He’ll always have Brisbane: Michael Neser enjoys the sweet day of Ashes glory | Geoff Lemon

In the end, the only suspense was whether rain would fall in Brisbane before Australia could knock out the final 32 points in the final session, and therefore whether a 2-0 lead in the Ashes would be postponed until the fifth day. As it turned out, the English resistance in the light of the afternoon had only provided the home fans with some evening entertainment, with Travis Head able to put on a brief show of throwing the pink ball over the fence before returning the same way.

And still. Through the longest partnership of the series to date, 221 balls on the hottest day of the second Test, Ben Stokes and Will Jacks kept Australia working in the field, something that might have been worth doing for the simple fact of proving it was possible. With Mitchell Starc tiring after leading all series, the match became a grind. What it reflected about the Australian bowling make-up was instructive.

One of those observations is that dishonesty has different types. The Australian selectors thought it would be unfair to leave out Brendan Doggett after a debut in Perth in which he did what the team asked and picked up a few wickets along the way. He got his second cap here, but also the continued unfairness of having to keep doing what the team asked. Namely, be the man with the short ball.

Doggett has pushed his way into the side by being a bowler who throws the ball up and gets a little help from the surface. When he got here, he’s now a first-change bowler whose second and third spells involve hitting the thing at mid-off. He’s not particularly fast, not particularly threatening, and there are a dozen other fast people in the country who could do the same job. The nice line given to players when they receive a Test cap is to keep doing the same thing that got them there. Doggett is the one who shouldn’t follow the advice.

After too many overs of this sort of thing – overs where a quality spinner would have been helpful if one had been picked – the ability to force change came from another, hitherto modest, contributor. Michael Neser is not anyone’s idea of ​​the glamor athlete. He’s a man who rolls to work looking like Jean Valjean, with close-cropped hair and a scruffy beard that belong more to the prison-galley era than the mayoral sequel. On this day he physically dragged Australia through the sewers to clear the air.

Neser is a triumph of modesty. While Nathan Lyon was spitting chips on live television because he had missed one Test match, Neser has been left out for years. This was his third game in four Australian summers, all day-night games, while he was on the bench in an untold number of sides and sides and second XIs. He’s always been good enough to play, but never good enough to get past the four bigger, taller, flashier speedsters. Due to this frustration, he never said a word, at least publicly.

So Neser knows how to wait for things to come his way, and started doing just that during his first appearance on his home turf. His special quality is consistency, honed from a first-class debut in 2010 to his most high-profile moment on Sunday. His pitch map was more of a laser pointer than a scatterplot. He hit the same length, gave no drives, no width of the leg side to look at, and covered the ball subtly enough to draw mistakes.

However long Stokes and Jacks batted, Neser was a chance. First he distracted them through a long delay, giving Stokes a painful blow in the box from an inside edge. Shortly afterwards Jacks’ outside edge came, allowing Steve Smith to make a stunning catch off slip. Then the killing blow, with England 60 in the lead: the subtle move away from Stokes, the edge, and the wicketkeeper rising up against the stumps for a fine take that might not have lasted had he been standing back.

Up to that point, Neser had conceded ten singles over eight overs in the day. Brydon Carse took a two and a three before becoming the bowler’s fifth wicket, taking Smith past Rahul Dravid’s long-standing mark of 210 Test catches and leaving Joe Root as the current leader with 213. Considering Australia have taken 20 wickets to England’s 11 or 12 so far, the remainder of the series gives Smith a strong chance to come top.

It’s a day Neser deserved and will never forget: five for 42 in an Ashes victory. It could also be his last act in Test cricket. Lyon and regular captain Pat Cummins will return to Adelaide, while Mitchell Starc and Scott Boland are the other choices if fit. Neser may have passed Doggett as the next backup if injury strikes again, but fairness to either of them in this regard would mean unfairness to the other. In this position, a player can only celebrate the moments he gets, no matter how few, and this long hot afternoon when no one else could get through will always be Neser’s, a career summarized in one day.