England's bowling plans short-circuited

Day 2 of the Gabba Test saw a fair bit of madness, but very little method

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Ashes. Second Test. Pink ball. Day 2, with Australia batting. And Brydon Carse starts his spell with a yorker, which seems odd.

Was it on purpose? A warm-up gone wrong? Or just something else? Because England had banged the ball into the surface before that. But at least it was at the stumps.

Carse then delivered two short wide ones, which didn’t go for runs. But already something had changed. The day began with normal Test cricket, but in Carse’s three balls it felt like another game. Travis Head and Jake Weatherald had mostly made runs playing uppish strokes on the offside. But England were in the game during Gus Atkinson and Jofra Archer’s spells.

Australia were 36/0 after nine overs.

The final three balls of Carse’s over were three wide short balls again, but this time Head went four, six and three. In a moment Australia were at five runs an over.

Ben Stokes brought himself on for the next one, and started with full toss. His third ball was short wide, and cut by Weatherald.

In nine balls, all the pressure the opening bowlers had built up was gone. Australia’s makeshift opening partnership was cleaning England up for the second straight game, the Ashes were already over.

Then Carse bowled a length ball down the legside, and instead of accepting the runs graciously, Head managed to get a leading edge that went in the air and Australia lost their first wicket.

This was a day when England routinely bowled some of the worst deliveries in the world, and Australia still got out.

Today, you could write a novella just on Carse. It was one of the weirdest displays of bowling we have ever seen. I couldn’t tell if he had a plan for several of his spells, outside of the fact he seemingly wanted Australia to score runs.

When Carse came on for his second spell, he started by massively overpitching. Then he gave up a couple of more runs while also bowling a no-ball. And he finished the over with an overpitched delivery that Steve Smith hit down the ground. Just like that, his seven balls went for nine runs.

It seemed at several times he would come on to bowl, get it wrong, and then England would have to handle it around him.