Joe Root took a mind-bending catch, while Steve Smith survived the tightest of run out decisions as Australia battled hard on day two of the fifth Ashes Test at The Oval.
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Daily wrap: Read the wrap of the day’s play and the live blog
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Scorecard: Check out the stats and full card from the fourth Test
Here are five things you missed from The Oval overnight.
1. No Moeen no cry
The Oval is supposed to offer a bit for spinners, but England won’t have use of theirs, with Moeen Ali once again a mid-Test casualty.
After his finger skin couldn’t handle his workload in the first Test, Ali pulled up lame with a groin injury while running between wickets on day one at the Oval and he couldn’t take the field for Australia’s first innings.
Confirmation came through before play on day two that Ali again wouldn’t take the field, meaning England’s spin options will likely be limited to Joe Root for the rest of the match.
The former skipper is far from the worst back-up imaginable and coming off an impressive spell in the fourth Test at Old Trafford, but England’s seamers will have to get through a mountain of work if Australia bats long.
2. Slow and steady wins the Ashes?
While England have scored at a tremendous rate of knots this series, Australia has gone for a slightly different approach — particularly early on day two at The Oval.
A glacial 21 runs were scored in 14 overs during a soporific first hour of play as Usman Khawaja and Marnus Labuschagne dug in.
It was less Bazball and more Boycott-ball after the notoriously pedestrian former English opener.
The 47.4 overs it took for Australia to bring up its century was the slowest in a Test match since 1990.
When Labuschagne fell, he had scored 9 off 82 balls and was the slowest rate of scoring for an innings of 65 more balls in Tests in England since 1994, when Hansie Cronje made 13* off 124.
The last time there was a slower innings of 65 or more balls at The Oval was Keith Miller in 1956, when he scored 7* off 67.
The session included just 54 runs, one wicket and 13 maidens as Australia failed to stamp its authority on the match.
3. Roooooooot
Marnus Labuschagne battled to reach stumps on day one, but battled even harder on the second morning, scoring just 7 more runs off 59 balls before falling.
It looked like he might get away with a healthy edge off Mark Wood as Five Quick Hits favourite Jonny Bairstow failed to move a muscle to a ball going past his right hip, but first slip Joe Root reacted brilliantly.
Perhaps not expecting to be called upon off an edge like that, Root moved late but perfectly diving left and sticking one hand out in pure reflex mode.
The ball stuck in his mitt and the pressure built up over the prior 90 minutes finally paid dividends.
“Unbelievable catch,” Glenn McGrath said on ABC radio commentary.
“He didn’t just go to his left, he went a long way to his left.”
There may have been another, more mischievous factor in the dismissal.
Stuart Broad cheekily switched the bails around at Labuschagne’s end just before the wicket taking ball, presumably just to get in his opponents head.
Perhaps it worked.
4. Ashes veterans enjoy lunch dessert
Even with the loss of Labuschagne, Australia’s first session would look like some sort of masterstroke if it was the platform for a big day of run-scoring as they plundered tired quicks for the rest of a long day in the field.
But any hopes of that sort of performance were extinguished immediately after lunch when Stuart Broad trapped Usman Khawaja LBW three runs short of a half-century off the 157th ball he’d faced.
In Broad’s next over he nicked off Travis Head and, after some lusty hitting from Mitch Marsh, he too was gone for 16, as Jimmy Anderson finally got in on the act.
Seven overs later, the most experienced batter in the team joined the party, with Alex Carey falling straight into Joe Root’s off-spin trap as 482 England Test caps took Australia from 2-115 to 6-170 in what felt like a decisive session in this Test match.
5. Smith’s narrow run-out escape
Steve Smith is always the wicket that England want — so to give him a chance when he was 43 is not the greatest idea.
Substitute fielder George Ealham tore in from the mid-wicket boundary and hurled the ball towards Jonny Bairstow, who had rushed up to the stumps.
Smith dived in forlorn hope that he would get home, but it appeared that Bairstow had broken the stumps before he slid his bat in.
Smith was two-thirds of the way off the field after one replay, but upon closer inspection there was a problem.
“He has hit the stumps before the ball has got there,” Glenn McGrath said of Bairstow on ABC Radio.
That he had, but doing so was not actually the issue.
The problem was that when Bairstow knocked the stumps, it dislodged one of the bails, but half of it fell back in its groove as Bairstow completed the run out with the ball now nestled in his glove.
It was an incredibly tight decision, examined in forensic detail by third umpire Nitin Menon, but Smith survived.
“The moral of the story is don’t knock the bails off before you’ve got the ball in your hand,” former Australian skipper Ricky Ponting said on Channel 9 commentary.
“The other moral of the story is not to take on a sub fielder that you know nothing about.”
Wise words from a man who knows a bit about being run out by sub fielders in Ashes series…
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