A day of Ashes chaos, on repeat

Day 1 of the series had 19 wickets, didn't follow any cricketing logic, and was just moments of madness and magic.

Buy The Art of Batting here:

There is an app called RushLine AI, that this morning suggested Mitchell Starc would take three to four wickets. That’s looking at pitch conditions, previous records and using artificial intelligence to try and tell us exactly what might happen in Test match cricket.

They were right, because Starc took that many wickets in the first session on Day 1 at Perth. There are things that AI can help with, especially when it comes to understanding cricket and being able to parse a lot more data and information than normal people can, quite quickly.

But then there’s also a day like this, which is the TikTok-ification of cricket. It’s chaos. Little snippets. Moments. 19 wickets.

This day looked really similar to the chaos in the India Test at Perth last year. But this was not in any way predictable or understandable. At one point, Australia took the wickets of England so quickly that Usman Khawaja couldn’t open the batting because he had been briefly off the field. And then he couldn’t bat first drop because Jake Weatherald, on debut, was out even quicker.

If you look at Weatherald’s lbw, you will see that he was mid-air after being hit on the pad, kind of like floating. There are lots of weird freeze frames of him.

And if you think about today, it felt more or less the same. The whole thing was just weird. And it wasn’t just the Weatherald dismissal, it was the entire day. We just watched the first day of the Ashes, and the entire thing seemed to be on glitch.