After long time at home England will rely heavily on their batting to regain the Ashes. The absence of Jofra Archer and unpredictable nature of Mark Wood’s fitness, will force them to trust their inexperience bowling attack for accuracy (swing/seam) to restrict Australia to low scores in less overs!.
Under Brendon McCullum as England’s coach batting has prospered tremendously reaching a level their fans could never imagine!.
On the other hand Australia have their issues to start their innings, either batting or bowling!. In batting their opening batsman David Warner’s performance away from home is not very encouraging, especially in England against Stuart Board. Now he will to handle Ollie Robinson and Matthews Potts. In bowling Mitchell Starc’s accuracy is now under the radar. In last Ashes(2019) in Uk he only played 1 test match. However unlike England Australian bowling squad is more experience, and one would imagine this attack of pace/spin will be handful for England’s bravado batting!.
The most interesting aspect of England’s contest is, only 9 times teams batted over 100 overs (in 49 completed inns)….England only managed to bat in 3 of them for 100 plus overs!. Hence for Australia’s sake, they need to bat long and take the test match into last day!.
Toss factor
Since Ben Stokes took over England’s Test captaincy, toss factor hardly mattered for Test matches they were involved.
Its very interesting to find only 6 times (13 tests) teams chose to bat first after winning the toss, and England in 13 tests won the toss 6 times but chose to bat only twice!!.
England’s batting partnerships
There is no apparent weakness in their batting , but their opening pair seems to be bit weaker than their middle order.
In below gfx using only Runs/wkts indicator I have filtered partnerships in various situation.
Total *
1st Innings -
2nd innings -
Home -
Away -
Then i looked into how they start their series
1st Test
2nd Test
3rd Tests
England’s top batsmen under Ben Stokes leadership
Session wise in 2019 Ashes in UK
England picked most wickets in last session and Australia in 1st session. The balance has been maintained by both teams
