Two teams at The Oval ... but only one was playing cricket

England's captain Ben Stokes. Picture: AFP

There were two teams at The Oval yesterday. One of them was playing cricket; the other was ... well, trying very hard to play cricket, but could probably not have put their finger on how or to what end. England tackled the third day of the Fifth Test with plan and purpose. For a team that began in the lead, in the series and on first innings, Australia approached their task with an uneasy fatalism.

Their hard-won innings lead of 12 runs lasted precisely six deliveries, erased by three boundaries in Mitchell Starc’s first over. Australia’s storied attack could, again, then make nothing of Ben Duckett and Zak Crawley – the very particular challenge of countering a short, left-handed, back foot, closed face bat and his towering, right-handed, front foot, full face partner playing the bowling on its merits rather than the bowlers’ reputations.

The attempt to keep to a single off-side sweeper soon went by the board, as Mitchell Starc and Josh Hazlewood struggled to bowl to one side of the wicket. Not until Pat Cummins took up the ball himself were Australia able to exert any control at all, and he executed one virtuoso act, fielding off his follow through and hitting the nonstriker’s stumps direct.

Otherwise, one could hardly miss the comparison, almost the ideological clash, with proceedings a day earlier, when Australian batters had been confined to 41 runs off the bat in 26 pre-lunch overs – testament, it must be said, to some fine bowling combined with helpful overhead conditions versus a pitch now at its best under clear skies.

Australia's Pat Cummins leads his players in at the end of play. Picture: AFP

It hardly does the event justice to report that Stokes came out to bat at number three. As a proclamation of potency, it was received round the Oval like an arrival of Maximus bearing a Bazball aquila (‘Are you not entertained? Is this not why you’re here?’).

In fact, Stokes rather shied away from triumphalism. He batted accordingly – like a proper number three consolidating an early advantage, reading the game and his opponents, sensing that by midafternoon he would have them pretty much where he wanted.

Stokes’s all-round future is in the balance. He will finish this series having bowled only twelve-nine overs, twelve of them off the reel at Lord’s. But it’s arguable he is a more natural number three than Ollie Pope, technically and temperamentally. His combination of bat, body and willpower in defence has a legionnaire’s impassability.

It was his predecessor and pal Joe Root that really took the game from Australia, in an innings studded with Bazball cameos (a ramp here, a reverse lap there) but more like previous models of his batting. First there was a reminder of the breeziness of 2015, where he seemed to be 20 from 10 in every innings before you had time to blink, and went on to be player of the series. Later came the supremely controlled Root of 2021, where every run looked like a down payment on a hundred, of which he made six in a year.

Root is not considered part of the long roll call in this game who may be playing their last Ashes cricket: he is only thirty-two, and easy to imagine batting here in four years time. But he has grounds for motivation. His non-Ashes average is 14 runs greater than his Ashes average, and seems increasingly to regard himself a work in progress: he has hit fifteen sixes in 2023 already versus 28 in eleven years preceding. Here was reassurance, at any rate, that Root has not sacrificed avidity to creativity. It took a ball from Todd Murphy to spin sharply and stay low to puncture his defence.

At length came Jonny Bairstow to do Jonny Bairstow things, for there can be few better equipped to take a game on at four for 222, creating urgency even where none exists, repaying some if not all of the faith England has shown in him this summer before he, Chris Woakes and Moeen Ali perished a little lazily to Starc. That England batted all the way down to their last and oldest pair suggests, in fact, that they might have liked a few more runs on what remains an excellent pitch.

These came as late breaks. Otherwise, the day had a festive, even reminiscent, feel in the crowd. Never mind the Australians of 2005, whose Oval Test was inevitably revisited by Sky during the day; Cummins’ looked like the Australians of 1985, being gorged on by Gooch and Gower on a balmy Kennington afternoon, overlooked by a venerable pavilion and the sadly endangered gasometers.

Cameos: an hour after tea, Cummins briefly had a field for Hazlewood of six men on the fence, no slips, no gully and no point, literally and philosophically. Hazlewood hit Root’s front pad and before realising it had taken an inside edge gave a cry that sounded like an appeal than a cry of pain. Later, he was unable to make ground to Moeen’s top edge at fine leg, which the crowd did not let him forget.

Nothing, mind you, was cheered more lustily than Anderson’s last over sweeps and successful review, completing another jumbo pack of enterprise and entertainment, with nearly 400 in a day’s play leavened by only two maidens. The Australians, in fact, have bowled fewer maidens than taken wickets this series. It is not even close: 34 to 84. Yesterday wasn’t close either.