The reaction from England has been widespread following the tourists’ nightmare opening-day performance during the first Ashes Test in Brisbane.
Despite coming into the series as underdogs, the off-field drama in the Australian camp had given England some belief in the lead-up to the Gabba Test.
Just a day into the series, a ruthless Australian side snatched that sense of belief right out of England’s souls.
AS IT HAPPENED: Ruthless Australia rolls England on opening day of the Ashes
The trouble for England began before a single delivery was bowled, with captain Joe Root‘s decision to bat first on a green top putting an undercooked batting line-up at the mercy of Australia’s pace attack.
Root’s curious call at the coin toss immediately earned comparisons to former England skipper Nasser Hussain’s infamous decision to bowl first in the opening Test of the 2002-03 series, one that England wound up losing 4-1.
Hussain admitted he “wanted Root, as an England fan, to lose the toss”.
“I could see the mind-games unfolding in front of me in the build-up to it,” the former England captain wrote in his Daily Mail column.
“He would have known that idiots like me have bowled first at the Gabba and been remembered for it for the rest of their career. It can be forgotten if you bat first and get it wrong but rarely if you bowl.”
While the outcome for Root was cruel, given that Australian captain Pat Cummins said he would’ve chosen to bat as well, that didn’t spare the English skipper from criticism.
“Play what is in front of you,” Scyld Berry wrote in The Telegraph.
“And a Test match can never be won in a session but it can be lost in one: another saying which is still valid even in this age of data. But Root seems to have ignored both of these eternal verities.”
Despite the criticism levelled at Root’s call to bat first, another ex-England captain, Michael Atherton said “definitive judgment must wait”.
“Root’s justification — that the softer than usual pitch would dent, become quicker and therefore harder to bat on as the game progressed — demands our consideration and will only be proved right or wrong over the next few days. Still, at the close, he probably wished his time over again,” Atherton wrote in The Times.
“There was certainly enough movement off the surface, combined with the heavy cloud cover, to have justified bowling. The psychology of the decision is fascinating and may have played its part. Bowl first and mess it up, and the captain takes the flak, as Hutton did and Hussain continues to do, even though it is almost two decades now since he sent Australia on their way in the 2002-03 series. It is the batsmen, not the captain, who get the blame if a captain bats first and it goes wrong.”
The Daily Mail‘s Lawrence Booth described Root’s decision to bat first as “bold” and “probably foolhardy”.
“There was only one way for England to lose the Test on the first day, and that was by batting in helpful conditions against Australia’s world-class attack,” he wrote.
The other English decision, one which can’t be pinned on Root alone, was the one to leave out both James Anderson and Stuart Broad. Berry called it “colossally bad planning”.
“England’s head coach Chris Silverwood had said that players in the Ashes series should not be expected to do something new, like make their Test debut,” he wrote.
“And here we have [Chris] Woakes and [Ollie] Robinson taking the new ball for England for the first time together. Best of luck, lads.”
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Former England captain Michael Vaughan was similarly scathing of the English brains trust’s decision to leave both veteran seamers out of the attack.
“They’ve had four years to plan, there have been no late injuries — we’ve known about Jofra Archer and Olly Stone for months, and everyone else is fit,” he wrote in The Telegraph.
“You need combinations and camaraderie as a team and unit – knowing who bowls well together and when. And how can they have that when they’ve never bowled together?
“Broad had to play. He’s fit and firing. What was the point of playing Broad and Jimmy Anderson for so many Tests together in the build-up to the Ashes if they weren’t going to play at least one of them this Test? Why didn’t they try, for a few Test matches over the last few years, an attack without Broad and Anderson? There’s been many of us crying out for it. But for them both to be fit and not to play the first Test on a green top is staggering.”
“To compound the sense of yet more Pommie haplessness at a ground where they have won twice in 20 attempts since the Second World War, the mid-afternoon drinks were carried on by Jimmy Anderson and Stuart Broad, both said to be fit yet neither required – other than to mix the cordial,” Booth wrote in the Daily Mail.
“If England, who wanted to find room for the left-arm spin of Jack Leach, really can afford to leave out 1,156 Test wickets’ worth of experience and knowhow, then good luck to them.”
Once the play started, it took just one ball for Australia to get on top, with England opener Rory Burns inexplicably missing a half-volley on leg stump off Mitchell Starc.
“The first ball of the Ashes series set a wretched tone for England as they endured a depressingly familiar tough day at the Gabba that crushed spirits and derailed years of planning,” wrote Nick Hoult in The Telegraph.
“Burns’s legs were akimbo as he was bowled by Starc, providing a comic illustration of what happens when batsmen so short of match practice are thrust into batting first on a green pitch against such a top-class seam attack.”
The duck on Day 1 made it six in Burns’ last 16 innings, and there are serious doubts over whether his unorthodox technique can survive on Australian pitches.
“Burns’ tragicomic haplessness is the very image of England’s self-sabotage,” wrote The Telegraph‘s Chief Sports Writer, Oliver Brown.
“Burns’ brain-fade will live in infamy. It was an unforgettable piece of sporting theatre.
“For an opener still struggling to justify his place, now with six ducks to his name in his 16 innings this year, it brought the grisliest humiliation.
“Nowhere was England’s agony more graphically illustrated than in the plight of Burns. It is one of cricket’s insoluble mysteries that Burns has amassed 31 Test caps for his country, given that he averages just 32: a figure that even Harmison, his fellow author of Brisbane calamity, has described as ‘nowhere near good enough’.”
Hussain said Burns’ dismissal was symptomatic of the left-hander being a nervous starter.
“The Surrey opener’s frailty when under pressure is that his front foot goes across to the off side far too much,” he wrote.
“Burns went so far across – the freeze frame at the moment Starc delivers the ball shows his front foot at least six inches from where it should be – he left his leg-stump exposed and immediately with that wicket the pressure was ramped up on England.”
“The ugly duckling of our batting, Rory Burns, bowled around his legs was awful,” former England opener Geoffrey Boycott said on a podcast for The Telegraph.
“It was as bad as Steve Harmison bowling the first ball of that Test match in Brisbane to Freddie Flintoff at second slip.
“You remember it? Yeah, none of us have forgotten it, and none of us will forget Rory Burns getting bowled around his legs first ball. You can get out, but there’s ways of getting out.”
All in all, the opening day of the series could have not gone more differently for the two skippers, with Root’s horror show at the coin toss followed up by his first duck of the calendar years.
Meanwhile, Cummins became the first Aussie skipper to take a five-wicket haul on his Test captaincy debut in 127 years.
“The most important wicket, of course, was that of Root not just for this first Test but also the series,” Hussain wrote.
“The England captain basically tried to remodel his game after the last Ashes because Cummins and Josh Hazlewood had got him out so many times. So for Australia to get him for a duck after all the success Root has had since then was massive.
“It was noticeable Cummins brought himself on the moment Root came to the crease because he has dismissed him seven times before in two Ashes series.”
“Every England captain wants to start an Ashes series well, but for Root there were echoes of Andrew Flintoff, as captain, who fell for a duck in 2006-07,” Atherton wrote.
Aside from youngsters Haseeb Hameed and Ollie Pope, as well as a counter-attacking knock from Jos Buttler, the rest of England’s batting line-up was also widely slammed.
“What an awful show it was, in fact it was a horror show,” Boycott said.
“Every England supporter will be deflated by the batting performance of England. We shouldn’t be that surprised or shocked because England in the last few years have been flaky.
“When a series starts, we have hope, we have expectation, and honestly all of us just want the lads to do well. But when you only score [147] and look poor, it really hurts.”
Vaughan, however, seemed less surprised by the outcome.
“It’s been the same for a few years now,” he wrote. “The batting unit haven’t been able to cope with any conditions that are not perfect.”
“They haven’t been able to soak up the pressure of a moving ball and avoid losing wickets in clusters.
“Yes, the bowling from Australia was very good. But ultimately when a team continues to collapse you have to question the technique and, more importantly, the mentality of the batsmen.”
Even after being bowled out for 147, the torment did not cease for the tourists.
Rain prevented England’s bowlers from having a crack at Australia’s top order in the helpful conditions, cementing it as “the worst opening day in Ashes history”, according to Vaughan.
Surely it can only go upwards from here for the tourists, right?