No rational judge could have expected England’s fall guys to succeed at the MCG where they were thrown on to a festive bonfire
Guess who just got back today? Those wild-eyed boys that had been away. This was a day of brittle, over-caffeinated cricket, on an MCG pitch streaked with faint green ridges. But it was also a day when the boys were, however briefly, back in town.
Ben Duckett and Jacob Bethell have been the two protagonists in the grainy, Zapruder-style footage from England’s six-day, mid-series jig-about by the sea. True to apparent recent form, both were here for a good time not a long time as England were bowled out for 110 in 29.5 overs. Both batted like men groping for the light switch in the dark against a new ball that seamed the width of the bat at times.
But it is also necessary to keep some perspective here, even as this Ashes tour continues its ongoing real-time collapse. The Boxing Day Test was preceded by two significant events. One was the emergence of apparent evidence that a slurry Duckett didn’t know how to get back to his hotel late one night in the resort town England insisted he visit at 2-0 down in the series.
The other was Rob Key’s pre‑match state-of-the-nation address in the bowels of the MCG, a rambling performance that seemed to fall apart even as the words emerged, with a sense by the end of an international sports team being managed by a stack of cardboard boxes with a hat on top, a complex two-month tour planned by the administrative equivalent of a well-meaning jar of marmalade.
