Third Test: Australia won by 267 runs (Australia 268 & 309, England 187 & 123)

There is an anecdote in one of George Will’s baseball books about the 1988 World Series, which the first of the outstanding La Russa-Canseco-McGwire Oakland A’s teams lost to the Los Angeles Dodgers, four games to one. In the first game of that series, the Dodgers took a 2-0 lead in the bottom of the first, but the A’s answered back in the second inning with a Jose Canseco grand slam to go ahead 4-2. Oakland had absolutely ripped through the American League, that year – they finished 104-58 in the regular season, thirteen games ahead of the next best AL team, and had gone on to bomb Boston in the ALCS four games to none.

As the anecdote goes, Canseco’s grand slam was the worst thing that could have happened to Oakland, because the entire team relaxed – the nerves of the World Series were taken over by the supreme confidence that they’d get anything they needed, whenever they wanted. Later that night, Kirk Gibson hit his miraculous home run to steal Game One. Oakland wouldn’t score another run after Canseco’s homer until the third inning of Game Three. And the Dodgers would take the Series and the trophy.

I couldn’t help but be reminded of that story, early in this match. England was absolutely dominant in the second Test, but they’d lost fast bowler Stuart Broad to an abdominal injury. He’d been replaced by Chris Tremlett, who hadn’t played a Test in a good three years. The media coverage in the run-up to the match focused entirely on how badly Australia was playing, with only the uncertainty of Tremlett thrown in on the England side.

So in the second over, when Tremlett charged in and clean bowled Australian batsman Phillip Hughes, you could have forgiven England for thinking they’d get anything they needed, whenever they needed it.

It wasn’t just Hughes falling early, though – the rest of the Australian order spent the first morning capitulating. When Tremlett took Steve Smith’s wicket right after lunch, the Aussies were on 69 runs for 5 wickets – much, much worse than at Adelaide, when they were famously on two runs for three wickets, but didn’t lose their fourth wicket until 96.

I suppose Smith’s wicket was the apex for England in this test; for the rest of the first day, they couldn’t find that same fire. Michael Hussey, Brad Haddin, and Mitchell Johnson all made half-centuries to rescue the Aussies, who cobbled together nearly 200 runs for their last five wickets, getting to a reasonable first-innings total of 268. Given that England’s prior two innings had been 620/5 (at Adelaide) and 517/1 (at Brisbane), though, I suspect England still felt they’d get what they needed.

That didn’t happen, of course. Mitchell Johnson – who didn’t play in Adelaide after bowling like a blind man at Brisbane – tore through England in the first innings, taking six wickets, including three in the space of three overs early on the second day. In the second innings, it was Australia’s Ryan Harris taking six, including four in six overs near the end of the innings. For the match, Johnson took nine wickets and Harris took nine – combined, more wickets than Australia took as a team in the first two matches. Whether tremendously good bowling by Australia or tremendously bad batting from England, the result was just 310 runs for the match for the English, an ugly total no matter how you look at it.

So a series that England could have won at Perth now teeters precariously at 1-1. The teams head back across Australia, to Melbourne, where the fourth test begins on Christmas Day, here in the USA (apparently a Boxing Day Test is traditional, which would make it a Christmas evening event in America.) I spent the first three Tests gloating about how convenient the series was for me to watch, given that each day’s play began in the evening and ran until bedtime, but this one doesn’t exactly fit the schedule, not over the Christmas break. I suspect I won’t see any of it, except perhaps to sneak in highlights, here and there.

One final note, to praise Australia for their great talent in nicknaming cricket grounds. The first test was played at the Brisbane Cricket Ground, the third in Perth at the Western Australia Cricket Association Ground. Naturally, the Aussies call the Perth stadium “The WACA” and the Brisbane one, which is in the suburb of Woolloongabba, “The Gabba.” I think we can all agree that this is wonderful.