The Ashes Briefing: England's Joe Root and Harry Brook fill their boots before weather closes in
SOURCE:The Athletic|BY:Tim Spiers, James Wallace and more
Australia made early in-roads after losing the toss, but an unbeaten stand of 154 saw England recover impressively before the rain came
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It is safe to assume this Test match will extend into a third day. It may even go the distance.
Bad light and then rain brought a premature end just before tea at the Sydney Cricket Ground with England, initially discomforted after winning the toss and batting, having countered to haul themselves into a position of relative strength.
Joe Root and Harry Brook — the former serenely, the latter with the odd pang of anxiety — will go into day two on 72 and 78 respectively having constructed the tourists’ highest stand of the series, writes Dominic Fifield.
This was a day of relative calm until the storm clouds rolled in:
Root and Brook shared an unbeaten partnership of 154 off only 193 balls before play was called off.
The pair came together with England in trouble at 57-3 and took them to 211-3 after 45 overs, the quickest they have ever reached 200 in Australia.
Neither side selected a front-line spin bowler, the first time that has happened in a Test in Sydney for 137 years.
The crowd of 49,574 was the largest for a Test at the SCG for 50 years.
Here, Tim Spiers and James Wallace dissect the key talking points from day one at the SCG.
Storm clouds gather over the SCG (David Gray/AFP via Getty Images)
My kingdom for a spinner
The last time Australia didn’t play a spinner in a Sydney Test match wasn’t just a few years ago, before Nathan Lyon emerged onto the scene. It wasn’t in some random match against West Indies in the 1970s, either. It was in 1888.
If that date needs any further context: the last time there was no spinner at the SCG, Queen Victoria was on the throne (ruling both England and Australia), the first ever professional football league was still months away from starting and Marmite hadn’t even been invented yet. Nor Vegemite. Be grateful you’re around in 2026, folks.
Leaving out Todd Murphy wasn’t a decision Australia took lightly given the great history of spin in this country.
As you can imagine, the traditionalists in the Australian media ranks took the decision well. “I absolutely cannot believe they haven’t picked a spinner,” former Australia batter and coach Justin Langer said on Channel Seven, adding that the decision was “not great foresight”.
“If they don’t (pick a spinner), I’m taking the selection panel to the Hague,” Kerry O’Keeffe fumed on Fox Sports before Australia’s team was revealed. “I will be bereft. Murphy is a quality bowler — he deserves to play at the SCG.”
Australia’s stand-in captain Steve Smith watches Todd Murphy bowl in the nets in the buildup to the SCG Test (David Gray/AFP via Getty Images)
On ABC Radio, Jason Gillespie suggested it would have been captain Steve Smith who made the call after coach Andrew McDonald had stated he’d “love to pick” Murphy days before the match. Australia had even put Murphy up for media duties three days out, usually a sign that said player is going to play.
For his part, Smith said at the toss he “hated” having to leave out Murphy, who would have appeared in only his eighth Test match, with Lyon sidelined having undergone surgery for a hamstring tear. “But we keep producing wickets that we don’t think are going to spin and seam’s going to play a big part,” Smith said. “You kind of get pushed into a corner.”
He had also stated after Melbourne: “I love seeing spinners play a part in the game, but right now why would you (pick one)?”
Ben Stokes wins the toss and chooses to bat first in Sydney for the final Ashes Test! pic.twitter.com/ynyai5cCUC
All-rounder Beau Webster was selected instead of Murphy and can bowl some part-time spin, but when he came on shortly before lunch it was medium pacers he was offering. And innocuous ones at that.
Lyon’s omission for the pink-ball Test at the Gabba, in Brisbane, was the first time Australia had not picked a front-line spinner in a home Test match at any ground since 2012. This is now the third of the five-match series where they haven’t picked a spinner, while Lyon only bowled two overs in the opening two-day Test in Perth.
The death of spin in Australia? Well, not in the domestic Sheffield Shield, where leg-spinner Mitchell Swepson sits joint fourth in the current wicket-taking list on 21, with off-spinner Corey Rocchiccioli just behind him on 20. In the last Shield match at the SCG in early December, Swepson took 3-37 for Queensland, while leg-spinner Tanveer Sangha took 3-30 for New South Wales.
Ground staff sweep the pitch on day one at the SCG (Robert Cianflone/Getty Images)
Lyon — who averages 39 in Tests at the SCG — also took 4-82 in the first innings of the other Shield match this season here in November. It can be done. And yet Australia just aren’t convinced the pitches are doing enough to warrant a specialist’s inclusion.
As for the wicket produced by SCG curator Adam Lewis, also known as “the most under-pressure groundsman in history” as Ben Stokes referred to him on the eve of the game… well, it certainly favoured the batters at the outset.
Cricket Australia, reeling from millions in lost revenue after two two-day Ashes Tests this Australian summer, will not have minded what Lewis served up — an excellent batting wicket which, yes, did a little early on for the new ball, but on which anything under 400 would be considered below par, particularly with a fast outfield to enjoy, too. Cracks may appear towards the end of the match but, for now, it’s one on which batters can fill their boots.
As it is, it was hard not to suspect that calling a premature end to the first day’s play, despite the sun peeping through the clouds once the rain had passed, reflected the need for this to extend to five days.
Tim Spiers
Yorkshire’s finest prosper
How was it for you? England’s most prosperous batting partnership came on day one at Sydney courtesy of a bullet-proof Root and the by now customary scatterbrained demigenius that is Brook.
When the plug was pulled early on the first day due to some overzealous officiating, Root was unbeaten on 72 off 103 deliveries and Brook 78 off 92. England’s run rate was ticking over at 4.69 for the day. Australia would have been the happier side to get back to the sheds and re-group.
An all too rare a day in the series when England finished on top.
Joe Root guides the ball backward of point (Darrian Traynor/Getty Images)
It could have been very different.
From 35-0 the familiar collapse looked well and truly on with Ben Duckett, Crawley and Bethell falling in quick succession to see England spluttering at 57-3.
Root set pulses alight for the wrong reasons initially, aiming a sonic boom of a wafting drive to his first ball and missing by the width of the Parramatta River. Root was all class thereafter, driving, gliding, cutting and clipping his way seamlessly, a second century of the series looking nailed on until the inclement Sydney weather put paid to that, for day one at least.
Cries of Rooot from the Barmy Army! 👏 Joe Root is going through the gears in Sydney. pic.twitter.com/hP89wAmauU
There were the usual carves over cover and flogs for six. So, too, was the baffling inability to read the situation of the game. Australia appeared spent and short of ideas late in the afternoon and the short-ball policy was sent for. Mitchell Starc looked to be blowing a gasket slamming the ball down into the middle of the unresponsive Sydney pitch with the field set back for a Brook flap.
But the batter seemed incapable of reining himself in to make sure he didn’t give his wicket away and gift Australia an opening back into the match.
One top edge landed between three fielders as they converged on the ball. It did not make for easy viewing, you suspect, for Root at the non-striker’s end, as well as the England fans either in the ground or hiding behind sofa cushions in the dead of night.
Harry Brook rode his luck at times en route to his highest score of the series (Cameron Spencer/Getty Images)
Still, Brook survived despite plenty of scares and the partnership — only the fifth century stand to date — looks set to become the biggest of the series from both sides, usurping the 162 put on by Travis Head and Alex Carey in the second innings at Adelaide.
Looks set? Pah.
James Wallace
The excellence of Alex Carey
You may think of a wicketkeeper as someone who just catches the ball behind the stumps. Think again.
Carey has become mes que un wicketkeeper in this series, as Barcelona would say. More than a wicketkeeper. As well as possibly being the best keeper in the world at the moment, he is Australia’s second-highest run scorer in the Ashes. And he’s a senior leader in the squad.
His exemplary catching is one thing, but the way he has put pressure on the England batters by standing up to Scott Boland and Michael Neser has — while not exactly revolutionising wicketkeeping — set a new high water mark in the modern game.
Alex Carey removes the bails after a smart take down the leg side standing up to Scott Boland (Santanu Banik/MB Media/Getty Images)
He was at it again: up to Neser, up to Boland, putting pressure on Root and Brook and preventing them leaving their crease to disrupt the bowlers’ lengths. He also took an outstanding catch off Starc to get rid of Duckett, diving low in front of Webster at first slip.
When he caught Bethell from one off Boland that seamed and bounced, it was Carey’s 24th catch of the series, putting him just five behind Brad Haddin’s record 29 catches in a five-match series dating back to Australia’s tour of England in 2013. Haddin’s efforts in a losing cause — England won the series 3-0 that summer — broke a record which had stood for 30 years.
Should he surpass Haddin, it would be a fitting way for Carey to mark a flawless series.
“He’s been brilliant with the gloves, with the bat and the way he’s worked with the bowlers has been elite,” Langer said on Channel Seven. “The skill to come up (to the stumps) against fast bowling is rare to see in this day and age. How difficult it must be to track the ball and the seam after the bat — he’s bolted England’s batters to the crease.
“The Duckett one was a ripper and when you see Scott Boland come over the wicket to Bethell he just makes it look so easy coming into those gloves. He’s been outstanding this series and a real leader of this cricket team.”
Carey’s remarkable performance at the Gabba had been hailed by Haddin as the best he’d ever seen, with fellow former Australia keepers Adam Gilchrist and Ian Healy also waxing lyrical about the current incumbent. Stand-in captain Smith said he had never seen a better performance from a wicketkeeper.
This was despite Carey claiming he doesn’t practise keeping up at the stumps to pace. “I train the basics and the fundamentals and then hope for the best,“ Carey said after Brisbane. “I won’t go up to the stumps to someone bowling 130kph in the nets. I just do my drill work and go about my business.
“Once you’re in that game intensity, your instincts take over a fair bit.”
Alex Carey has enjoyed an outstanding series with bat and gloves (Jason McCawley – CA/Cricket Australia via Getty Images)
Carey’s high skill levels are another area where Australia have outshone England.
While it would perhaps be unfair to criticise Jamie Smith’s keeping compared to Carey’s given the Englishman is more of a batting wicketkeeper than vice versa, there is no doubting that someone like Ben Foakes — England’s best keeper in recent years who was eschewed because of his slower scoring rate with the bat — would have made a difference on this tour.
Not least because Smith hasn’t made up for the wicketkeeping shortfall with big runs.
“You compare Alex Carey to Jamie Smith this series — it hasn’t just been the runs scored, but it’s the energy he brings to the team,” added Langer. “He’s provided more to this team, in my view, than Jamie Smith has, with his energy and that all-round excellence.”
Tim Spiers
Where is the Crawley experiment headed now?
The pitch had a green tinge but this was no green monster. Not that England’s openers could cash in after Ben Stokes won the toss for the fourth time in the series and elected to bat. Smith could hardly hide his disappointment after the coin fell England’s way — the face of a man who knew he’d have to wait his turn to tuck in on a belter.
Here was a chance for England’s openers to set their stall out on a Sydney shirt front, to build an opening partnership of note after an underwhelming Ashes. Could Zak Crawley rattle off a match influencing ton on the pitch where his 77 off 100 balls four years ago caught the eyes of the current England management — the knock that set the narrative in train that the lissom-limbed opener had all the attributes to succeed against pace and bounce and sock it to ’em Down Under?
Alas, no. Crawley was out leg before wicket to Neser for 16 off 29 balls.
Zak Crawley departs after falling leg before wicket to Michael Neser (Philip Brown/Getty Images)
Crawley’s entire Test career has been built on the back of that dashing seventy in 2022. Sure, he peeled off a double ton against Pakistan at Southampton in 2020, but it was his 14 fours and the composed ease at Sydney two years later that has seen him given four years-worth of rope despite a batting average that remains resolutely in the low 30s and a propensity to blow cold for prolonged stints of his now 64-Test career.
Crawley hasn’t had a disastrous tour by any stretch. Heading into the fifth Test, he was England’s top scorer and has looked in fine fettle all series despite that first Test pair in Perth. And yet he hasn’t won England a game nor played a defining innings, either.
In many ways, the 77 he scored here four years ago is symbolic of his Test career. It looked good but didn’t really make an impact. He has spent 64 Tests largely flattering to deceive.
Crawley has one more knock left in this Ashes to put that right. Sydney would be a fitting place to set his stall out for the next four-year cycle. It would also be a fitting place for the great experiment to fail for good.
Will it be green shoots or a gravestone? We’ll soon find out.
