The Ashes fifth Test day one recap: Buy the ticket, take the Harry Brook ride. Just imagine when he works out Test cricket
How long can a prodigious talent in a leadership position bat with the abandon of Harry Brook? As long as he wants when it works.
The Ashes fifth Test day one recap: Buy the ticket, take the Harry Brook ride. Just imagine when he works out Test cricket
In a previous, thoroughly unproductive batting life, Harry Brook scored just 113 runs from 14 innings in Australia.
The miserable run stemmed from a BBL guest stint with the Hobart Hurricanes and the 2022 T20 World Cup, and afterwards Brook noted that Australia’s significantly bigger boundaries contributed to him regularly holing out in the deep.
Seemingly in complete control on 45 on day one at the SCG on Sunday, with England cruising at 3-154 after lunch, Brook did his utmost to fall in the same fashion.
Mitchell Starc banged in three consecutive short balls to Brook, and he top-edged the least threatening of them. Every man and his dog at a sold-out SCG knew the bouncers were coming. Only good fortune guided Brook’s miscue between the three fielders converging from behind square leg.
Stuart Broad’s reaction in the Channel Seven commentary box said just as much as an incredulous Mark Waugh on Fox, who wasn’t wrong with a head-shaking: “That should’ve been out. He’s got to learn. He’s better than that.”
Brook knows it, too. He’s wrestled with short-ball tactics regularly in his 35-Test career, and “could have played it better at times” on Sunday.
A parallel to the way Waugh himself played was duly made by his co-commentators: stylish and exquisite when those flicks and glances raced to the boundary; lazy and irresponsible when they went to hand.
When Cameron Green took up the short-ball tactics to Brook for the home side, he did so with five fielders on the rope, all of them from forward square leg to a wide third man.
The English vice-captain still hooked a ball some 15 rows back over fine leg, with the shot immediately compared to the Big Bash hitting of David Warner the previous evening.
With the light fading, Brook still looked to ramp a Green bouncer over the slips when he’d moved to 77, threatening to edge through to Alex Carey with an early tea in the offing.
Buy the ticket, take the Harry Brook ride?
Certainly seems that way – for now at least. And you could never accuse it of being boring.
Whether such a mercurial batting approach can endure for someone in a leadership role, is a fair question.
Just a couple of headlines from the English press this tour – “Infuriating Harry Brook needs to work out how to play Test cricket and fast” and – capture the repercussions of when his approach goes wrong quite nicely.
