Key events
Pre-match reading
Barney Ronay has been listening to Ben Stokes, who is beginning to sound like William Goldman. “We all play a good game,” Stokes tells the media, “by looking like we know what we’re doing when we’re looking at the wicket.”
Preamble
Tim de Lisle
Hello everyone and welcome to the final act of this drama. It should have been a cliffhanger, and could well have been if England hadn’t fluffed their lines on the second day in Perth. It should have been an epic, and might have been had the pitches in Perth and Melbourne not come straight from a seamer’s dream. The long and the short of it is that it’s been both long and short at the same time.
It’s been a long tour – four of England’s likely XI today left home on 10 October, for the baffling warm-up that consisted of two white-ball tussles with New Zealand. And yet it’s been a short Ashes series, occupying only 13 days so far. For the players, it may have felt a little like what was famously said about the First World War: months of boredom punctuated by moments of terror. They haven’t shot themselves in the foot, but they will have spent a bit of time kicking themselves.
For the Australians, who may have been mildly irritated to lose in Melbourne, Sydney is a chance to make that game look like a blip, to complete yet another hammering and give Usman Khawaja a handsome send-off. And to show why they deserve to keep their places, as there have been three underperformers in their top seven – Jake Weatherald, Marnus Labuschagne and Cameron Green, who may already have been dislodged by Beau Webster.
For England, it’s a chance to play for pride again, for a sliver of respectability, for some World Championship points, for the record books, for the mood in the camp and their long-suffering captain, not to mention their travelling supporters. In Test cricket, no rubber is ever more than half-dead. A consolation win is still a win, and as England discovered at Melbourne, when Ben Stokes and Joe Root finally tasted Test victory in Australia, it is definitely some consolation.
The best England can do now is to lose 3-2, something they’ve done just once in 140 years of Ashes tours – way back in 1936-37, when Gubby Allen’s team raced into a 2-0 lead, only to find Don Bradman pulling off the greatest comeback in Test history. A 3-2 win by the Aussies has happened only once in England, too: in 1997 Mike Atherton’s team went 1-0 up, then 3-1 down, before winning a dogfight at the Oval.
So there’s no shortage of sub-plots, and the pitch is among them. It’s been looking like another greentop, but the man in charge of it, Adam Lewis, says he’s confident it will go to five days and Cricket Australia, along with the spin-bowling community, will be praying he’s right. The weather hasn’t been on Lewis’s side – too hot and dry before Christmas, too cool and damp since. Today’s forecast is for all of the above at once, with warm sunshine giving way to showers after lunch and a fair chance of a storm in everybody’s tea cup.
All being well, the toss will take place at 10am (11pm GMT), so do drop by five minutes after that to find out if Shoaib Bashir has finally got the nod.
