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Australians are set for sleepless nights

England’s juggernaut to give Cummins and co plenty to ponder during countdown to the Ashes

Michael Vaughan

Where to start? That was a ridiculous display of batting from England. I did wonder, when the openers were steaming along, if 500 in a day was possible. They got there despite it being only 75 overs.

To think of the records they broke, or that four young players all got hundreds on the same day. Two of them, Ben Duckett and Harry Brook, were maiden hundreds, another, Zak Crawley, is fighting for his career, and Ollie Pope is still finding his way. I have no doubt what the banter in the dressing room will have been.

It will have been everyone reminding Joe Root that he did not get many at a strike rate of 74, while the rest of them were whacking it at 100-odd.

Root will have been the butt of all the jokes, which we have not been able to say too often in recent years.

We have to be honest about what England are doing. They are trying to change Test cricket and, eight games in, it is going pretty well.

It is not like they have done it once and then struggled for three games. They had one blip, but otherwise it has been consistently excellent.

It is still early days, of course, but I expect England to continue this way, and I think we will be talking about this period in years to come. We will look back and see Ben Stokes and Brendon Mccullum being the dual combination that changed Test cricket: the way it is played, and the way we think about it.

I have not known a captain in my time, watching or playing the game, have such an impact on a team.

Look at where the England team were before. One win in 17, and thrashed in Australia playing cricket completely opposite to this.

This was an incredibly flat pitch and an inexperienced Pakistan bowling attack. But generally, Pakistan are the best team in the world at bowling on flat wickets, taking the 22 yards out of the equation. England were just too much. It was not reckless, it was good, strong cricket shots.

Watch them play these shots. They are what we would have considered risky in my era. They are not risky to them because they are so conditioned to it from white-ball cricket: paddles, dancing down, reverse sweeps. They are an everyday action these players do. They have trained their brains and bodies to do it again and again. And it is a sensible way.

It sounds mad to say that scoring at close to seven an over is not completely bonkers. But for these players, with their skill sets, it is not outrageous. They are brought up to

It sounds mad to say that scoring at seven an over is not bonkers – but players now are brought up to do it

do it. It is all about mindset and language.

Children coming through these days do not believe that they cannot score if a bowler is bowling well. They do not respond to the language I grew up with about getting bowlers into their second, third, fourth spells, then capitalising. They think about how you can take them on.

This is the first team to take that mindset into Test cricket, and openly encourage what we consider risk-taking. It is what will help the modern player flourish. There will be plenty of older players who will say it is not possible to do this every time, and of course this extreme cannot be replicated every time. This was the perfect wicket and they capitalised. England do need to prove that this is more than just a hot streak, and to do so they will have to adapt, and go up and down the gears, like the great Australia team used to. But people have wondered what will happen each time they take on a new bowling attack, and it keeps going well. In our summer, I reckon the Australians would have been saying, “We will have you”.

But even Pat Cummins and co will be having sleepless nights now because this is a juggernaut. It is not a nice method or mentality to play against at all.

First Test

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2022-12-02T08:00:00.0000000Z

2022-12-02T08:00:00.0000000Z

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Daily Telegraph