Decorated England servants gone by any measure

Alastair Cook and Stuart Broad have been valiant. But in this third Test the game has tapped them on the shoulder.

Alastair Cook and Stuart Broad look like spent forces.

Cricket careers almost always end sourly. Otherwise, perhaps, they would not end at all. Alastair Cook and Stuart Broad have been valiant cricketers for England. But in this third Test the game has tapped them on the shoulder, as they have seen others tapped.

A little over two years ago, Alastair Cook was a captain enjoying the thanks of a grateful nation for the recapture of the Ashes, Stuart Broad his right-hand matchwinner. A pathos was lent the scenes of jubilation at Trent Bridge by Michael Clarke who was foreshadowing the end of his international career in the act of turning the urn over.

Cook paid Clarke generous tribute; Broad reflected afterwards on the eerie deadness in the Australian captain’s eyes as he went on his way in the second innings: “He wasn’t angry, he wasn’t upset. He just looked gone.”

Gone: it’s an exclamation beloved of commentators. For cricketers it has a different resonance, implying a loss of powers, a blunting of edge, and a vulnerability that opponents are quick to sense. It’s like the proverbial blood in the water, or bullet with your name on it, and no respecter of reputations.

Cook is 32, Broad 31 — they are young men by any measure other than sport, where they are veterans, the former England’s tallest Test scorer, the latter their second-highest Test wicket taker.

The Perth Test is Cook’s 150th and the tenth anniversary of Broad’s international debut. That sounds epic enough, yet the truer measure is the sheer mileage on their cricket clocks: between them they have bowled and faced in the region of 30,000 international deliveries, in the classical roles of opening batsman and opening bowler respectively.

That has been their glory; it has also, always, accentuated the stakes. Coming in first with bat or ball are cricket’s least forgiving roles, exposed by the merest loss of reflex for the batsman, the slightest loss of speed for the bowler.

Key cricketers are also doubly penalised. Fans hold them to exalted standards. Opponents arrow in on their methods. And if not stationary targets, both Cook and Broad are now assuredly slower moving.

In the first innings, Cook was beaten by a fast, full delivery from Mitchell Starc that one suspected, not so long ago, he would have clipped comfortably through the leg side. Now it thudded into the pad on a contorted front leg, and he became just about the last batsman in this Test not to review their dismissal, leaving with a sigh instead.

Cook’s second innings dismissal yesterday was less gainly still. What looked to the naked eye like a leading edge actually emanated from the middle of a crooked bat as it speared back to Josh Hazlewood, who could hardly believe his good fortune. Neither attacking nor defending, neither committed nor withdrawing: it was a shot shadowed by sporting mortality.

Broad, meanwhile, returned figures of the kind that R. C. Robertson-Glasgow once described “much ado about nothing”: 0-142 from 35 overs. Again what was worse was his strange lack of presence. Tall, strong, fair-headed, never short of hostility or histrionics, he has always stood out in a crowded attack. Here he shrank back to anonymity.

Gone tomorrow for certain will be the WACA, although it has signed off as a big cricket venue in a happier fashion. Its surface has been reintroduced as a character in its own right, an active agent in the direction of this match, offering something for everyone, except perhaps the 130km/h right-arm seam bowler — a type with which England, unfortunately, are overendowed.

The pitch presented yesterday morning with a scribble of cracks; whether it was imagination they seemed darker by afternoon. Tim Paine took guard well ahead of his ground in order to take them out of play — rather less of an option for Englishmen facing Australian bowlers capable of velocities of 150km/h.

To the Australians, the sights of a ball from Broad jagging four degrees past Paine’s edge, and a ball from Woakes running beneath Cummins’ bat to arrive at Bairstow on the third bounce were perversely encouraging. Mitchell Starc’s extraordinary round-arm trimmer to bowl James Vince vindicated its promise.

On Friday night, members of the touring media were hosted at the state-of-the-art, $2 billion Optus Stadium which will host Perth’s next international fixture come January, and an impressive sight it is too, with its lofty tiers, crewcut turf and sound and light show, suitably deafening and dazzling.

Football will embrace it; that it could hardly represent a greater change in local cricket culture has been reinforced these last four days, the WACA having been seen to picturesque advantage, bathed in warm but not hot sun, fanned by stiff breezes, occupied by happy spectators. The grassed areas, which arguably played their part in the WACA’s eclipse by reducing its capacity in the early 1990s, have been healthily populated.

Between the showers late yesterday appeared a rainbow that seemed to pour directly into the new stadium bulking on the horizon: the symbolism of the pot of gold was curiously apposite. But what Perth will gain in amenity it faces losing in identity.

England, meanwhile, face rebuilding, as they did in 2013-14, when Cook brought to Australia an England team loitering palely. By its conclusion, Graeme Swann, Matt Prior and Kevin Pietersen had all played their last Tests, Pietersen involuntarily but irrevocably. Of servants as great as Cook and Broad, it will be harder to let go. But their careers are being prolonged by something almost as concerning for England: the lack of recognisable alternatives.