Stuart Broad answers England’s Bazball-signal at their time of need to crack boring Aussies open
THE OVAL — Bowling is less amenable to the siren call of Bazball since it relies less on attitude and more on precision.
There just isn’t the scope or the licence to scale up. Yet, should England press on to level this series, none will have contributed more than Stuart Broad, who was already Bazball’s leading wicket-taker on 63 before he cracked this game wide open after lunch. And boy did England need wicket No 64.
Australia were grinding rearwards through the decades, taking us back to post-war scoring rates when Broad intervened in that angling, gangling way of his. The crowd were desperate for any kind of reprieve from the crushing tedium, two an over is no way to bring the Friday vibe at English cricket’s party capital.
Usman Khawaja has the adhesive properties of a barnacle. With every fibre of his being Khawaja resists the impulse to put bat on ball. Do that for long enough and the score will take care of itself, which was the founding principle of Test cricket for almost a century and a half.
Khawaja stood on 47 off 157 balls when Broad speared the penultimate ball of the 52nd over into his pads. Khawaja would appeal but it never stood a chance, as Broad’s celebration probably told him. Hawk-Eye rang up three straight reds to give Broad his 150th Ashes wicket. Only Glenn McGrath and Shane Warne have more.
With the fourth ball of his next over, Broad was wheeling away again after drawing the edge of Travis Head’s blade with a beauty that moved away. That was his 20th wicket of the series, the fifth time he has crested that number in Ashes cricket. Only Warne tops that, taking 20 wickets on six occasions.
It felt like 2009 all over again when a long streak of angelic blondness first ripped through the Australian top order at this marvellous cricketing redoubt. The 22-year-old rapier sent back Shane Watson, Michael Clarke, Ricky Ponting, Michael Hussey and Brad Haddin with figures of 5 for 37. We could not know then that Broad’s breakout moment would presage one of the great sporting careers of any Englishman. Fourteen years on, headband billowing proudly, we are left wondering if it might ever end.
Broad’s intervention felt the more significant since it pierced the suffocating minimalism of the Australian approach. The Ashes retained, Australia need only draw this Test to win a series in England for the first time in 22 years. With a washout forecast for Monday, this is effectively a four-day contest.
The lack of Australian ambition at the preceding engagement in Manchester decelerated to a crawl here. Just 54 runs were scored in the first session, taking Australia to 115 for 2 at lunch off 51 overs. Marnus Labuschagne was the worst offender with just nine runs off 82 balls, the slowest Ashes scoring rate since Keith Miller took 67 balls to reach seven in 1956.
And it was Broad who cracked the innings wide open. To think it was only 16 months ago that he and James Anderson were stood down by selectors who thought it wise to send an England team to the West Indies without either. It was time to look for somebody new, they argued. The rationale was shredded during the last days of Joe Root’s captaincy, making re-instatement the first duty of the Brendon McCullum–Ben Stokes relaunch.
As Broad remarked at a street cricket venue in Chelsea before the series started, Bazball has teased a performance hike that surprised even him, and one that he intends to mine as long as the old bones permit.
“I’ve still got a great hunger,” he said. “I love that competitive drive that bowling at a batter gives you. Those sort of feelings are so addictive to me. So if you’ve still got your desire on the competitive side, and everything around playing for England is a 10 out of 10, it gets back to dream-job location.”
This would not be a Broad feature were it not to sample his specialist subject; shithousery. When Broad arbitrarily stepped into Labuschagne’s space and reset the bails, the Australian batsman laughed. How was he to know of the alchemy in play.
The very next ball he was consumed by anger and disbelief after edging Wood to Root. It was the signal for Broad to run in from mid-off, innocent as you like, to congratulate Khawaja at the non-striker’s end.
The replays revealed nothing untoward in Broad’s idiosyncratic fiddling, after all he had not broken any rule. But that ignores Broad’s diabolical energy, which by hook or by crook brought England back into this game.
