.png)
1 hour ago
1
There has been a lot of discussion over the past week about day-night Tests, how to approach them and whether they produce quality cricket. Stuart Broad described them as a lottery but Australia’s outstanding record would suggest that actually the best team normally prevails, and skill should win the day. The question for England is whether they have it in them to dominate in relatively unfamiliar conditions, to win key battles at key moments and to take control.
I remember the day-night Test in Adelaide in 2017, when I was with the England team as batting coach. I personally enjoyed the spectacle and felt it was a good challenge for the players. We lost that match despite going into it having played four first-class games and the first Test in Brisbane, so we had a volume of cricket under our belt. A pink-ball Test was something new, but the players all felt they were up to speed in terms of match cricket. This England side are nowhere near, and that is a concern. You need what I call your match-head on, and that only comes from playing matches. I’m firmly of the view that you can have all the nets sessions you want, but it’s not the same – when you play a loose drive in the nets there is no consequence, a lack of precision goes unpunished. In a match you have to walk off.
Having said that, I still absolutely believe they are capable of coming back and shocking Australia. That confidence is based on the first half of the Perth match, and in the amount of continuity and experience that runs through the side. But for all that experience, this week will bring new challenges.
Steve Smith has been experimenting with “eye blacks” in training, trying to reduce the glare of the floodlights. His record in pink-ball Tests is massively worse than in standard games: in red-ball matches in Australia he averages 65.72 with a century every 4.7 innings, but in day-night games at home his average is 38.10, with one century in 22 innings, and he clearly still feels uncomfortable and is working on ways to counter that. I suppose it’s a good thing for England to know that Australia’s best and most prolific batter has not been able to dominate these matches – he says it’s “just a completely different game” and that he finds it “tricky just picking the ball up at certain times of the day” – but it also demonstrates how much of a challenge they are facing.
Hopefully the players will find that exciting. There are different phases in day-night games, and those who can recognise and play well when conditions change, those who adapt, are the ones who will succeed. They will understand that twilight can be particularly tricky – batting in the heat of the day is a distinct phase, and so is batting under the lights at night. The real trouble is between those two phases, when the light and conditions are constantly shifting. The temperature drops and that can help the ball to zip through, and a pitch that has looked placid suddenly has that bit more pace. We definitely saw that in Adelaide.
Then there is the pink ball itself. As the bowler is running in, generally a batter will get some sort of sighting of the ball in his hand, be able to decipher which side is the shiny side, and get some sort of clue about what the bowler is trying to do and the kind of delivery he is looking to bowl. Alastair Cook has described how much harder it is to glean that information from the pink ball. England’s battle is not just against the Australia team, with Mitchell Starc historically so successful in these matches, but against the combination of unfamiliar light and an unfamiliar ball.
What we learned from their collapse in the second innings in Perth was that England’s batters still struggle to identify the moments in an innings where they should change approach and absorb pressure for a while. I hope they are able to change. Ben Stokes spoke to the media this week and made it very clear that he has reflected in depth on how the first Test went and his part in it, his captaincy and his performance. I found his words hugely encouraging – people feel this group of Bazballers are not in the reflection game, but clearly that is not the case and they should all have done their share.
Stokes also said he likes to keep things simple. Whenever elite sportspeople say that I find it hard to swallow. When a player has a wealth of experience, as Stokes does, things can seem straightforward, simply because they have so much information and can funnel down to what is important in any given moment. But there is nothing simple about some of the situations his team will face this week.
They have already got one big decision right. Bringing in Will Jacks, someone who can bowl a bit of spin, play an aggressive form of batting at No 8 and can field well, is the right call. It gives them another option, a change of pace – and perhaps when Travis Head was carving the fast bowlers around Perth Stadium they could have benefited from slowing things down and making him think a bit. I like the look of Josh Tongue but another pace bowler might not actually have bowled that much or contributed in the field or with the bat.
after newsletter promotion
I just hope that England’s batters have recognised that driving at balls on the up is a massive no-no in Australian conditions. When the ball is full and straight, absolutely hit it back where it’s come from. But there is a line around fourth or fifth stump, whether it’s on the front or back foot, where if you are playing with a slightly angled bat you’re asking for trouble. You have to be prepared to leave more balls in that channel and wait for the straight one, or one that’s a bit wider and you can look to cut or pull. That is the method that brought Michael Vaughan such success in 2002-03 and I hope in particular that Joe Root grasps this opportunity to get in and bat some time.
The first Test ended in just two days and the second is being played in conditions that can mean games change very quickly. Perhaps this will be an occasion for a team that always seems in a hurry to occasionally press pause. Thanks to that early finish in Perth they have certainly had plenty of time to prepare and England should be aware of this game’s unique challenges, so they won’t be caught out, they won’t be shocked; they’ll be prepared and ready to adapt. As, of course, all elite teams should be.
