Eleven overs

England had not won an Ashes series since 1987. They arrived in Australia in 2002 with a captain who had built his reputation on hard, unsentimental thinking, and a seam attack that looked respectable written down.

Nasser Hussain won the toss at the Gabba and put Australia in.

The first morning

Australia reached fifty in fifty-four minutes.

Justin Langer and Matthew Hayden had 67 up before Langer edged Simon Jones behind. That was the last thing that went England’s way for four days.

Jones chased a ball into the outfield, slid, and caught his knee in the turf. He did not bowl again in the match. He did not bowl again on the tour. England were down to three front-line bowlers before lunch on the first day of the series, in Brisbane, in November.

At lunch Australia were 125 for one. By tea, 233 for one. At the close, 364 for two, with Hayden 186 not out.

Hayden and Ricky Ponting put on 272 for the second wicket. Australia made 492. Hayden 197. Ponting 123.

Full scorecard: Australia v England, 1st Test, Brisbane, 7–10 November 2002 →

The rest of it

England made 325 with ten men. Australia batted again and declared at 296 for five, Hayden making a second hundred in the match, which is a way of saying the first innings had not been an accident.

England needed 464. Michael Vaughan went in the first over. Marcus Trescothick went in the second. Three wickets were down for 33.

They were all out for 79 in 28.2 overs. Glenn McGrath 4 for 36. Shane Warne 3 for 29. Australia won by 384 runs.

Simon Jones was carried off on a stretcher. The knee needed reconstruction and he did not play a Test for sixteen months. He was back for the 2005 Ashes and was, for one summer, as good as any bowler England had, which is the sort of fact that makes the first session at Brisbane worse rather than better.

The decision, on its own terms

The Gabba has a reputation for early seam movement, and a bowling captain has traditionally been given the first session there. Hussain had pace. His batting order had a demonstrated problem with Warne, and every hour Australia spent batting was an hour England spent not facing him.

Bowling first was defensible before the toss, and it has been defended since by people who watched the whole match.

It stopped being defensible after about eleven overs, when the ball went soft, the pitch turned out to be the flattest in the country, and Hayden started scoring at a run a ball.

Eleven overs is the whole argument. A toss decision is a bet on conditions that have not happened yet, and it is settled long before anyone can act on the answer. Hussain could not un-insert Australia at twelve overs. He could stand at mid-off for the next four sessions and watch the bet lose, which is what he did.

Langer fell at 67. England did not take another wicket until 339.

What he said

That the buck stopped with him.

He said it that week, on the record, without qualification or a single word about the injury that had cost him a quarter of his attack in the first session. He repeated it for the rest of his career.

That is a great deal more than most captains offer, and it is one reason the decision is remembered as sharply as it is. There exists a complete, first-hand, immediate account of the reasoning and the regret, given by the person responsible, which is a rarer document than it ought to be.

The part that is still missing

Whether it mattered.

England lost by 384 runs, having lost a bowler to injury inside the first session and having then been bowled out for 79 in the fourth innings by an attack that would have bowled at them whichever way the coin landed. Australia won the series 4–1 and were, by a distance, the better side.

The toss is the part everybody remembers. It is the only part of the match a captain controlled, so it is the part that gets carried, and no scorecard will ever show whether it made any difference to a Test that England were probably losing from the third over.

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No. 5 in Declared, a series of 15.

NextThe Test that turned into something else