Ashes second Test: Joe Root’s call to bowl will not leave him easily

Decisions like Joe Root’s call to bowl first have a way of following a captain round.

England captain Joe Root snicks a ball to the slips yesterday at Adelaide Oval. Picture: AFP

‘ENG WON TOSS.’ Even the grand old Adelaide Oval scoreboard has become a heckler here, enunciating the last two words of this information with a golden yellow script in the bottom right hand corner.

Joe Root would have glimpsed it during his preparatory surveillances on emerging to bat early yesterday afternoon. Can’t even get the scorers off my case….

Decisions like Root’s have a way of following a captain round, acquiring as they do a context from the unfolding of events. This is unfair, because these subsequent events are complexly inflected. But the heads-or-tails simplicity of the coin’s fall appeals to our narrativising instincts, offering an immediate counterfactual entire in itself.

Australia, of course, would have batted first regardless in this second Test: Steve Smith has said so. England might well have bowled as listlessly in the first 15 overs of their innings under those circumstances too. But there is a developing sense of Root’s choice as an expression of misgivings about his task.

England arrived in Adelaide as motivated as could be, enjoined by Root to remember Australia’s taunts and guffaws of Brisbane, rallying loyally round their slighted comrade Jonny Bairstow, lent an abrasive edge in the field by a snarling and rasping Jimmy Anderson and Stuart Broad.

Yet as coach Trevor Bayliss explained in fronting the media on Sunday evening, Root’s forgoing of first innings for his batsmen was in search of the “best opportunity” for bowlers that are an abiding source of concern.

“It’s well documented that one of our challenges is taking wickets on flatter wickets,” Bayliss conceded. “It’s well documented they’ve got three guys who are quicker than ours,” Bayliss conceded further. Having been presented with the relevant documentation, was the inference, Root was obliged to sign off on it.

When West Indies in 1982 became the only team to insert successfully, Clive Lloyd swaggered into the field with Roberts, Holding, Garner and Croft at his beck. Root sought to emulate him mindful of England’s contrasting tour matches against the Cricket Australia XI: pushing them over like dominoes with the pink ball here, bouncing off them like a wall while using the red ball in Townsville.

It was not, then, a Hussain/Hutton howler. But it was a concession of weakness rather than an assertion of strength. It imposed an onus on the bowlers on the first two days to which they proved unequal, and a penalty on the batsmen on the third day of which they could hardly have been unaware. Not that the surface has deteriorated — if anything, barely blemished, it has sped up a little. But none for 0 is an altogether more solemn undertaking when it comes in the wake of eight declared for 442, instead of following a successful call and confident appropriation of first innings: one is in constant danger of falling between stools, of keeping the target in mind or deliberately expelling it from same. Which is pretty much where Root fell yesterday facing his 10th ball, knocking over both stools, an occasional table and an expensive lamp by driving expansively at Patrick Cummins.

And so it continued, as Australia bowled with the kind of precision and discipline that preys on conglomerated minds — batsmen not sure if they were attacking or defending, striving or surviving. Vince, Moeen and Bairstow fell to attempted scoring strokes that called for defence; Cook defended what he might have left alone. Nobody, strictly speaking, played a culpable shot; nor, until the tenacious eighth-wicket pair of Woakes and Overton, did anyone suggest permanence.

The salient wicket was Cook after a two-hour vigil, four years on from being immolated here by Mitchell Johnson. Now he perished with surprising gentleness, poking needlessly at an off-break. Lyon has now dismissed England’s tallest Test scorer six times, more than any current Australian bowler — a useful ascendancy to enjoy.

Here was not, then, so much a collapse as a steady subsidence or controlled demolition, around the structural weakness of England’s desire to accommodate a fifth bowler — more to the point, a fifth bowler who is not Ben Stokes.

This has already had some peculiar public outcomes. A few months ago in England, for example, Bayliss found himself explaining why Moeen Ali was the team’s ‘second spinner’ at a time there was not actually a first. “Mo is a bit of a complex character at times,” said the coach, as if describing Holden Caulfield.

But there must also be a sort of cumulative psychic toll, on bowlers aware they are not quite good enough, on batsmen conscious that they bear an individually greater burden because of those limitations. “They’re confident,” Bayliss insisted of his charges on Sunday night. “There’s a good feeling in the dressing room.” But here there’s also a touch of Holden, who famously never knew what he was going to do until he did it.

England’s cause might have been lost altogether but for Steve Smith’s reticence about the follow-on, which if ever an option was so last evening. A new ball and 29 overs under lights looked an enticing assignment, but the tyranny of bowling “loads”, one presumes, exercised its dominion.

When Australia elected to bat again, England, with no necessity to spread the work, and no particular burden of expectation, were able to inflict some late casualties. For a captain whose opponent was 268 ahead with six wickets in hand, Root walked off in a merry mood — merrier, certainly, than he had departed earlier.

As his thick outside edge flew into the cordon yesterday, where it lodged as if in a sandbank, Root had a painfully excellent view of his demise. He looked down, then ahead, then wearily into space — one of those dread spasms in batting where time stands still as one desperately wishes to turn it back. England’s skipper will be too rational to concede similar regret about the toss. But as he slowly wended his way off, he did not look back towards the scoreboard, needing no reminding.