The Ashes Diary (6 page)

He came into the dressing room shrugging his shoulders, and you couldn’t wipe the smile off his face. I can remember my First Test match, and in that situation you’re stoked that you’ve made
one
run in Test cricket. So he was definitely seeing it as 98 runs scored, not two runs missed out on.

Riding the wave of those 163 runs from Ash and Hughesy, we took plenty of energy into the field. Dharmasena and I had a chuckle about my pre-match comment that Ash was a batsman worth watching.

Taking two early wickets was great. Mitchell Starc swung the ball beautifully and Patto put it in the right areas. Starcy was a bit lucky to get Root caught down the leg side, and there was some dispute over whether Trott hit the ball before or after it went into his pads, but we accepted both, thank you! With a first-innings lead of 65 and two wickets down, we were full of confidence.

Cook and Pietersen were obviously big wickets now – the biggest. We realised that with the sun out and the wicket so dry, there wasn’t a lot of assistance, so we tried from there to bowl very patiently and build up pressure. Ash got them both into a spot of bother, when Pietersen edged one that hit Brad Haddin on the leg, and Cook had another tangled up in his glove and hip. Pietersen chipped Ash in the air to mid-wicket, as we’d hoped, and I gnashed my teeth when it flew just clear of the fielder. So close!

In the field, the boys kept themselves amused by laying ‘chewy bombs’ for each other. A chewy bomb is when you leave some used chewing gum on the grass, and it ‘goes off’ when someone else walks up unsuspecting and steps in it. When it happens, everyone gets a big laugh, especially the bloke who has set the bomb. Anything that gets you through a long hot day, I suppose.

When stumps were drawn, we all came together and congratulated each other on a good day. Our spirit is strong. In about 50 overs, England got to the end of the day having scored only 78 runs, which I thought reflected a great effort by our bowlers. England is effectively 2/15. To me, the match feels even.

Tomorrow’s a crucial day, not just in this Test match, but in the whole series. If we bowl England out tomorrow, we give ourselves a great opportunity to win this Test. That will surprise a few people and put us in a good position. It’ll be hard to take another eight wickets on a flat track against class players. But if we keep bowling as we did today, we’ll get the rewards for our hard work.

Friday 12 July.
Nottingham.

This was the key day, a controversial day without doubt, and at the end of it I feel that we’ve shared the honours.

The light was smokier than yesterday, and it was a few degrees warmer. All day it felt like the crowd was getting sun-baked, and was quite sedate compared to what I’m used to in England. To us, having been in the subcontinent recently, it was almost like we were playing an Indian Test match. This was the test of how well we’d learnt our lessons from that series.

Chris Rogers took the field with a black armband, after the death of a friend.

Part of the plan against Cook and Pietersen was to dry them up. Cook is known for his patience, and Pietersen not so much, but we felt we could get the breakthrough if we frustrated both of them. We thought we could tie them down until the ball started reversing, and then attack a bit more. With Pietersen, it was a matter of taking the ball away from him, and with Cook it was to frustrate him until he came to us, reaching for balls he didn’t normally want to hit.

As it turned out, they spent most of the morning trapped up each end. Sidds bowled around the wicket to Cook, and Starcy around the wicket to Pietersen. Cook was becalmed, but Pietersen took the bait. He hit four fours in the first half-hour, but we didn’t mind him playing his shots and taking a risk or two.

I rotated the bowlers fairly quickly. Patto came on and beat Pietersen first up. Sidds thought Pietersen was vulnerable to the yorker, and speared in quite a few with great accuracy. We felt that we did frustrate them, and ultimately Pietersen went a bit too hard at a short one from Patto, and chopped it on.

Ashton Agar was bowling very well to Cook, using the rough outside the off stump, and I had the pleasure of helping Ash take his first wicket in Test cricket. What a wicket to get – Cook, closing the face, getting a leading edge and popping the catch to slip. If one day someone asks if I can remember where I was when Ashton Agar took his First Test wicket, I can say, ‘Yes, I was at slip taking the catch!’

With Bell and Bairstow in, our bowlers were starting to get the ball to reverse. Both Jimmy Pattinson and Shane Watson extracted some big movement in the air and were unlucky not to take a bunch of wickets. We lost referrals in the Decision Review System when I made a couple of errors. Patto appealed for LBW against Bairstow and our referral was turned down. Then Watto got the umpire’s finger when he hit Bell in front, but England’s referral overturned the decision. Both times, the ball had been veering off down the leg side, according to Hawk-Eye.

As far as our process is concerned, it’s pretty straightforward. I talk to the people who have the best view, who are generally the wicketkeeper and first slip. If needed, we then go to the bowler, who’s more emotionally involved and obviously thinks every ball that hits the pad is out. Within the few seconds we’re allowed, we make a judgment call. Today we got two of those wrong, and lost our referrals. I take responsibility for making the final calls, but the replays showed that while we made mistakes, they were very, very close.

We got Bairstow and Prior, and took the second new ball. I thought that even though the old one was reversing, a new one might charge up the bowlers and give them some conventional swing. I’m not sure if it was the right decision, because the ball also began to come off the bat a lot harder.

We were holding up well through a hot day. The ball was beginning to shoot, Patto unsettled Broad with some short ones, Agar very nearly had Broad caught in close by Cowan and out in the deep by Hughes, and we were very confident we could have them out by stumps.

Then, on 6/297, the temperature in the game went up.

Ashton had bowled with great control all day, and was now a constant threat to Broad, who was verging on losing his patience nearly every ball. He went back to one, and cut at it. He got a big outside edge, which deflected off Brad Haddin’s thigh and ballooned to me at slip. We were excited, of course, but it wasn’t an appeal, it was just a celebration. A regulation wicket.

The surprise, as we gathered around Ash, was that Broad hadn’t left. When we looked to the umpire, to our absolute astonishment Aleem Dar was saying not out. We looked back at Broad.

We kept appealing to Aleem, but he was saying nothing. I was that close to having the top of my head blow off, it was everything I could do to walk to first slip for the next over and take a few deep breaths. It’s a crucial moment in Test cricket when these things happen, and a captain’s job is to keep control of himself and of his team. We were at absolute boiling point. But the game wasn’t going to stop, and we weren’t allowed to refer the decision. The next ball had to be bowled.

I didn’t hold it against Broad. It was ironic that his father, Chris, was the match referee who had recently banned the West Indian wicketkeeper Denesh Ramdin for cheating by claiming a catch he’d dropped. But I’ve played cricket for long enough to have seen this many times before, and it’s not the batsman’s job to walk – it’s the umpire’s job to give him out. That’s what frustrated us: that it was a bad decision by the guy whose job it was. But to their credit, our boys held in their frustration. I said, ‘Come on, let’s get on with it,’ but that’s pretty much all I had to say.

Inevitably there’s something you can laugh about in these moments, and the funny side of this was that I’d just stuffed about two full packets of chewing gum into my mouth, and while I was appealing, my cheek was bulging like a chipmunk with a mouthful of acorns. Mum always said, ‘Don’t speak with your mouth full!’ and here I was being beamed around the world, with a gob full of chewing gum.

Anyway, there was nothing to laugh about at the time. I wish we could have stayed ‘in the moment’ and been able to forget the matter instantly. Peter Siddle bowled to Bell, and he defended it. I took my gum out of my mouth and threw it away. The game doesn’t stop just because something’s gone against you.

Next ball, Bell drove at a ball that tailed away, and got a nick. It flew very low between Hadds and me. Hadds dived to his right, but the ball went below his glove. Being such an outstanding keeper, Hadds would have expected to take it. Sidds was filthy – at the situation, not at Hadds – and it was one of those moments when a piece of freakish cricket could have changed the mood back our way again. I don’t blame Hadds for one moment, as he kept going with great polish throughout a long hot day, and he had enough recriminations against himself. It was barely even a chance, that’s how low and fast it went. It’s always a good lesson, but it happens so often: the game doesn’t stop.

This was one of those critical moments when the senior players have to show leadership. Jimmy Pattinson had a good appeal against Bell turned down, and umpire Kumar Dharmasena had to have a word to calm things down. But I felt that the boys showed remarkable restraint in the circumstances. Hadds and I decided to run fast between overs, like it was the first over of the day and we were full of spring, to gee the team up. We just had to show that we weren’t going to lose our bottle. At the end of play, I personally went around to each of the bowlers and congratulated them. Whatever had happened in the last hour was something that involved the umpire and the batsman. Our part in the day was to have bowled and fielded with great patience and discipline, and I was proud of the boys.

The bowlers are very stiff and sore now. We’ve bowled something like 140 overs and tried everything we could think of to take wickets. The boys worked their backsides off, but didn’t have a lot of luck.

Reverse swing and Swann’s spin are going to be big factors in the second innings, but I think if we can restrict England’s lead to somewhere between 290 and 315, we’ll have a target we can chase down.

Saturday 13 July.
Nottingham.

What a day – again! Another hot day, both in the weather and under our collars. Keeping cool is the constant challenge, both physically and metaphorically.

We were desperate to clean up England’s last four wickets, both to limit the number of runs we would be chasing and to get the best of batting conditions on a pitch that is showing signs of wear, but still playing well enough.

The bowlers were exceedingly tired after how hard they’d worked yesterday, so the start was a bit ropy. The coaches and I talked about bowling with discipline, and they started a bit loosely. Then, a couple of overs in, Shane Watson and I moved away from each other in slips, each expecting the other to go for the ball, when Stuart Broad nicked one off James Pattinson. We’ve done so much slips catching practice that this was disappointing, but sometimes the ball flies into that exact centre point between you, so you each want to leave it for the other. Anyway, it was no excuse. I thought it was Watto’s catch, and Watto thought it was my catch, and we were both feeling apologetic.

Fortunately, we didn’t have to pay too dearly. Our pacemen finished off the England innings before lunch, and we were left with 311 to win – pretty much within the band I was looking for when we arrived at the ground today. We’re good enough to get these runs, and the pitch, while difficult, is not a nightmare by any means.

As we became used to in India on these dry, abrasive pitches, scoring is easiest against the new ball. It was essential for Watto and Chris Rogers to build a firm foundation and put a high price on their wickets. After a play and miss at James Anderson’s first ball, Watto played extremely well. I think it surprised some people that he went about his job patiently and methodically, when they might have expected him to go out and have a blast. It was a mature start. We expected no less from Chris, who was rock-steady again, providing a great example. They both got a few fours away early, but when things tightened up, they had the maturity to fight their way through the tough patches. Anderson tried to cramp Chris from around the wicket, but he was good enough to get through that period and won a small victory when Anderson was taken off, quite expensive, without a breakthrough.

Swann was brought on to bowl in the first over after lunch. As expected, he was going to wheel away from one end while Cook rotated his pace bowlers at the other. Or at least Anderson and Broad – Finn seems to have fallen out of favour for the moment.

Shane and Chris kept going, and in the dressing room we had a quiet feeling that we could do this. Swann was getting some turn, but it was slow off the deck and it wasn’t jumping. The odd one was keeping low, but the dangerous ball that can pop up and off the glove or the shoulder of the bat wasn’t in evidence. The slowness of the wicket meant that when Swann did drop short, he was quite hittable, and Chris and Shane both cashed in with some good pulls and cuts, and Shane put him away with one big sweep shot from outside off stump. Otherwise, the boys were watchful and looked to play straight.

As the afternoon session wore on, the ball wasn’t swinging and the English fielding started to get a bit sloppy. This was what we wanted: for them to start questioning whether they were going to get a wicket. Shifts in pressure are subtle, but all-important. Of course you feel pressure as a batting team chasing a big total – 311 will be a record on this ground – but also, the longer a partnership goes on, the more that pressure shifts across towards the bowlers and fielders and their captain.

It was going perfectly until the drinks break in the middle of the day. Shane and Chris had been together for 24 overs. First ball after drinks, Broad got a bit of inswing and Shane played slightly down the wrong line. Aleem Dar gave him out – which proved he had a finger, after all! – but Watto had taken a big stride forward and felt that the ball had swung enough to be missing leg stump, so he made the decision to ask for a review. That was okay, as he and Chris were going so well together, and I would back Shane in that situation. In the end, it was super-close. According to Hawk-Eye, it was just nicking leg stump, which meant the umpire’s call would stand. That meant a double loss for us: losing Shane, and losing a review.