'The Lions had a chance at a legacy'
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Times
3 minutes ago
- Times
Funky fields and ‘Bazball' batting — 2005 Ashes was trailblazing series
It was a series ahead of its time. 'It definitely felt like in that Test series we were playing a different form of Test cricket to anything that had been played previously, particularly in the aggressiveness of some of the batting,' Andrew Strauss, England's opener in the 2005 Ashes, says. He is right. It was not quite Bazball, which peaked for England at 5.50 runs an over in their Pakistan series in 2022, but England's run rate of 3.87 in that Ashes series is their 12th-fastest ever (the top nine are all in the Bazball era) — a series that they won, remember, against an attack of Glenn McGrath, Shane Warne and Brett Lee, with the fourth bowler (either Mike Kasprowicz or Jason Gillespie) mercilessly targeted, even though they were two very fine operators. This was a series, among many other unforgettable moments of greatness, in which Kevin Pietersen was hitting the great McGrath back over his head on debut in the first Test at Lord's and smashing rather than defending his way to a draw with 158 in the fifth Test at the Oval. England also scored 407 all out (at a run rate of 5.13) on the first day of the second Test at Edgbaston after being put in by Ricky Ponting. Whether or not it remains the greatest series of all time is a matter of opinion, but it certainly had an impact on the game. Take the bowling by right-armers from round the wicket to left-handers. It had been done before, of course, with England's Craig White having had some success against Brian Lara, and there had been some images floating around of Pakistan's Shoaib Akhtar really troubling Adam Gilchrist with that tactic at the end of a spell during the previous winter. But here was Andrew Flintoff neutering Gilchrist, one of Australia's greatest weapons, with that angle of attack. The left-hander, who changed the role of the wicketkeeper-batsman for ever, averaged only 22 in that series, without even as much as a half-century, dismissed four times by Flintoff, all from round the wicket. England's dressing room during the 2001 Ashes had a whiteboard detailing the Australia batsmen's weaknesses and, as a result, plans to dismiss them. Next to Gilchrist's name there was nothing but a question mark. It has been said that the 2005 plan came about by accident when Flintoff had to move to round the wicket because of a dodgy foothole in a one-day international at Lord's earlier that summer. Whatever the genesis, as Simon Jones later revealed in his autobiography, by the time of the first Test, the whiteboard read: 'Go around the wicket and cramp him for room.' It was no surprise that England had come up with a plan of some sort because the head coach, Duncan Fletcher, was a stickler for the importance of angles in both batting and bowling. In exasperation he once asked Marcus Trescothick: 'Did you do geometry in school?' when Strauss's opening partner was unable to fathom the gist of Fletcher's thinking, with the coach playfully slipping a couple of protractors under Trescothick's door while on tour in Sri Lanka. Before the 2005 series Fletcher had warned Strauss about the danger of the angles he was creating when playing Warne's leg spin. Strauss wanted to move across his stumps and play everything to the leg side with the spin, but Fletcher suggested, if the ball was short enough, that Strauss stay leg-side of it and punch it with a straight bat through cover. 'I'd just got a hundred against [Stuart] MacGill [another Australian leg spinner] six months before and I remember thinking, 'I think I'm OK here, mate,' ' Strauss says. But then in the second Test at Edgbaston, Strauss was spectacularly bowled around his legs when trying to pad up to Warne. He changed his mind about Fletcher's advice and turned to the Merlyn spin-bowling machine for hours of practice. 'Warne didn't get me out at Lord's but I did think, 'These angles are tricky for me,' ' he says. 'At Edgbaston it became increasingly obvious that I had to play it differently. Fletch was very counter-intuitive in that sense of looking to score off the back foot through the off side rather than looking to hit everything leg side. That was Fletch's genius. He was the only coach I think who really told me things I'd never really considered in the game of cricket before. 'It was like learning a different language but it certainly did help me. We had that Merlyn bowling machine and I remember facing thousands of balls off that. But it's one thing doing it against the Merlyn machine and another doing it against Shane Warne in the middle of an Ashes Test match.' Playing against the spin, as long as the length is right — either short enough or full enough — has now become an accepted coaching tip at the top of the game, with Rahul Dravid's famous email to Pietersen when the England batsman was struggling so badly against left-arm spin containing just that advice. Mind you, those problems of Pietersen's were mainly brought about by the introduction of the Decision Review System, which was not in place in 2005, and caused players to think about playing finger spin very differently, representing a huge change in the game from that time. 'It didn't affect me quite as much as some others,' Strauss says. 'I was always trying to get my bat in front of my pad anyway. Back in the day people used to squeeze the ball between bat and pad, but you couldn't play like that any more.' The round-the-wicket to left-handers theory was much more of a problem for Strauss, as South Africa's Morne Morkel later exploited it remorselessly. Gilchrist's weakness would undoubtedly have been acted upon more quickly these days. England may now be reining in the size of their analysis team a little but there is still a whole heap of data out there for teams to use. Back then there was very little. 'Obviously we'd worked out that Gilchrist really struggled with that angle,' Strauss says. 'What we didn't have at that stage was the deep statistical analysis to back up our hunches. In the latter stages of my career it became obvious that was an angle that was hard to contend with. In those days we were very much using Fletch's eye, where technical weaknesses might occur. 'Increasingly these days you will find out a player's weakness very quickly in a way that probably took longer back in those days. I was a good example. You come into Test cricket, you have a good run and then after a year or so people start working you out. That time is definitely shortened now. To a certain degree everyone knows everyone anyway because of franchise cricket, but there's fewer places to hide these days.' As Mark Garaway, England's analyst from the following winter onwards, tells me, we now know that Gilchrist was a right-eyed-dominant left-handed batsman, and so the angle from Flintoff round the wicket and reverse-swinging the ball away meant the ball was constantly going into the line of his less preferred left eye. The solution would have been to close off even more in his stance. Nowadays bowling round the wicket to left-handers for right-arm bowlers is almost de rigueur, but as David Warner consistently showed in his horror times against Stuart Broad, it does not mean that batsmen can counter it successfully. That 2005 Ashes was the first time in living memory for most of us that Australia were really rattled by an England team, particularly by the reverse-swing from Flintoff and Jones. Both of them achieved that reverse-swing in both directions, away and into the batsmen, which was quite a new phenomenon after the years of booming in-swingers from the likes of Waqar Younis (there were no wobble-seam balls yet), but they also bowled a good length doing it, rather than just the toe-crushing yorkers of yore. Australia just could not generate that reverse-swing in that series, and so they set about pinching the Australian bowling coach Troy Cooley back after that series. When they played England for the first time thereafter, Cooley said to the Australian players: 'Boys, today, eyes in the middle, no looking elsewhere. Just worry about us.' As Gilchrist later recalled in his autobiography, 'It was like a boxing glove came out and smacked me in the head and said, 'You idiot. That's what you were doing for the best part of three months in England — worrying about what the opponent is going to do.' ' The field placings by the captain, Michael Vaughan, contributed to this too. There are some funky fields these days, but Vaughan startled Australia with some of his arrangements, placing a short extra cover at Edgbaston for Matthew Hayden, who immediately hit one there to Strauss, and constantly playing on Hayden's ego that thrived on the boom of a straight drive by placing a catcher so straight that he was almost on the cut strip. Much was made of Pat Cummins's Bazball-spooked immediate use of sweepers at Edgbaston in the first Test of 2023, but it was the smart use of sweepers and in-out fields by Vaughan that also cornered Gilchrist back then. 'They were agile with their field settings,' he said. 'I certainly always felt traditionally that field settings to me tended to follow a certain path and then evolve through an innings, but it felt like they were setting quite unique fields to me in that 2005 series. There might be one slip and a floater and almost a fly slip or deep backward point, clearly targeting an area, on or just outside the off stump.' We sometimes bemoan the lack of bouncers and physical threat in today's game, and it has become an understandably sensitive subject since the tragic death of Phillip Hughes in 2014, but 2005 was not for the faint-hearted. The first morning at Lord's was a brutal examination for the Australia batsmen. As the opener Justin Langer has said: 'It felt more like an AFL grand final or a State of Origin clash between Queensland and New South Wales. Everything seemed to be racing in fast-forward. Matty Hayden was hit in the helmet, Ricky [Ponting] had his face cut open. It was more like a war than a chapter of the gentleman's game.' There is no doubt that the general standard of fielding has improved dramatically since 2005 and even the catching was uncharacteristically sloppy in that series. Pietersen dropped six catches, with Fletcher working out that he was off balance, on one leg, when the ball was hit, with the help of the substitute fielder Trevor Penney (England had some rather good substitute fielders in that series, as Ponting discovered when run out by Gary Pratt) while they were watching one day. Fletcher shouted when the ball was hit and Penney duly did the observations on Pietersen. Of course, Strauss did take one rather exceptional catch off Gilchrist at Trent Bridge (obviously with Flintoff bowling round the wicket), diving so far to his left that his arm became a telescope, and for that Strauss reveals Fletcher's planning. 'Fletch had us doing a lot of our slip catching with a gap between us really trying to challenge us to catch balls outside our own little bubble,' he says. Strauss is unsure whether the standard of slip catching has improved in Test cricket and statistics in that field are scarce and sketchy, simply because one man's drop is often another man's refusal. As for the changes overall in the Test game, especially in these Bazball times, he makes some good points. He is not anti-Bazball but, like many of us, he did watch Sam Konstas's Test debut for Australia and say: 'That risk/reward doesn't make sense to me.' Indeed, it didn't. 'It's still a five-day game and it's still a risk/reward game,' he says. 'You still have to decide whether the reward for the risk you play is the right one. Sometimes the England team have got that wrong. We've come up against some teams that, man for man, we are not as good as, and we have asked them some serious questions because of the way we play. It has really ruffled people. But because it is such a long-form game you are still going to get to the point where the better team come out on top most of the time. 'To win a Test match you don't have to do anything radically different from what we did in our day, which was roughly to find a way of taking 20 wickets in changing conditions over the course of two innings and you have got to get 600-plus runs on the board. How you do that is an interesting question.' It sure is, but 20 years ago, England, unexpectedly and stunningly, certainly found the correct answer.
BBC News
33 minutes ago
- BBC News
Women's Super League round-up: Easy wins for top four
The top four in the Super League table enjoyed emphatic victories as Wigan Warriors, St Helens, York Valkryies and Leeds Rhinos all nilled their retained top spot with a 72-0 win over Leigh Leopards as the quartet at the top half moved in lockstep two points away from the teams in the bottom half of the biggest points haul of the day went to York Valkyries, who put 86 points unanswered points on a humbled Warrington Wolves side still looking for a first win of their 10-match Rhinos executed a demolition job on Barrow Raiders away, scoring 15 tries in a 78-0 victory, and St Helens beat Huddersfield Giants 48-0 in the early kick-off at the Totally Wicked the day was evidence of a growing divide between the top and bottom halves of the Women's Super League table, it was also a day for those in the leading try-scorers table to fill their Grace Banks came out the winner, with four tries at the Leigh Sports Village taking her to the top of the table on 16 tries, ahead of teammate Eva Hunter whose two took her to 15 for the were hat-tricks elsewhere for Saints' Dani McGifford, Leeds pair Lucy Murray and Ebony Stead - who moved to 15 for the season - and Savannah Andrade, who went over three times for retain a three-point lead over St Helens and York Valkyries in the Super League table with a trip to York's LNER Community Stadium to come next Sunday.
BBC News
33 minutes ago
- BBC News
Saints go third by thrashing Giants
Betfred Super LeagueSt Helens (24) 52Tries: Percival (2), Feldt (2), Sailor (3), Dagnall, Lomax, Knowles, Goals: Feldt 8Huddersfield (4) 4Tries: Greenwood Tristan Sailor delivered a virtuoso performance, scoring three tries and setting up two more, as St Helens dismantled Huddersfield Giants to move into third in the Super League table.A superb individual showing from the 27-year-old Queenslander, who now has 18 tries this season, was the glitter on an eighth Saints win in their past nine it was a victory that served notice that Paul Wellens's improving side will prove a significant barrier in this sort of form for whichever opposition they face in the were on the board early but made best use of a yellow card for Giants centre Taane Milne in the first half, extending a lead from 6-0 to 24-0 while he was on the on top, the home side were ruthless, firing in another four tries before the hour mark to put Giants to the sword and the game to to follow. St Helens: Sailor, Feldt, Robertson, Percival, Dagnall, Lomax, Mbye, Walmsley, Clark, Lees, Batchelor, Whitley, KnowlesInterchanges: Welsby, Bell, Paasi, DelaneyHuddersfield: Flanagan, Halsall, Bibby, Milne, Gagai, Rush, Frawley, Rogers, Woolford, Powell, Greenwood, Rushton, CudjoeInterchanges: Golding, English, King, WilsonSin bin: Milne (18 mins)Referee: Jack Smith.
