The bowler who was not there

Australia’s bowling card at Edgbaston reads: Brett Lee, Jason Gillespie, Michael Kasprowicz, Shane Warne.

Glenn McGrath had taken nine wickets at Lord’s a fortnight earlier and was the leading wicket-taker of the age. His name is not on the sheet.

The morning

Every account of it agrees. Australia were warming up before the toss, McGrath stepped on a stray cricket ball, and the ankle went. He was helped off the outfield and did not play.

Ricky Ponting won the toss and, without him, chose to field.

England made 407 on the first day at better than five an over.

Full scorecard: England v Australia, 2nd Test, Edgbaston, 4–7 August 2005 →

The ledger of an absence

Kasprowicz replaced him and bowled eighteen overs across the match for three wickets at 109.

The four bowlers who did play conceded 5.13 an over in the first innings, which for an Australian attack of that era is close to unheard of. Warne took ten wickets in the match and still finished on the losing side.

Australia lost by two runs, the narrowest margin in Ashes history. They lost the series 2–1 having not lost one since 1987.

McGrath returned for the third Test, missed the fourth, and played the fifth. Australia won neither of the two he missed and did not win either of the two he played.

What replaced him

Kasprowicz was a good Test bowler with 38 caps. He is also the man caught behind off Steve Harmison with three runs needed, on a delivery the replays show hitting his glove while the hand was off the bat, which under the Laws is not out.

So the bowler brought in for McGrath was the last wicket to fall in a two-run defeat, on a dismissal that should not have been given.

Neither of those things is his fault and both are on the card.

What is actually claimable

Less than people think.

Edgbaston was decided by two runs, so any of a hundred things can be said to have decided it: the no-balls, the toss, Kasprowicz’s glove on the last morning, Flintoff’s over, Warne treading on his own stumps.

An absent fast bowler is one item in that list and there is no way to weight it against the others. Australia still made 308 and 279 and came within a boundary of winning.

What can be said is narrower: the best bowler in the world missed the match his side lost by two runs, for a reason that had nothing to do with cricket.

The category this belongs to

Not selection. Nobody chose to leave McGrath out.

But the effect on the scorecard is identical to a selection, and that is the point of this series. An eleven is a decision until something happens to it, and then it is a fact with no decision attached, and the record cannot distinguish between the two.

The card at Edgbaston shows four bowlers. It does not show why there were four rather than the four everybody expected, and a reader coming to it in fifty years will see a routine attack and a two-run defeat.

What the summer became

It is the series English cricket has never stopped talking about, and every account of it begins at Edgbaston rather than Lord’s, where Australia won by 239 with McGrath taking nine.

Two Tests, a fortnight apart, one man’s ankle between them.

Australia had won eight consecutive Ashes series. The stray ball is not the reason the ninth went the other way. It is the first thing that went wrong, and the two runs at the end are close enough that nobody has ever been able to rule it out.

••••••

No. 5 in The Eleven, a series of 5.

NextEight for 43, after nought for 72