All out before lunch

England were 2–1 up in the 2015 Ashes with two to play. Alastair Cook won the toss at Trent Bridge on a grey August morning and put Australia in. Stuart Broad opened from the Pavilion End.

The Ashes were decided before lunch.

Four overs

Broad's third ball took the edge of Chris Rogers's bat and Cook caught it at first slip. Three balls later Steven Smith drove at one and Joe Root took it. Australia were ten for two in the first over of the innings.

David Warner went in the second, caught behind off Mark Wood. Shaun Marsh edged Broad to Ian Bell in the third. Adam Voges got as far as the fifth over, where he pushed forward and Ben Stokes threw himself to his right at fifth slip and caught it one-handed, low and behind him, in a place no fielder is meant to reach.

Twenty-one for five, after four overs and one ball.

Michael Clarke, the captain, made 10 and was caught at slip. Peter Nevill was bowled by Steven Finn. At the eleven-over drinks break Australia were thirty-eight for seven, and the England players stood around in a loose circle looking mildly embarrassed, because there was nothing useful left to say to each other.

Mitchell Starc and Mitchell Johnson went in the thirteenth over, two balls apart. Nathan Lyon lasted until the nineteenth. Australia were all out for 60 in 18.3 overs, having batted for ninety-four minutes.

Full scorecard: England v Australia, 4th Test, Trent Bridge, 6–8 August 2015 →

The top score

Mitchell Johnson made 13. Clarke made 10, Lyon 9. Seven of the eleven were dismissed in single figures.

The highest score in the innings was Extras, with 14: eleven leg byes and three no-balls. An Australian Test batting order was out-scored by the byes.

Broad's figures were 9.3–5–15–8, the best by a fast bowler in Ashes history. Five of his nine and a half overs were maidens. He took eight of the ten wickets and did not bowl a single no-ball while doing it.

What Stokes caught

The catch is the image that survived. It is shown on its own, endlessly, and it deserves to be, but it is worth being clear about what it was not: Voges was the fifth wicket. The match had already gone. Four batters were back in the pavilion before Stokes left the ground, and the catch decorated a collapse rather than causing one.

The conditions were not a secret either. Trent Bridge in early August, overcast enough for the floodlights, a green tinge on the pitch, a new ball, and a bowler running downhill from the Pavilion End who had taken five for one against the same side at the same ground five years earlier. Australia had read the same forecast England had.

The same eleven, three days later

England made 391 for 9 declared, Root scoring 130. Australia batted again and made 253. Rogers made 52. Warner made 64. Voges, out to the famous catch, made 51 not out.

The same eleven players, against much the same attack, on the same square, batted for 72.4 overs and looked like a Test side. England won by an innings and 78 runs and the Ashes went with it. Clarke announced his retirement before the series was over.

What is missing

Everything that is usually offered to explain the 60 was also present for the 253. The pitch, the ball, the overheads, the bowler, the ground, the opposition. Two innings by one team, three days apart, in the same match: sixty and two hundred and fifty-three.

Ninety-four minutes are recorded to the ball. What happened inside them, to eleven professional cricketers who were fine again on Friday, is recorded nowhere at all.

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No. 2 in Collapse, a series of 2.

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