The attitude of England’s top order batters appears to be that if you aren’t Pat Cummins, you’re going to the fence. It’ll be interesting to see the impact of this as the series wears on.

Australia’s most accurate bowler, Scott Boland, conceded 147 runs in 26 overs in the first Ashes Test. He was dropped for Mitchell Starc for the second. Starc finished day two with 1-75 off 12 overs.

Starc wasn’t the only one to go for a few though. Josh Hazlewood had at this point conceded 5.73 an over and Cameron Green 6.14.

Cummins and Nathan Lyon were both far more economical. Whether that was purely a product of their bowling, we’re not sure. Whatever the reason, the upshot was Australia’s captain had two ‘safe’ bowlers at his disposal and one of them was himself.

We have always had a deep-seated aversion to ‘doing stuff’. This extends beyond the actual doing of stuff to the mere idea of having to do stuff. Pat Cummins situation right now seems like an absolute nightmare to us.

It surely can’t be great when the only reprieve from on-field captaincy stress involves doing a load of fast bowling. It’s not like Cummins hasn’t been called upon to do crucial batting this summer as well.

Late on day two, things got worse. Playing in his 100th consecutive Test match, Lyon knacked a leg while fielding and was carried off (alas not single-handedly by Jonny Bairstow – you have to be a protestor to be treated to that).

So now Cummins may feel he only really has one escape route should he find England’s run-rate unnerving – himself. This is less than ideal in this match even before you factor in the fact that the third Test starts four days after this one is due to finish.

We have no idea whether this is a deliberate ploy from England or if it’s something that will continue throughout the series. Even if it does, there os one thing in Cummins’ favour: even when England make 500 they don’t actually tend to bat very long.

All the same, we feel kind of tired even thinking about it.

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It just ratchets up, doesn’t it? The climax of a tight Test match ratchets up the tension and anguish to the same point a normal sport can take you… and then it just gleefully and sadistically carries on ratcheting from there. It keeps on ratcheting for maybe another hour of ever-escalating torment, beyond what you thought was possible; beyond what a person should be asked to take in the name of entertainment. And then, one way or another, that tension breaks.

If you’ve been following your team for years and the Test in question for hours and days, you’ll have pretty strong feelings about which way you want that tension to break. It went the wrong way for England fans this time around – although it could have been worse. The 2005 Edgbaston finish actually had too much riding on it. We don’t want to be in a situation where a match like that goes against us. This one was bad enough.

We’ll take it though. This was a good and just-about-manageable level of stomach-churning impotent desperation.

Long form drama

There’s a reason why it’s more dramatic when someone’s trying to kill Stringer Bell or Adriana La Cerva compared to an attempt on the life of Unnamed Security Guard or Henchman Number 6. Whatever you feel about major characters in a story you’re following, you get to know them and that’s important.

It’s the same with a Test match. A lot’s happened. You’ve put a lot into this.

You’ve watched the highlights. You’ve followed the score. You’ve delighted in Harry Brook’s breathtaking dobble and you’ve tried to explain Ben Stokes’ declaration to pretty much everyone you know.

But it’s not just the hours of play. You’ve looked forward to this series for a while and you’ve poured more time in overnight too (such an important and underappreciated part of the Test match experience).

Where’s Mitchell Starc? Where’s Ben Foakes? Is David Warner going to be crap again? Are England going to end up looking a bit fast-medium at some point?

There’s also all that time you’ve already invested watching these players down the years. You’ve taken in a lot in that time. It’s all in there. You’ve seen these people change and grow. Jimmy Anderson has lost a quarter of a yard of pace since you saw him open the bowling for Lancashire in 2002, for example.

That’s why when you see Stuart Broad high-stepping in to a hat-trick ball crescendo even when it’s not actually a hat trick ball, it’s not just Stuart Broad. It’s 8-15 Stuart Broad, Courier Mail under his arm, the greatest batter in the world.

When David Warner leaves one outside off stump, it’s not just David Warner. It’s David “Sandpaper” Warner, Ashes brutaliser and Ashes brutalisee.

When Moeen Ali daubs another stripe of pus on the pitch from his raw spinning finger, it’s not just Moeen Ali. It’s Polyfilla Moeen, the magnificently malleable peg who filled every hole in the England team for all those years, back one last time for just some of the glory he’s still owed.

When Usman Khawaja finally – finally – gets out, it’s not just Usman Khawaja. It’s Usman Khawaja, born in Pakistan, qualified commercial pilot, seemingly dropped for good but given one last Test thanks to someone getting Covid, at which point he started uncontrollably vomiting endless hundreds.

When Jonny Bairstow misses a stumping off Moeen, it’s not just Jonny Bairstow. It’s England’s greatest one day batter, the man who launched England’s recent renaissance and a man who, if you know what he suffered as a child, you can’t help but wish experiences nothing but happiness for the rest of his life.

With such rich characters and plenty of plot twists and turns, it’s only natural that we should find ourselves emotionally involved in this chapter. We don’t just follow the climax, we feel it.

So finally, after four and a bit days of play, it’s down to this: Pat Cummins and Nathan Lyon and their damn edgeless bats, sashaying around slotting runs into the endless empty green spaces of Edgbaston.

The cricket itself is unremarkable. The cricket is also absolutely excruciating.

Pat Cummins, early injuries, unshakeable decency and endearing sledging. Nathan Lyon, the poor guy who dropped the ball at Headingley in 2019. Is that right? Maybe for you it’s Nathan Lyon, the absolute prick who dropped the ball after that other run-out a year earlier.

It doesn’t really matter which. That only influences what you feel, not how much.

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Fast bowlers aren’t often captains. They’re more likely to get injured. They’re more likely to be tired and bad-tempered in the field. There’s always the temptation to over- or under-bowl themselves. But these things aren’t insurmountable.

Whenever a Test captaincy vacancy opens up, the discussion begins. Who are the options? Top players are required for so much international cricket these days that usually there’s no obvious standout candidate with extensive first-class captaincy experience.

So the TV pundits go through the team’s inked-in senior pros and weigh up all of their credentials. And whenever they come to a fast bowler, they pretty much just say that they don’t have a case because they’re a fast bowler.

Most of these pundits are former captains and most former captains are batters because these same discussions have already happened many times before.

James Anderson knows the rules as well as anyone.

“I think more bowlers should be captain,” he told the Sydney Morning Herald. “There’s lots of arguments why it would suit to have a bowler as captain, but it’s just not the done thing is it? Captains like to look good at first slip and look like they’re making all the field-position changes and doing all the good stuff. But I’m all for it.”

A few examples

Do you know the best way to become captain if you’re a fast bowler? Trick people into thinking that you’re a batter. A decent proportion of Test bowling captains have been all-rounders.

Imran Khan is an obvious example. Imran really ramped up the batting while he was in charge, hitting five of his six Test hundreds and averaging 52.34. He also averaged 20.26 with the ball during this time, so it’s hard to argue he was weighed down by the responsibility. (Imagine if Pakistan had stuck to the ‘your captain has to be a batter’ script and never put him in charge. That is a super-weird parallel universe to try and wrap your head around.)

India had Kapil Dev as captain; South Africa had Shaun Pollock; West Indies had Daren Sammy and now have Jason Holder. England have given Ian Botham, Tony Greig and Andrew Flintoff a go.

When Ben Stokes led England in a Test in 2020, we tried to work out which England all-rounder has the worst record as captain. We concluded it was Flintoff on the basis that he basically ruined his own playing career by bowling himself for 68 overs in one Test.

We’d argue that this is one of the legitimate challenges of being a bowling captain: those times when it’s all on the line and you need a breakthrough and you want to lead from the front… and then you don’t immediately get that breakthrough and the desperately-needing-a-breakthrough situation remains unchanged. A good 25 off Flintoff’s 51 second innings overs in that match were ‘just one more over’.

There have been a few non-all-rounder Test captains too.

Bob Willis captained England. Courtney Walsh led the West Indies once they were convinced of his absolute indestructibility. Pakistan got confused by the Imran thing and gave both Wasim Akram and Waqar Younis the job in the mistaken belief that you’re supposed to have your best fast bowler as captain (although Wasim did hit three hundreds, including a double, so maybe that helped (reverse) swing it for him.)

Going into the 2021/22 Ashes, Australia decided that Pat Cummins would be their captain.

Tactician or strategist?

We have always been very bad at identifying captains. We remember thinking that Michael Vaughan’s relaxed approach would undo all of the progress England had made under Nasser Hussain’s ferocious micro-management – but turned out he was a great choice for that side.

Then we were pretty sure that Kevin Pietersen would be a better option than Andrew Strauss after that. Wrong again.

It’s worth explaining why we thought that though.

One of the best and worst cricket nicknames of all time was when Kevin Pietersen was called Dumb Slog Millionaire after getting a big IPL contract. It was brilliant because it was timely, a great play on words and it played into all the sneering and snobbishness about the shortest format and the IPL in particular. It was also terrible because it totally mischaracterised KP’s batting.

Pietersen was not a dumb batter. He was a smart, calculating batter – a proactive batter. Rather than simply ‘playing each ball on its merits,’ he approached each phase of play as a problem for which he would have to come up with a solution. His batting wasn’t necessarily about minimising risk for each and every delivery; it was about manipulating the broader situation in the hope of minimising risk for himself in the longer-term. Fielders were threats. Gaps in the field were to be exploited – often innovatively. The ‘slogs’ stick in the mind because they often seemed so rash given the immediate circumstances.

All of this amounts to tactics. This is what people tend to mean when they say someone has, “a great cricket brain.” They mean that person can evaluate batting danger and either combat or exploit that, depending on whether they’re batting themselves or in the field. Pietersen has a good cricket brain. What we saw with his England captaincy were failures in strategy and man management.

These, we’d argue, are far more important aspects of captaincy and they’re elements that can quite comfortably be undertaken by a fast bowler.

On the field

Upon taking the Australia job, Cummins said that he and his vice captain Steve Smith were going to take a collaborative approach and that on-field tactics would be one area where he’d be looking to cede control a lot of the time.

“There’s going to be times where I’m out in the middle, it’s a hot day, I’m in the middle of a spell and I need to turn to people for advice, for tactics, for experience and that’s the main reason – one of the big reasons – why I wanted Steve to be vice-captain,” he said.

“How that looks? I think it potentially could look differently to [how] you’ve seen partnerships work in the past. I think that will remain pretty fluid.

“A 22-degree day might look differently to a 40-degree day. There will be times on the field where I’ll throw to Steve and you’ll see Steve move fielders around – maybe doing bowling changes, taking a bit more of an elevated vice-captaincy role – and that’s what I really want.”

A lot of people think that setting the field is the main element of captaincy, but a lot of bowlers set their own fields anyway. Why shouldn’t a captain delegate to an even greater extent and intervene only when he thinks it necessary?

Off the field

Virat Kohli is a so-so tactician, but he has developed India’s Test team significantly since taking over from MS Dhoni.

Dhoni was a good captain too, but his approach was clearly geared towards the formats where you can win without taking wickets. In contrast, Kohli wants his Test teams to go after the opposition. If he is blessed with the bowling tools to do this, he has also consistently fielded stronger bowling attacks at the expense of the team’s batting in pursuit of his goal. This demonstrates a commitment to that way of playing in a way that merely saying ‘we want to be aggressive’ does not.

The constituent parts of Kohli’s Test sides may change – often quite considerably – but his philosophy doesn’t and he has managed to imbue this into his teams. His is a culture of fitness, self-improvement, refusal to take a backwards step and inexplicable bubbling anger at all times.

He has pushed for a will to win to supersede a fear of failure and he has done so successfully enough that the team now operates perfectly well even in his absence.

And he is absent quite a lot.

Because this is the current cricket world, isn’t it? People say that a fast bowler can’t be captain because it’s so much more likely they’ll get injured and miss games – but who doesn’t miss games in this day and age? Between injuries, paternity leave and sitting out entire tours in a bid to postpone burnout, the average all-format batter will miss plenty of matches. Someone who plays for their country in all three formats is not a ‘safe’ pick if you want your captain on the field all the time.

If you’re captain of England, India or Australia, in particular, being captain is simply too big a job for you to do on your own. If you’re not playing, you’re planning or travelling. And if you’re not planning or travelling, you’re being briefed for media appearances in which you’ll be asked a bunch of tricky questions about some political hot potato or other that’s not really anything to do with hitting a ball with a cricket bat. Or maybe it’s a photo shoot today. Or maybe – who knows – maybe you’ve got a chance to go into the nets and practise.

Something has to give. Plenty of things have to give, in fact. The only question is what those things should be. Maybe bowling changes and field settings are some of the easiest things to hand over to someone else. Maybe actually playing in the matches has become an optional aspect of Test captaincy.

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If you’ve ever seen The Perfect Storm, you’ll know that quite a lot of things go wrong in it.

The Perfect Storm is a film about fishing, starring George Clooney, Mark Wahlberg and quite a few other people you know.

At one point Wahlberg is bitten by a shark. A bit later John C Reilly is hooked and dragged into the sea. And then the bad weather arrives.

The bad weather in The Perfect Storm is, as you’d imagine, quite a few steps beyond ‘persistent drizzle’.

Clooney and his men have a jolly good stab at coping with it, but the odds are very much against them and pretty much everything anyone tries to do for the greater good looks like suicide.

Clooney has to climb a 20ft clanking gantry that flaps up and down, throwing him about; helicopters try and refuel in mid-air – the whole thing is absolutely bloody horrifying.

If the weather in The Perfect Storm provides a lesson, it’s that sometimes a whole bunch of stuff goes against you to create a situation that is quite simply a bit too much for you and there’s really not that much you can do about it.

All out for 36

All out for 36 is not a good innings. We can probably agree on that. It is, however, a one-dimensional collapse.

What India can take from being bowled out for 36 is that while they clearly didn’t do much right, they also didn’t do an enormous amount wrong – because they simply didn’t have time.

The really, truly godawful low scores are almost always sufficiently freakish that they cannot be wholly damning in isolation. They’re not to be ignored, but they tend to speak only of narrow failings.

The England team of the 1990s? Now that was a side that could collapse. That was a side of three-dimensional collapsibility that proved its worth against all opponents in all conditions.

1990s England could get bowled out for a double digit score, but 1990s England could also put on 200 for the first wicket and get bowled out for 200.

1990s England could spend a whole day collapsing while failing to score runs or they could get bowled out in a session while scoring at five an over.

1990s England could do it all.

What have 2020 India done?

2020 India have done very little. 2020 India have lost wickets to the two most accurate bowlers in the world with the new ball on a challenging pitch.

That’s it. They didn’t really have time to show us anything else. They didn’t even get the chance to play too badly because every time they made a mistake, the batsman was dismissed. Wavell Hinds was once dropped twice on his way to a duck. Now that’s playing badly.

India’s was never going to be a good innings, but sometimes things really don’t pan out for you and a bad innings ends up worse.

Had a couple of chances not gone straight to hand or had the ball beaten the bat instead of finding the edge, maybe they’d have managed a relatively normal score without the batsmen playing any better.

Because maybe then someone or other would have got to face a bowler who wasn’t Pat Cummins or Josh Hazlewood. Maybe they’d at least have got to face a slightly more tired Pat Cummins or Josh Hazlewood. Maybe they’d have got to face a slightly more tired Pat Cummins or Josh Hazlewood with an older ball. All these things make a difference.

It’s pretty obvious that the India side who were bowled out for 36 were never likely to make 400. But look at it this way: they only really had time to do one thing wrong.

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As the pre-Ashes war of words hits a dizzying peak of meaninglessness, it’s worth reflecting on something said long after a previous series had finished.

Reflecting on the team’s modus operandi during The Mitchell Johnson Ashes, Peter Siddle said: “The key stat for us is maidens. The more maidens you bowl, the more pressure builds, and obviously the more back-to-back maidens you can bowl – that plays a massive part. Then they’re looking for that quick single or pushing at one they normally wouldn’t because they want to get off strike.”

As we observed in the linked article, some aspects of a team’s ‘brand of cricket’ will always command more attention, even if other aspects may be equally important.

Same again this time around. Australia are apparently fielding a ‘fearsome’ pace attack that may well blow England away but may also find itself blowing in the red-faced, hands-on-knees, rasping lungs, leaden legs sense.

Mitchell Starc and Pat Cummins are ‘strike bowlers,’ which sounds really scary until you remember that it basically just means that they get tired quite quickly. This isn’t always such a problem, but when you only field four bowlers, it certainly can be – and even if some of England’s specialists leave something to be desired, they do still have a long batting line-up.

Will Starc and Cummins still be ‘taking the pitch out of the equation’ in the evening session or will they be bowling at the same pace as England’s fourth seamer by then?

It’s evident that Australia will be looking to Josh Hazlewood and Nathan Lyon to bowl plenty of overs. When it comes to shouldering workload, this is Plan A and they have no Plan B unless Steve Smith’s going to bring his flapping chicken dance bowling action out of semi-retirement. (Here’s hoping.)

England will be aware of this and they will know that their batsmen have three very obvious options.

1. Preserve wickets and force Starc and Cummins to come back for more and more spells
2. Hit Nathan Lyon out of the attack and force Starc and Cummins to come back for more and more spells
3. Get out and lose the Test match

Presumably they’ll be looking to go for one of the first two. We’ve no idea which is the better option, but the decision might shape the first Test.