Mitchell Starc brought down the top and tail either side of Adam Zampa spinning through the middle, knocking England 72 runs out of Australia’s 280 for eight at the Sydney Cricket Ground on Saturday night.
James Vince and Sam Billings led a 34-for-three recovery and eventually got back into the hunt with an excellent partnership of 132, needing 124 more off a run a ball. But when Vince fell for 60 and Billings for 71, the chase collapsed in a sequence of seven for 52, giving Australia the one-day international series 2-0.
It was another good day for the bowlers after a T20 World Cup that maintained a competitive balance between bat and ball. The SCG surface offered plenty and with regular captains Jos Buttler and Pat Cummins rested, the teams were led by English all-rounder Moeen Ali and Australian quick Josh Hazlewood. It was Starc, though, who enjoyed his outing the most.
During the recent World Cup, Starc shifted from his long-time role as opening bowler, with Australia’s management talking him up as a middle-order force before dropping him for a match against Afghanistan which Australia needed to win by a mile.
With the new ball restored in these ODIs, Starc resumed taking wickets. Jason Roy was caught with a bounce on his hip, gloved to Alex Carey, before Dawid Malan got the full swing ball that Roy had been waiting for, shooting off the pads and into his stumps. Starc had a maiden double wicket.
Hazlewood backed him up, cutting the ball viciously in an engaging battle with Phil Salt, who cut 23 off 16 before falling back and losing his stumps. Three down in the sixth over, Vince responded with a gem of an innings, seeing off good balls as he countered in style, most notably a six over cover from Ashton Agar.
Steve Smith returns to his crease during a knock of 94 at the SCG. Photo: Dean Lewins/EPA
Billings was patchy in comparison, surviving a narrow lbw review from Zampa, but surviving until he grew fluent, including consecutive sixes off Agar in the 22nd over. The batsmen reached 50 in six balls apiece of the other Hazlewood changed course, the stand-in captain pulled a ball back to hit Vince in front.
His rival captain took on Zampa, Moeen smashed a four and a six off his first two spin balls, but the leg-spinner was too good, driving a quicker delivery through Moeen’s back defence. Zampa’s next over showed his range, drifting and diving under the bat of the advancing Billings, hitting the stumps again through dramatically different means. Four balls later, time in the air and a goal saw Sam Curran cut his big shot to long on. It was 169 for seven, and anything less.
Starc returned to hit the stumps of Chris Woakes and David Willey before Zampa caught Liam Dawson, the players finishing with four wickets each. Only Wasim Akram, Brett Lee, Muttiah Muralitharan and Wasim Akram have done it more often than Starc in one-day cricket, and he has played less than half as many matches as any of them.
For Australia, a good day with the ball was matched with the bat. David Warner and Travis Head put on another quick-fire 33 before both were out for the under-20s, but Steve Smith and Marnus Labuschagne built a measured partnership of 101, measuring the difficulty of the pitch and the bowling quality as Woakes found reverse swing. Willey used variations, and Rashid taunted through the air.
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Rashid took them both out, but not before Labuschagne had reached 58 and Smith moved on to 94, looking far more composed than in recent summers with his newfound stillness at the crease. Mitchell Marsh also found batting on this Sydney surface difficult, hitting two sixes but mostly working the ball into spaces, adapting his game to build an even 50 from 59.
Agar provided some late impetus, mostly through hard running rather than hitting the boundary, and 280 proved a very good score in the conditions. The result will likely draw a collective shrug from a changing England side – Moeen, Curran, Woakes and Rashid were the inclusions after the first match, with Buttler, Chris Jordan, Olly Stone and Luke Wood dropping out.
In Australia, Warner, Smith and Alex Carey stepped in when it came to bowling changes and field locations. Still, if a trivia question in 20 years asks about Australia’s one-day captains, and Josh Hazlewood is the surprise answer, at least he’ll know he got away with a win.
“It was quite exciting and a bit stressful,” Hazlewood said afterwards. “I sure liked it.” The stand-in skipper also praised the impact of Starc’s swing. “It was probably unexpected,” Hazlewood said. “There was no swing from anybody else the whole game. There were some beauties there.”
“You know exactly what he’s going to do, but reacting to it is a different thing,” England’s Vince admitted. “You need a bit of luck against a ball like this [to dismiss Malan]. Losing those wickets early, we had to rebuild a little bit, we got it going and then once I got out there was another flurry that ended the game.”
“I would have liked a bigger contribution to get us to the goal, just like Bilbo [Billings]Vince added. “If we could have kept that partnership going longer, we would have given ourselves a better chance of winning.”