You can start with pure numbers. Once in Test history has a team made a bigger score at a faster rate. In a world of obscure stats that one offers clarity. In Manchester on Friday, England made 592 runs at 5.49 an over. The team to better this mark was England again, pretty much the same team, eight months earlier, with 657 runs at 6.50 against Pakistan. That time it had been a calculated plan to create a chance to win on the flattest track imaginable in Rawalpindi. This time was about using an opportunity that gradually took form as Australia disappeared.
It will be crowned as the pinnacle achievement of the Bazball era. Ashes on the line, ascendancy required, ruthlessly taken. It’s an interesting quirk then that most of the third day was not truly Bazball style. The third chapter did have Jonny Bairstow looting sixes and fours while farming the strike. That is also the kind of declaration batting you see after one team has ground the other down, like Rishabh Pant and Ravindra Jadeja slaying boundaries around the SCG in 2019, the last time that Pat Cummins, Mitchell Starc and Josh Hazlewood each went for more than 100 runs in an innings.
The first chapter had a burst from Ben Stokes and Harry Brook before Australia went to defence, putting sweepers back and declining the new ball so it had less pace off the bat. Then it was more like the middle of a one-day match, runs coming steadily at five an over with singles and twos. Australia would have reasoned that they were at least taking time out of the game while keeping down the scoring.
In the middle, across a span of 17 overs either side of lunch, Australia took five for 89 – fast scoring but something that approximated Test cricket. It coincided with pitching the ball up. Stokes was bowled, Chris Woakes edged an outswinger, Mark Wood lost his off-stump, Stuart Broad skied a full one. Only Brook was out to a short ball. Hazlewood had five for 111, an analysis reflecting a good day had the other bowlers combined for something similar.
But once Bairstow started hitting with Jimmy Anderson for company, it was back to the short ball with nine fielders on the fence, then the same to Anderson with fielders around the bat. Anderson survived the few he had to face, contributing five runs to a stand of 66, the English lead pushing towards 300 in a final stanza of Australian haplessness.
It was evident everywhere. Steve Smith and Marnus Labuschagne squirming on their stomachs under the practice-wicket covers to dig out the ball. Bowlers trying to deliver on two plans and succeeding at neither. Fielders flocking in and out with the change of strike, waving to the captain for orders that changed by the minute as Cummins endured his toughest test and two of his worst days in the job.
Long before captaincy, he played in Johannesburg in 2018, the match after the sandpaper exposé. While South Africa slowly and clinically took Australia apart, Cummins was the point of resistance, avoiding the follow-on by making 50 and taking nine wickets in the match. So far in Manchester he has missed run outs, missed catches, returned one run with the bat, and one for 129 with the ball, his shoulders visibly slumping after Bairstow sent him into the crowd.
The same went for the same previously unflappable Carey, not only fumbling what would have been a run out of Stokes in the second over of the day that might have changed the rhythm of things to come, but unable to hit the stumps with three separate underarm throws while Bairstow kept playing chicken with him to regain strike by running byes. To top it off, after an innings in which the edge past leg stump was one of England’s most lucrative shots at the cost of one wicket, David Warner jammed one straight on to his stumps with Australia trying to bat through the day in hope of weekend rain.
On a wall within Old Trafford is an aerial photograph of the Waca. “Presented to Lancashire County Cricket Club in appreciation of our Twin Member Relationship,” reads the copperplate. This has felt like the kind of Ashes Test that happens in Perth: dominated by the least credentialled players, scoreboard clacking towards 600, luck taunting the visitors, despair washing in like the Fremantle doctor as a home crowd delights in their misery. One thing that Perth offers, of course, is days four and five in sunshine. In Manchester, a couple of stolen hours despite the forecast may suffice.
