England has savaged its flailing Bazballers after the day any hope of regaining the Ashes urn may have slipped out of their grasp, but are trying to make themselves feel better by blaming Alex Carey — just like the last series.
Once again it was left up to captain Ben Stokes to keep the tourists in the Test, with his unbeaten 45 (151) and a valuable cameo from Jofra Archer (30*) leaving them 8-213 at stumps on day two, still trailing Australia by 158 runs.
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The man who has contributed least to the side’s poor efforts in this series, Ollie Pope, received the heaviest criticism after a woeful 3 (10).
Pope now averages just 31.5 in Tests when you exclude a pair of centuries against minnows Zimbabwe and Ireland; against Australia it’s just 16, without a half-century in 15 attempts.
Another horrendous Ashes outing on Thursday saw the English No.3 absolutely savaged by The Telegraph’s Oliver Brown, describing him as a “petrified rabbit”.
“The rhetoric around ‘Popey’ has become familiar: great team man, happy to be in the background, all-round dressing-room legend. But here in the blistering heat of Adelaide, Pope was such a zombie, such a petrified rabbit in headlights, that the version in the Vatican might just have done a better job,” Brown penned.
“‘An absolute road,’ Justin Langer called this pitch. And yet Pope somehow made it resemble the Road of Bones, the desolate Siberian highway with potholes like lunar craters.
“No matter how enticing the conditions Down Under, he contrives ever more witless ways to set fire to his innings. This was the most egregious example yet, a nothing shot to a nothing ball, encapsulating the folly of England’s faith that he had the temperament for such a series.
“Just when he needed to weather a fired-up Scott Boland before lunch, he flashed at the final ball of the over as if frightened of negotiating a maiden. Moments later, he gift-wrapped a 563rd Test wicket for Lyon, trying to clip him around an eighth-stump line. It was so profoundly stupid that you almost forgot that he was out for three.”
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But more crucially for England, according to Brown, was what it meant for the entire Bazball “cult”.
“Remarkably, head coach Brendon McCullum remains oblivious to the criticism. He has warned against “knee-jerk reactions” about Pope, insisting, despite all impressions to the contrary, that his man would come good,” he wrote.
“It was a tactic designed to ensure that Pope would stay true to his natural style, but after 64 Test matches nobody can say with certainty what this style is supposed to be. “Runs after runs after runs” was what he pledged to deliver in Australia. Except all he has conjured so far is a catalogue of failure.”
It was arguably a relief for McCullum that his team’s free-wheeling tactics weren’t to blame for another poor performance – instead, it was out of his hands, because the Aussies were just too good.
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Not that that would save his job, according to the BBC’s Stephan Shemilt.
“This was not a collapse caused by Bazballing batting, rather a fold in the face of relentless Australia bowling,” he wrote.
“Only Ollie Pope, whose Test career is now hanging by a thread, and Jamie Smith were dismissed playing attacking shots – and Smith was at the centre of the Snicko confusion.
“But the debate surrounding DRS cannot mask the truth that England have wilted in the Ashes cauldron and could lose this series in as few as 10 days of cricket.
“At some point over the weekend, Pat Cummins looks likely to once again become an Ashes-winning captain and the bloodletting of this England regime will begin.”
He added: “England had the opportunity to bat themselves back into the series. Instead, it was only Stokes’ defiance that prevented them from bowling twice in the day.
“While the Snicko controversy is unsatisfactory for a series of this magnitude, it pales in comparison to the substandard nature of England’s performance.
“If this really is the end of the Bazball era as we know it, it is symbolic that captain Stokes was in the middle for so much of the day, watching his team crumble around him.”
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Meanwhile it’s somewhat ironic that Carey, one of the most affable and imminently likeable members of the Australian XI, has found himself involved in yet another Ashes drama.
But he has once again been targeted by English fans following his day one admission he believed he got a “feather” on the ball when the DRS had called him not out.
“Carey, once more, was unapologetic about what he had done even if it was clearly not within the famed spirit of cricket. Whether the spirit of cricket still exists, or has become a concept so outmoded that it is laughed out of the ground as a fad of the self-righteous, remains to be seen,” MailSport’s Oliver Holt righteously declared.
“For a dastardly villain, Carey seems like a nice guy but the reality is that his cynical opportunism cost England at least the 34 extra runs Carey made after his reprieve. His extended stay at the crease also allowed Australia to edge towards par in an innings in which they had been struggling.
“Some will say Carey should not be criticised for the way he acted. But remember the way Stuart Broad was vilified in Australia when he refused to walk after edging a ball to slip at Trent Bridge in the 2013 Ashes?
Jofra & Stokes fire up at one another! | 01:04
“The Aussies were so enraged by that that the local Brisbane newspaper refused to mention his name or print his picture the next time England toured.
“What Carey did in Adelaide is no different. His gamesmanship will fly under the radar more this time because it happened on home soil but the consequences of what he did may be just as detrimental to England’s hopes of regaining the Ashes as that ‘stumping’ at Lord’s, on the day the Long Room lost its mind.”
Famously, Broad himself declared the 2021-22 Ashes series was “void” due to the tough conditions England dealt with during Covid.
The i Paper’s Daniel Storey clearly had that in mind, and his tongue in his cheek, when he suggested the Carey incident did the same thing for this series.
“It’s a real shame (it makes me sad) that so much effort has gone into preparations for this series, and two games played, only for the whole thing to be deemed void. But that is where we are. Onto 2027,” he tweeted.
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