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There are often single images that come to sum up entire Ashes series, and frequently they have been taken when no cricket was even being played. Andrew Flintoff consoling Brett Lee; Shane Warne’s balcony dance; the sprinkler; Ian Botham celebrating a miracle win at Headingley, Ben Stokes doing the same; and all the way back to the Oval pitch invasion in 1926.
And maybe this year’s has been taken, with England’s campaign in danger of being summed up by the footage of Jofra Archer arriving at the Gabba on Saturday clutching a pillow. The day Archer imagined and the one Australia subjected England to turned out to be very different.
With the home side six down overnight, the notoriously chilled bowler presumably thought he would help his side swiftly steamroller the lower order and spend the rest of the day being laid back in the most literal sense, while his teammates assembled a match-winning lead.
Four hours after the start he was still fielding – working in the covers, if you like, rather than lying under them – while Australia’s tail made the pitch look like a featherbed, and this was becoming less day-nighter than daytime nightmare.
Archer does not help himself sometimes, but the main issue with the image was not what it said about the 30-year-old pace bowler. It was that it would inevitably be interpreted as emblematic of the attitude of a touring side that is already perceived to have taken a laid-back approach to their pre-series preparations, and to the extended period between the humiliatingly premature conclusion of the first Test and the start of this one.
Their fielding on Friday’s second day here, when five catches went down, was a bit sleepy. All of this means they are not seen as being particularly keen on hard work, certainly not in the way they are keen on their own company, or golf.
Of course they insist that they have an established and proven method for tuning up for away series – Perth was the first time they had lost the opening Test of one since Brendon McCullum’s appointment as coach in 2022 – and that they have trained long and hard in all conditions and for all eventualities. But bringing your own bedding to work rather undermines this message.
Three months ago McCullum described this challenge, one of the most difficult in British sport and the focus of furious planning for years, as the “biggest series of all of our lives”. Now their players are pondering how best to sleep through it.
What followed made it look as if Australia had perceived Archer’s definition of essential kit for a day of Ashes cricket as something of a slight and decided that they – and certainly he – were not going to take it lying down. Archer does not need to invite questions about his work ethic – there have been enough of those over the years, most of them entirely without merit. But having done so, what followed was just a little awkward.
For a start, the day began with Stokes deciding to give him a rest. England were toiling with a ball that was already 73 overs old, leaving them seven to get through before they could get their hands on a fresh one, which the captain intended to deliver to a fully refreshed Archer. So he shared them with Brydon Carse, the most wayward and expensive bowler – in his four overs in this period Stokes conceded eight runs and took a wicket, while Carse leaked 19 in three.
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At which point it was finally time for Archer to get to work, armed with the new pink ball that in the right hands can be such a destructive weapon. He bowled five uneventful overs, and then took the rest of the day off. He was the only English bowler not to take a wicket on day three, while Carse, Gus Atkinson and Will Jacks all bowled at least twice as much.
None of them enjoyed themselves, not on a roasting Brisbane afternoon and with Mitchell Starc and Scott Boland surviving 165 of their finest deliveries while adding a hugely damaging and frustrating 75 for the ninth wicket, a partnership of slow savagery. There were good deliveries, edges that fell short, others that flashed just past the stumps, balls that just cleared them, but it was pure toil. No bowler managed to make the ball sing, though one imagines it might have groaned a few times.
This Australia side was supposed to be fallible, feeble even, ageing and injury-ravaged. But in key moments, as Starc and Boland demonstrated, they simply refuse to yield. England will not want to be remembered as relative featherweights, but the time for them too to stand up is slipping away. Like the fowl whose down potentially packed that pillow, they’re looking increasingly plucked.
English (US) ·