like a man who didn’t know where he was or why.

If anything, it brought to mind one of those late era freediving MS Dhoni innings where he’d take a one-day innings ever deeper but never actually feel moved to make an attempt to surface again.

There was the time he stalked England and never actually pounced. There was the time he stood around and watched his batting partners beat Australia without ever quite feeling moved to step in and help. And there was the time he forgot to blink when the required run rate got away from him against New Zealand in the World Cup.

Marnus blinked when Stuart Broad swapped his bails round, edging the next delivery to where Joe Root’s hand would somehow eventually be.

Further reading: Is Stuart Broad the most annoying cricketer there’s ever been?

• Follow us on Twitter
• Get the email
• Support the site via Patreon

It’s late July and that of course means the end of the Test summer. With no more England men’s fixtures scheduled until the tour of India from the end of January 2024, you should probably try and make the most of the Oval Test. The nights are drawing in, as Prince Prefab messaged to tell us at exactly one minute past midnight on June 22.

Like all the most enjoyable things in life, it’s good to really hurry through a Test series and just get it over with. This one began less than six weeks ago, which is why we’ll again ask just how much of Pat Cummins will truly be appearing in this Test. Pat reckons he’s fine, but while he was physically present for the last match, he often looked like a hollow-eyed golem, dutifully trying to perform its cricket-ball-stopping obligations with clumsy clay arms.

Ben Stokes must be smouldering towards ash too. It’s been a heated month for a captain who previously burnt out while trying to fulfil his various cricketeting responsibilities, resulting in a spell out of the game. His influence with the ball is waning in particular. Short of bowling for the first Test at Lord’s, he was overbowled by the second and hasn’t turned his arm over since. As forecast in our list of 10 things to watch out for during this Ashes, Stokes is only really an all-rounder by reputation these days, not in any practical sense.

So giddy up for one last push, lads – and don’t be surprised if late-comers like Chris Woakes and Mitch Marsh have a big say in how the match pans out. The likes of Marnus Labuschagne, Jonny Bairstow and Zak Crawley – who are not coincidentally all batters – seem to have paced themselves pretty well too.

Let’s now have a word with Rick Dangerous to see what we might expect from the Oval surface these next few days.

Rick Dangerous says…

In my experience, you learn something important every time you revisit a given place. First time you go there, obviously you get crushed by a boulder. Waaaargh. Second time you go, you avoid the boulder but accidentally drop down onto some spikes that you didn’t know were there. Waaaargh. Third time you go, you avoid the boulder and the spikes and get killed in some other mystifying way. But this is how we learn: through being crushed by boulders and impaled on spikes.

Fortunately, a great many Test matches have been played at the Oval, so we already have a good bank of knowledge and a decent idea what to expect. Weirdly, the ground features zero boulders and zero hidden spikes.

Even more weirdly, both England and Australia won their most recent Test matches there. England skittered to a three-day win over South Africa last September after the first two days were abandoned. (Day one was a wash-out. Day two was a loss-of-monarch thing – although it would have been another wash-out even without that). Australia then beat India there in the World Test Championship final a month or so ago.

It’s hard to know what to conclude from those two results. Neither England nor South Africa reached 200 in the first game – although the home team definitely would have got there if 130-1 hadn’t been enough for victory in their second innings. (Zak Crawley made 69 not out off 57 balls.) In contrast, the World Test Championship final saw Australia make 469 batting first with totals tailing off a bit after that.

All 31 wickets fell to seam in the England game, while nine out of 38 fell to spin in the Australia game.

The three Tests prior to that also all involved England, India and Australia – because honestly, why play anyone else?

In all three of these matches, the highest total came in the winning team’s second innings. It’s perhaps also worth highlighting that in the last Ashes Test here, half of the second innings wickets fell to spin.

A greater unknown is of course the weather. At the time of writing, it looks like we might get the odd interruption, but as long as both teams keep their eyes peeled for concealed flamethrowers and stuff like that, we should get pretty much a full game. Waaaargh.

• Get the King Cricket email (it’s just the articles, but we email them to you, so it’s easier)
• Support the site via Patreon (you don’t get anything in particular, but it does help improve the site for everyone, so it’s a nice altruistic thing to do)

It was only one innings, but two Zak Crawleys batted at Old Trafford last week. The first was what we call in these parts “a jousey bastard” who cemented his reputation as the most gifted inside-edger in world cricket. The second was an almighty destroyer of worlds who flickered into existence and displaced the other guy completely from about 70 runs onwards, laying waste to the Australia “attack” in frighteningly untroubled fashion. That second chunk of innings was really quite something and it was followed by a similar assault from Jonny Bairstow – but given the match ended in a draw, do these innings actually matter?

Before we get to that, it’s worth pointing out that Australia didn’t retain the Ashes by being very much on the receiving end of a bruising, rain-affected draw. This was just the particular match when England ran out of time to catch up with them.

Because really both teams did a hell of a lot to mitigate the impact of bad weather in the fourth Test. England winkled Australia out for an underwhelming score in the first innings and then batted with almost unprecedented haste. Australia, however, were even further ahead, having very cannily won the first two Tests of the series. (Smart move, Australia.)

The 2-1 scoreline of course means that the Ashes are ‘retained’ even if the series can still be drawn. Given that England gave the Australia bowlers the kind of runaround they’ve rarely if ever had to endure before in this Test, all of that action begs a question: What’s important here? The Ashes, the scoreline or the memories?

The Ashes, the scoreline or the memories?

It’s the first one really, but the other elements do have the potential to massively enhance or massive diminish what winning (or retaining) the Ashes actually means.

In short, it’s not just about winning. It’s how you win and who you beat.

As just a quick example, compare and contrast the 2005 Ashes with the 2009 Ashes.

The former was a 2-1 England win over an incredible collection of all-time greats who’d contributed to Australia winning eight series in a row. The latter was a 2-1 England win in which Ben Hilfenhaus was the top wicket-taker.

That’s a little reductive because the 2009 series certainly had its moments (why not have a listen to the Ridiculous Ashes and revisit some of them). We do feel it reflects a fundamental truth though: Not all Ashes series are equal. Not all 2-1 victories are equal. The things that make them unequal are important too.

So while the 2023 Ashes are no longer up for grabs, we’d argue that the far more significant prize of ‘bragging rights’ remains unclaimed.

As such, Zak Crawley’s 189 off 182 balls and Jonny Bairstow’s 99 not out off 81 balls do matter because they are eminently bragworthy. We can’t remember Australia ever looking quite so fast-medium in the field as they did for much of this match.

2-1, 3-1 or 2-2?

But yeah, the Ashes cannot be won. That is kind of important. And England will feel frustrated as it has felt like Australia have been slowly cracking, only to hold out just long enough thanks to the British weather.

Whatever the eventual scoreline in this series, both teams have also been pitted against the schedule. Pat Cummins’ battery in particular looks like it’s being sustained by emergency five-minute charges during every break in play. This is hardly surprising. He’s just led his team through five Tests in six and a half weeks and bowled his oversized heart out in each and every one.

For their part, England knew none of their quick bowlers could make it through the whole series so they’ve chopped and changed and didn’t even get round to letting Mark Wood loose until they were already 2-0 down.

In short, the Test season has been condensed into one long, brutal, attritional ultramarathon. Some will gripe at The Hundred’s clear August window at this point, but this is basically the way they schedule Test series nowadays anyway.

It adds an interesting endurance dynamic to proceedings, but we do feel for the players shouldering the greatest physical and psychological burdens. The final Test starts on Thursday. Imagine the state of some of these guys if they hadn’t missed a day and a bit thanks to rain.

• Follow us on X or whatever the frig it’s called now
• Get the King Cricket email
• Support the site via Patreon even though all our content is free whether you do or not

Send your match reports to king@kingcricket.co.uk. We’re only really interested in your own experience, so if it’s a professional match, on no account mention the cricket itself. (But if it’s an amateur match, feel free to go into excruciating detail.)

Our eternal lack of enthusiasm for doing absolutely anything before a stipulated time or date meant there were only about nine tickets left for the Old Trafford Ashes Test by the time we got round to ordering. This meant that we ended up near the top of the temporary stand.

Old Trafford has had a recurring temporary stand for many years. It is currently on the south side of the ground, square on to the wicket, but it used to materialise one step anti-clockwise where there is now a permanent two-tier stand. The two-tier stand also used to be one step anti-clockwise, on the east side of the ground, square on to the action before the pitch was rotated 90 degrees. (Or at least we think it was. It can be surprisingly hard to maintain your bearings at Old Trafford given all the moving of stands and pitches.)

In recent years, the temporary stand seems to have grown larger and more terrifying, as you can see in this photo by friend of the site, Adam Collins.

Before we got to the temporary stand, we of course first had to park. We aimed for the nearby school which always offers match day parking.

Upon arrival, we realised that the school doesn’t in fact always offer match day parking, because sometimes – such as on a Wednesday – it is a school.

We therefore instead manoevred our way to Kings Road on the other side of the tram tracks to park near Morrissey’s old house. There is quite a lot of permit-only parking in this area, so Special Correspondent Mum knocked on someone’s door to double-check we were okay to leave our car outside their house. The man who answered not only said it was fine, he then rather unexpectedly offered to drive us the short distance to the ground. We felt this was a kindness too far and politely declined.

Arriving at the ground and ascending to our designated spots for the day, it was hard not to notice that the distance between amenities and seats was large and the journey steep. This is something you’ll want to factor into your match-watching behaviour. There are no quick toilet trips from the top of the temporary stand. Rush down to the bar at a break in play and you’ll inevitably end up at the back of the queue. The name of the game is consolidation. Never acquire more liquids to go in without first taking care of the liquids that need to go out during the same sortie.

We’re not sure the lads in front abided by this simple rule. One in particular adopted our “repeat until funny” mantra, deploying the phrase, “It doesn’t get any easier,” each and every time he returned.

On the plus side, the top of the temporary stand is quite a good vantage point from which to monitor queue lengths.

More distractingly, it is also a good vantage point from which to identify hills you know or houses you’ve lived in.

“I think that’s Croker Hill. And then that one’s Shutlingsloe – “The Matterhorn of Cheshire.” And then, oh what was that? Is he out?”

A certain amount of cricket was also missed while standing in the incredibly long queue at the sole cask ale tent where many an admiring glance or comment was again drawn by The Device.

The sole cask ale tent was so insanely popular, it was no surprise to see a sign in place warning would-be customers that it was going to inexplicably close for the day at the tea break.

We felt double lucky that we got to spend £6.60 a pint there because while walking towards it we were PHYSICALLY MANHANDLED ASIDE BY GLENN MCGRATH AND NARROWLY AVOIDED DEATH.

“Sorry mate,” the beanpole seamer hissed in our ear as he BRUTALLY PALMED US ASIDE by applying modest pressure to our upper arm while clearly late for a commentary stint. Fortunately, we remained upright and promptly went and spent a small fortune on beer while we still could.

Coincidentally, at that very same moment at the opposite side of the ground, Special Correspondent Tim was saying hello to a passing Moeen Ali and getting a nod in return. These twin encounters highlight the innate decency of England players versus the innate awfulness of the Australians.

As inevitably as empty pint pots follow full ones, the afternoon session brought the first beer snakes. Recent player comments about “northern crowds” has made us wonder whether all of our readers know the ins and outs of beer snake culture – such as the fact that these slithering sticky beasts have at least two songs devoted to them.

There is of course the classic, percussive chant: “Feed. The. Snake… Feed. The. Snake…”

But there is also the more melodic: “Feeeed the snake. Feeeed the snake. Feeeed the snake and he will grow,” which we rather like. (The beer snake’s preferred pronoun is ‘he’. We would be interested to know whether beer snakes at women’s matches are ‘she’. Perhaps someone could look into this for us.)

It was from around this point onwards that we were struck by another advantage of being very high up in the temporary stand. The higher you are, the fewer empties there are behind you to be flung over or into your head.

Get the King Cricket email (details here) or support the site via our Patreon (details here).

England and Australia have arrived in Manchester for the last northern Ashes Test until 2031. The tourists lead 2-1, but fatigue is starting to tell for both teams. What can we expect in the week ahead?

Pat Cummins has bowled 140 overs in the last six weeks, and may conceivably have sat this match out had his team taken the Headingley Test and therefore the series.

37-year-old Stuart Broad, meanwhile, has bowled 149 overs since the start of June. Other than those two, the only other seam bowler to have played in all three Ashes Tests is Ollie Robinson. He sat out the Ireland Test, but he’s got through 102 overs since then. It looks like his back may not allow him to add to that tally.

But it’s not just the quick bowlers who are suffering. Ben Stokes’ body is basically being held together by an ever-expanding exoskeleton of orthopaedic braces and bandages, while questions remain about Jonny Bairstow’s mobility behind the stumps.

“Questions remain” is the diplomatic way of putting it. Bairstow has looked like a man coming back from breaking his leg in three places and also dislocating his ankle. He’s actually moving quite well considering exactly that happened less than a year ago, but it’s fair to say he hasn’t looked the keeper he was. Maybe he’ll have loosened up a bit after a week off.

The batters from both sides are basically fine because they’re only batters and therefore don’t really do anything.

So onto conditions. We thought the smart thing to do would be to ask Private First Class William Hudson of the United States Colonial Marine Corps for his take on how the Old Trafford pitch might play this week.

Private Hudson says…

Hey, maybe you haven’t been keeping up on current events, but Australia just got their asses kicked. That doesn’t make England a squad of ultimate badasses though. They’re still 2-1 down. It’s a must-win game for them, so what can we expect from the Old Trafford pitch?

We’re entering North-West England’s rainy season now, but Old Trafford pitches do tend to be hard and fast at this time of year after being sun-scorched throughout May and June. This year was hot as hell – and it was a dry heat too.

The thinking has therefore always been that Old Trafford is the UK pitch that most favours faster bowlers and spinners. Does that hold up though in recent times? Let’s take a look at the last few Test matches played here.

Last year England famously beat South Africa by an innings after losing the first match of that series at Lord’s.

In South Africa’s first innings, all 10 wickets were either edges or LBWs and nine were taken by fast-medium bowlers. The good length ball was king and England also lost three wickets to such deliveries before the end of day one.

However, after the first hour of day two, the game changed. Bens Stokes and Foakes put on 173 off 324 balls. The question after that was whether England’s first innings bowling method would work again. It did. South Africa were bowled out for 179, all 10 wickets falling to fast-medium bowlers, nine of them to length balls.

It’s perhaps also worth highlighting that despite the low score, South Africa did reach the second new ball in this innings. They then lost their last five wickets to it in barely five overs. That shiny new nut isn’t to be wasted, people.

Going further back, it’s a bit harder to draw firm conclusions from 2020 as three Tests were played at the ground in not much more than three weeks. The stats say that Stuart Broad (22 wickets at 12.09) and Chris Woakes (15 wickets at 15.80) were the most successful bowlers and Ben Stokes also chipped in with five at 14.00. It’s therefore something of a surprise to see that James Anderson only took three at 47.66 – albeit he only played two of the matches.

So on the face of it, it’s a similar story. Jofra Archer’s five wickets at 36.40 seems a fairly nondescript return for a faster bowler, while Dom Bess’s five wickets at 48.00 is significantly worse. But then the touring spinners did actually fare pretty well. Roston Chase took eight wickets at 33.62 for the West Indies across two Tests, while Yasir Shah took eight wickets at 20.62 for Pakistan in their one Test.

The match before that was the fourth Test in the 2019 Ashes, which Australia won by 185 runs. Pat Cummins, Mitchell Starc and Josh Hazlewood were their seamers. Nathan Lyon contributed just two wickets, both in the second innings: Joe Denly for a dentury and then Archer.

Again, the wickets taken by both teams were overwhelmingly bowleds, LBWs or catches by the keeper and in the cordon. One noteworthy exception was Steve Smith who was caught at backward point from a reverse sweep for 211.

All in all, I’d have to say that close catching is likely to be vital this week. You simply do not want to be shelling any nicks. If chances start going down, that’s it, man… Game over, man. Game over.

Don’t suppose you’d like to help support the site for a month (or two) would you? You can chip in via our Patreon campaign. The minimum’s a quid for a month, but we wouldn’t become uncontrollably enraged if you chose to contribute more or the same amount for longer.

The lead image up top is by Mark Stuckey via Unsplash.

First published in 2016 and now republished without changing a word – although we did update the lead image and add a link at the bottom.

If you have a problem, if no-one else can help, and if you can find him, maybe you can ask Moeen Ali to do the job.

He’ll probably say yes.

“Hey Moeen, fancy being an international spin bowler?”

“Yeah, all right.”

“Hey Moeen, great bowling. And great batting in the middle order as well – really dynamic. Do you maybe fancy opening in one-dayers?”

“Yeah, all right.”

“Cracking stuff. Really cracking stuff. Thing is – and I feel a bit awkward saying this because you’ve done really well; don’t for one minute think this reflects on you – but do you maybe fancy batting at eight? Don’t take it as a demotion. It’s more that the other guys can’t seem to bat at eight. Yeah, I know how that sounds, but it does seem to be the case. And you’ve been so adaptable – really just coped with whatever we’ve asked you to do, so…?”

“Yeah, all right.”

“Great stuff with the batting at eight, Mo. Great stuff. Now this is a bit of an odd one – we know you’ve never opened in a first-class match before – but do you maybe fancy opening in Tests?”

“Yeah, all right.”

“Fantastic. Absolutely fantastic. And, er, how about going back to seven and eight for a bit afterwards and then maybe we can ink you in at five for the winter.”

“Yeah, all right.”

“Okay, so obviously we did want to keep you at five for a while, but the thing is there’s been a few injuries and things, so in this match could you maybe bat at four in the first innings and three in the second?”

“Yeah, all right.”

“Great. I mean really great. We don’t want to mess you about or anything. You’ve really coped admirably with everything we’ve asked you to do and we know it’s not fair to keep messing you about. Ultimately, we want to allow you to get settled in one position. Role definition is very important in this England team. One thing though, er – how are you with spreadsheets? I think I’ve mucked up one of the formulas in this one and I can’t work out what I’ve done. You couldn’t take a quick look, could you? There’s also a problem with the central heating at Loughborough if you could check that out at some point? Also we need someone to make a few hotel bookings.”

“Yeah, all right.”

“Great stuff, Mo. We really value your ability to uncomplainingly turn your hand to literally bloody anything.”

> Moeen Ali: a magnificent malleable peg who filled countless holes in the England Test team