Stuart Broad, the Pom we love to hate - and hate to love

Stuart Broad celebrates dismissing Todd Murphy during Day Three of the third Test match. Picture: Getty Images.

Ben Stokes is mighty. Mark Wood is fast. Joe Root and Harry Brook are quality. But Australians can’t look away from the Englishman who, day-in, day-out, is doing most to rake over the 2023 Ashes: that familiar antagonist, Stuart Broad.

Broad has just turned 37 – too old, surely, for the affectation of the headband which makes him look like a cosplay samurai. But, y’know, that’s Broad all over. At 198cm, he cannot help but stand out, so goes with it. He throws out provocations – the celebrappeals, the crowd conducting, the voiding of those Ashes series he prefers for forget.

And, gallingly for Australians, he backs them up. Nobody has delivered more overs (117.4) or taken more wickets (16 at 24.9) in these three Tests. He’s bowled beautifully, batted bravely, and been as big a nuisance as ever.

That it was Broad who succeeded Bairstow in the wake of the latter’s stumping at Lord’s, for example, could hardly have been more exquisite. Here’s the guy who stood still as a statue when he smashed a caught behind at Trent Bridge ten years ago handing out etiquette lessons [-] the audacity of that is just … magnificent.

I hardly agree with him that it was “the worst thing I’ve ever seen in cricket” – for me, that was probably Narendra Modi and Anthony Albanese at Modi Stadium earlier this year. But how I enjoyed his response: the theatricality of him lipping Alex Carey, and checking the crease every over was just so …. Broad.

Stuart Broad bowls during Day Three of the 3rd Test Match. Picture: Getty Images.

Stuart Broad in the field. Picture: AFP.

Then, when it was done, the perfectly drawn line and succinct tweet: “A great Ashes battle. Loved being out there with @benstokes38 in that mood. Some controversial moments that will split opinions, that’s sport. Lord’s as loud & animated as I’ve ever heard it. On to Leeds we go!”

Too right, and that’s Broad also. He goes all-in; he comes straight out. Which, dare I say it, is very Australian: he is an uncompromising competitor unclouded by animosities. We Australians have loved to hate him; for a while now, I suspect we’ve hated to love him, just a little. He’s the guy that Aussies most want to get the better of; he’s the guy Aussies would probably most enjoy a beer with, not least for owning his own pub.

Australians can take a modest share of him also. His cricket heroes growing up were the Aussies of the Warne-McGrath-Ponting era: “They were so successful. They were winners.” And it was an Australian summer in 2004-5 for Hoppers Crossing CC in the Victorian Turf Cricket Association that Broad, then eighteen, has Broad has said was the making of him.

“I went over as a young kid,” Broad has recalled. “Public school cricket, all nicey-nicey, flat wickets, knock it around … and then I stepped out there, and it was like being in a fight.”

Broad lived with the groundsman, worked as a brickie and a gardener during the week, played tough cricket at the weekend, and discovered he liked it; he developed what you can only call a Broad streak of Australian pragmatism. Which, of course, was on show that day in Nottingham, for which I’ve defended him in a thousand Aussie conversations.

In the autobiography of Charlie Macartney, the great Australian batter of a hundred years ago described being scolded by no less than Victor Trumper for giving himself out in a game: it’s a cardinal principle that Australians neither trespass on the umpire’s job nor question the umpire’s decision.

Besides, Trent Bridge was an Australian stuff-up. Earlier in the afternoon, they had idly torched the review they later needed. The fairest way to evaluate Ashes disputes, as I see it, is to imagine the alleged misdeed being perpetrated by your opponent. No Australian would have walked in similar circumstances. Why should Broad have? (Likewise, I’d have offered no spirit of cricket pieties had it been Bairstow stumping Carey at Lord’s).

Something else to be respected is that Broad keeps coming back for more, has been prepared to fight for his place, has been proud but never entitled. Eighteen months ago, of course, he seemed to have been discarded, as Joe Root struggled with his captaincy’s impending doom, and Chris Silverwood did his final impersonation of tight-lipped, ashen-faced supremo Ron Knee.

Broad’s column in the Daily Mail, never perfunctory, sometimes disarmingly frank, described a kind of grief response to omission: “Not to big it up too much but it has affected my sleep. I said to my partner Mollie one morning that my body felt sore. She suggested that would be stress. No, I can’t pretend I am as good as gold, because I am not. It would be wrong to act like everything’s OK.” The public has relished James Anderson’s redemption song, but it’s been Broad who has really held the tune.

Since working his passage back, Broad has taken 61 wickets at 25 - better than his career average. He is now two Test wickets away from 600, and three from 150 in the Ashes. There is a very good chance that David Warner, whom he has dismissed seventeen times, will be one of them.

You could write volumes on this still unfolding rivalry, but one of its more fascinating elements is its playing out against a vaguely opposite overall trend. Broad has played in thirty-eight Ashes Tests, won twelve and lost eighteen; Warner has played thirty-one, won nineteen and lost seven.

There is all cricket in that. Broad has enjoyed the individual edge, Warner formed part of the collective edge. We are probably in the last stages of savouring this endlessly fascinating game within the game, this interpersonal Ashes, which let’s not forget has spanned a decade not just a couple of series. How, like these Ashes, is it going to end?