Category: Cricket

• Achilles complaint stalls bowler’s recovery from injury

• Cummins to rejoin hosts’ squad for third Test in Adelaide

Josh Hazlewood is racing the clock to play a role in the Ashes series after another injury speed bump on his road back to the bowling crease.

It has been a case of one step forward two steps back for the 34-year-old paceman who had been making positive steps in his return from a hamstring injury, sustained while playing for NSW against Victoria in the Sheffield Shield.

Left-armer ran through England again but just how much will Australia regret not selecting their premium spinner at the Gabba?

In the end it was Mitchell Starc saving the day in the second Ashes Test as he did the first. In a series supposed to be defined by Australia’s fast-bowling Big Three, he has done the work as the sole member to make the starting line. With one English wicket left to fall and his tally on six for 46, he was on the brink of the remarkable feat of recording career-best figures for the fourth time in less than 12 months. Joe Root and Jofra Archer swung a few runs away to void that statistical note, but it was still another day (and night) of heavy lifting for the man who so far in this series has carried Australia’s burden.

Having passed Harbhajan Singh’s 417 Test wickets in the process Starc, who ended day one with figures of six for 71, is now in the top 15 wicket-takers on the Test all-time list, but the more significant milestone from the overtaking lane was the 414 of Wasim Akram, making Starc the most prolific left-arm quick of all. Until now Wasim has been uncontested as the greatest of his ilk, but with time yet ahead of Starc, the Australian can now make an argument of it. He may average three more runs per wicket, but has needed eight fewer deliveries to take each one, and his recent vintage years have both of those numbers moving in the right direction.

Will the captain return? Will Nathan Lyon play? Who will open? Ashes hostilities are renewed and the hosts don’t need to ask too many questions

At last, at long last, an Ashes series is about to start. It feels that way, anyway, after so many months of lead-up, such an eternal blur of preview and prediction and preamble, were supposed to reach their end – only to find that the end was instead a momentary interruption, a hiccup, an indigestion-dream of a Test from Perth, a contest done in the span of 31 hours, leaving everyone to return to punditry and prognostication for a further 11 blasted and benighted days.

We are, for pity’s sake, in a discussion cycle about Ben Stokes correctly applying a bike helmet while not on a bike, or Steve Smith correctly applying eye-black stickers in his Tim Tebow tribute act, or the archaeologically uncovered fact that Australian teams have a good record at the Gabba. Like farmers waiting for the rains, we are praying for play to start to let us talk about something that has happened, rather than something that might. Even the day-night format means another wait, four more hours than would usually be the case before the balm of the first ball.

After years of selectors arguing that his presence brings stability to Australia, the injured opener is now the team’s main source of uncertainty

As far as surprises go, a 38.95-year-old with a back problem continuing to have a back problem is not up there with the end of The Sixth Sense. The only twists in this story are the ones that Usman Khawaja can’t currently do. With the second Ashes Test in Brisbane coming up on 4 December, the capricious nature of such injuries made it odd that the batter was included in the first place in Australia’s squad on 30 November, and less odd that he was ruled out again on 2 December. But here we are, still engaged in the dance that Australia’s selectors have been doing through a reluctance to part with Khawaja at the top of the order.

From here, other results will decide whether we have reached the end of what has been, like so many others, a very good Test career that declined irreversibly toward its end. For two years Khawaja has struggled with the level of fast bowling that Test openers must combat, looking increasingly out of sorts in the process. Throughout that period, thanks to the faith shown in him by selectors, the solution has remained in his own two hands. One big score, one vigil of the sort he once made routine, and he could lock in the confidence that his later-stage version could bring the benefit of experience with no trade-off in reflexes.

Mixed messages over captain Pat Cummins’s potential return to bowling in the Ashes are a curiously dismissive attitude towards the paying public

You could speculate about whether Cricket Australia deliberately prefers to be opaque regarding player availability and team plans, or whether it just has a deficiency in communications, but once again the fitness of players and the makeup of the XI is left to be inferred from the selection in the larger squad of 14 players for the second Ashes Test in Brisbane.

Normally, a board naming an unchanged squad would not be much news. This time it is, thanks to the possible movement in either direction of Pat Cummins and Usman Khawaja, neither of which has now eventuated.

The parallels are imperfect but, as with Michael Vaughan’s Ashes winners, hyper-aggressive cricket with a tweaked approach in the second Test is the 2025 cohort’s only chance of winning

Twenty years on, a montage of the 2005 Ashes still tingles the spine. Close your eyes and you can probably make your own, with an Embrace soundtrack if you want to be right on the nose. Chances are you’ll see Kevin Pietersen and Andrew Flintoff belting sixes with lusty abandon; Geraint Jones wheeling away after winning the epic Edgbaston Test; Ashley Giles calmly patting the winning runs at Trent Bridge; Flintoff’s messianic dismissal of Ricky Ponting at Edgbaston; Simon Jones detonating Michael Clarke’s off stump at Old Trafford.

All those moments came in England victories or winning draws. But no 2005 montage is complete without images of Ponting being cut below the eye or Justin Langer’s right elbow ballooning in real time. Both wounds were inflicted by Steve Harmison on the first morning at Lord’s, a game that Australia won emphatically by 239 runs. When the story of the series was written, those blows – and the way England duffed Australia up in the first innings – were an essential chapter.