0, 11, 11, 29, 60, 112, 118, 122, 144, 147 ao.
This strange series of numbers to the untrained eye looks like it might be a number sequence of significance. To the student of sport and of Test Cricket in particular, this string of 10 numbers is the fall of wickets of the England team on Day One of the First Test at the Gabba. To an England fan, this string of numbers is the first tolling of the bells of doom.
When Mitchell Starc took the wicket of Rory Burns, with the very first delivery of the series and by bowling him out, the pendulum could have begun to swing in one of two ways: either this was an anomaly and England would gloriously cruise to a massive target, or this would be the predicate for a horrible day's play. What we saw was the latter.
You would think that as an England fan that I would be devastated at this horrid turn of events but then I remember that I am an England fan and that watching England continuously innovate by finding new and different ways to disappoint and infuriate its fans, is par for the course. I have seen England sides get driven around dust bowls in India, get bashed silly by West Indies sides whose players have more flair in their little finger than the entire England squad, and watched English teams drag themselves around the wide brown land of Australia as though they'd been sent to suffer punishment just as the nation had sent prisoners of Mother England to Australia 233 years ago. This is not a new experience.
Not even Joe Root, the one on whom so much of the pressure and burden of expectation sits, could muster anything more than a duck egg. It was the fall of the 6th wicket and the 52 run stand which offered the slightest amount of resistance. The parochial Australian crowd almost cheered cheers of consolation when Buttler and Pope managed to find the boundary occasionally but really, that was about the only highlight in this otherwise morbid innings.
England surprisingly looked to have no answers to the bowling attack of Starc, Hazelwood, and Pat Cummins who spent most of the afternoon on autopilot en route to 5/38, sending the ball from centre to a width and a half outside the off-stump in a fairly unimaginative bowling display. Why would they need to invent anything? It was obvious that on this green-top there was less out there for the batters than for vegetarians at a pig spitroast. Abject tosh took wickets; so why try harder? This is the point that I would normally say that I expect England to know how to play cricket on a green-top but given that they also no how to play badly on a green-top, this is nothing remarkable. Australia is nothing special, England can lose to anyone in the world.
About the only saving grace for the day was that God (who by the way is English, otherwise why did he give the words of the Bible in pre-Commonwealth English to Shakespeare, amen) cracked the irrits and decided to chuck down a few thunderbolts. England all out for 147 was more exciting than watching paint dry but not quite as exciting as waiting for it to peel and I suspect that He had to go watch a paint peeling festival somewhere. Had the Aussies taken willow to leather, the score at the end of the day could have very well been Eng 147 and Australia 220 without loss.
As I sit on a train which crawls through Western Sydney in a rain storm where visibility is less than a hundred yards, I can see with perfect clarity that what we witnessed on Day One might very well be as good as it gets. Jimmy Anderson was seen on Instragramgramtwitbook (I'm down wit da kids, yo) merrily jaunting about Queen Street and Stuart Broad did start the match either. About the best that we can hope for is that in four years' time, England might be good enough to trouble the Australians but this has all the makings of being something like the Mike Atherton side of 1994.
I wager at this point, it scarcely matters where the 5th Test after being cancelled from being held at Perth ends up at. By that stage Australia will be 4-0 up in the series unless rain saves England from a fate worse than... well... sorry, but as an England fan, there is not fate worse than being an England fan. What else can you throw at us? We know the score. We've seen it all before.
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