Australia’s men have just beaten Sri Lanka by an innings and plenty. Australia Women have whitewashed England in the Ashes. Australia A have beaten England Lions by an innings too in the “A” Test in Sydney, but one bright light has emerged: an English answer to Scott Boland.
We may think of Australia as still being the land of moustached fast bowlers breathing fire and slaughter, and of visiting batsmen fending snorters into the slips, but this image is going out of date.
Most of Australia’s Test pitches have changed drastically – from old-time true, heartless and grassless surfaces to green seamers, on which the metronomically accurate Boland is king. In nine Tests in Australia at fast-medium pace, clocking only 130-132 kph or just over 80 mph, Boland has taken 49 wickets at only 12 runs each.
Perth’s Optus Stadium, England’s first Test venue in November, has to start damp and grassy otherwise the clay pitch cracks up. The second Test is in Brisbane, where the pink ball will dart around under lights. Melbourne is Boland’s home ground, where he took six wickets for seven runs on his Test debut against England in 2021-2. Mark Waugh, most stylish of Australian batsmen and now a commentator, said that the ball seamed more during the India Test earlier this year than he had ever seen before at the Sydney Cricket Ground. Boland was player of the match, taking 10 wickets for 76 runs.
Happily, the England Lions tour that culminated in defeat by an innings and 10 runs by Australia A, supplied an answer to Boland: the 27-year-old Essex seamer Sam Cook. Even his figures in the two red-ball games in Brisbane against a Cricket Australia XI and the “A” Test were Boland-esque: 13 wickets at 14 runs each while conceding little more than two runs per over. With his repeatable action, Cook nibbles the ball either way at Boland’s pace and the batsman, deprived of loose balls, is finally forced to take the risk of improvising a shot.
It may sound boring, and it is the type of bowling which McCullum and Ben Stokes have not merely eschewed but publicly poo-pooed since Ollie Robinson was dumped, but fast-medium seam-up of relentless accuracy looks as though it will be the way to go at least half the time in the next Ashes. At least that was the way it went for most of Australia’s Test series against India, from first to last.
Day one at Perth was a seam-fest in which 17 wickets fell. Of Sydney, former Australian captain Michael Clarke told ESPN: “The SCG is my favourite ground in the world, it is my home ground, and I hate saying this out loud, but that’s the worst pitch I’ve ever seen in Sydney… balls not just going up off the surface but shooting low at the end of day two.” The groundsman said he was trying out a new type of grass.
In addition to maximising such seam-bowling conditions, the 80 mph fast-medium bowler has the advantage of breaking down far less often than his more glamorous mates at 90 mph. Cook has been hitting the Chelmsford deck and banging out 40-plus Championship wickets per season for the last four years, having started at Loughborough University; and several rounds of the Championship each summer are played with the Kookaburra ball, its seam prouder when new before flattening out more than the Dukes does. So Cook is forewarned and forearmed.
No less usefully, if he has to bowl against Sam Konstas, the first Australian batsman to espouse Bazball, Cook has developed a fine range of slower balls. The Hundred has not done a lot for England’s Test cricket, hogging the school holidays in August and setting off Stokes’s hamstring injuries, but to keep his place at Trent Rockets Cook has widened his armoury of skills so that he can bowl at any stage of an innings.
Boland, on the other hand, was surprisingly ineffective when Australia toured England for the 2023 Ashes, partly because his natural length was a bit too short for English conditions, but also because he did not have the slower balls for self-protection when England’s batsmen charged him. He went for almost five runs per over, like his fellow seamers, and nothing like the metronome he has been in Australia, taking only two wickets in his two Tests.
The focus of next winter’s Ashes will still, at times, be on how England’s batsmen react to short-of-a-length balls on and outside off stump, perhaps on days two and three in Perth, or in the afternoon sessions at the Gabba, or on the drop-in pitch at Adelaide where the Test will revert to being a daytime game.
Will Joe Root try dabbing and steering fast back-of-a-length balls past the slips and fall short of a Test hundred in Australia for the fourth tour in a row? Some of the time, however, the focus will be the knee-roll of the front pad when Boland, or Cook, makes the ball dart back: after a big appeal for lbw has been turned down, use a review or is the ball going over the stumps? Less spectacular, but pivotal moments.
