“I don’t think a groundsman has ever been under as much pressure as the man here this week.” Ben Stokes had a smile on his face during his final pre-match press conference of this Ashes series at the Sydney Cricket Ground as he responded to a question about the nature of the pitch for the fifth Test, which starts on Sunday.
However, this is no laughing matter for SCG curator Adam Lewis, who has to defend the greenish tint on the edge of the strip a day before a single ball has been bowled.
In a surprising twist to Australia’s obsession with grass lengths in the week since England’s two-day win in Melbourne, Lewis also described how he “blocks out the noise” while rolling, mowing and watering the strip. “I don’t scroll, I don’t have social media, so I try to keep all that negative energy away from me. We just put pressure on ourselves,” Lewis said on Friday, for the record, about producing a pitch for other people to play cricket on.
Lewis also said he was “pleased with the colour” and predicted “a nice even surface” with “good carry” for the bowlers.
By Saturday afternoon, Stokes and his fellow tour selectors had yet to make a decision on which team would be selected from the England 12 for this Test. This is likely to come down to a clear choice between Matthew Potts, a similar replacement for the injured Gus Atkinson, and Shoaib Bashir, who has played one proper game of cricket since July.
However, there were no clues in Stokes’ own reading of the SCG surface, which was refreshingly honest about the mysteries of how a pitch can develop over the course of a match. “I watched yesterday and the day before yesterday too,” said the England captain. “I mean, we try to pretend we know what we’re doing when we look at the pitch and rub and bump it, but no one really has a clue. You can only try to give yourself the best chance by thinking, ‘What XI do we need to give us a chance to win this?’
“We’ll have one last look at some point in training. But we’re all playing a good game by looking like we know what we’re doing when we look at the wicket.”
Stokes did promise that this would be a truly pivotal event for his England team, despite being 3-1 down in the series and the smell of home now in their nostrils. “This is a big match because we are going there and representing England,” he said. “The Ashes unfortunately didn’t go the way we wanted for us, but we have another match in a big series and it’s a really big one for us.
“Although we can’t get what we came here for, we still have a chance to go there and win a game of cricket for England.”
Stokes also paid tribute to the series’ deciding factor; Australia’s vastly superior seam bowling, key to the hosts’ three successive victories when the match was alive. “The one thing you take away from the Australian team above all is the great execution with the ball, which put us under a lot of pressure,” he said. “There is a big difference between what Australia can do with the ball and what we can do with the ball.
“We know that, we own that, we weren’t able to execute it as well as we would have liked.”
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