Around half-five on the second afternoon, Joe Root turned, again, to Stuart Broad, and asked him to come back for his sixth spell of the innings. The sun was a little lower, but other than that the only thing that had changed since he finished his last, less than an hour previous, was that Australia had pressed further ahead. The two batsmen Broad had been bowling to then, Usman Khawaja and Mitchell Starc, were still in, and that much better set, Mark Wood had run out of luck, James Anderson had run out of inspiration, the partnership was up to 40 runs and Australia were closing in on a total of 400.
Whatever little flutter of hope England had when the last wicket fell had faded away again, and left everyone who shared in it feeling all the more foolish for thinking it would ever be any other way. Which fits. The decision to leave Broad out of the team for the two of the first three Tests was a poor bit of judgment that will come to define this tour, as well as the career of the coach who made it. Like Broad said, given the way England batted in those matches picking him wouldn’t have made so very much difference. But it would have at least shown that the management knew who was in their own best XI.
Now he had been selected, Broad didn’t need much persuading to come back for that extra spell. He needed one more wicket for his five-for, and a place on the SCG honours board alongside his dad Chris, who made a century there in 1988.
It had been 18 months since Broad last took five wickets in an innings, against the West Indies at Old Trafford in 2020. Of course he missed the last few months of that stretch after he tore his calf during a training session before the second Test against India during the summer just gone. It was a bad injury, which needed surgery, and three months of recuperation. Kevin Pietersen warned Broad that a similar injury had finished his own playing career. Broad is 35, and has a second life lined up in TV, there must have been times when it felt touch and go whether it would end his too.
For the first two weeks, he couldn’t even put weight on his foot. After that, there were the long hours treading water in a swimming pool, followed, as he got fitter, by lonely road and gym sessions, then trips to Wimbledon Cricket Club to take tentative steps in the nets, and solitary journeys up to Loughborough to bowl stretches of 10, 12, 14 overs in front of his rehab team. At the front of his mind all the time, the lure of one more tour to Australia, and the prospect of taking the new ball in the first innings at Brisbane, and bowling to David Warner again. The promise of it got him through.
Of course it didn’t work out the way he’d dreamed it, it rarely does. Broad has ended up a bit-part player on tour, picked for one Test on a flat track in Adelaide and then another now the series is over already. There was a time he would have spoken out about exactly how he felt about it, like he did when they dropped him from the Test against the West Indies at the Rose Bowl 2020, but this time he’s tried, some minor grumbling apart, to bite his lip. The men picked ahead of him, Ollie Robinson and James Anderson, made a strong case with their wickets, and besides, there were plenty of other good judges making Broad’s point for him in the papers and on TV.
It must have left him addressing those same questions all over again, about whether, and why, exactly, he wanted to go on flogging himself for a team who didn’t seem to rate him enough to pick him when they needed him. He said before this Test that he wasn’t going to make a spur-of-the-moment call about retirement. He says he’ll make the decision between now and the spring tour to the West Indies. But first, he had a point to prove.
This was the 19th five-for of Broad’s career. The highlights make it look as good as any of them. He got Warner, of course, in the classic fashion, just the two of them must have pictured it, with a delivery from around the wicket that zigged one way and then zagged the other, Steve Smith, too, and Cameron Green, caught behind with similar deliveries, then a vicious bouncer to remove Pat Cummins, and a cutter that had just enough on it to beat Usman Khawaja to finish. That last one was his 125th in Ashes cricket. Among Englishmen, only Ian Botham has more, with 128.
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But it wasn’t his best bowling, Broad often takes his wickets in fits and sparks, there was none of that this time, just a lot of craft, sweat, and toil. It took him 29 overs – the last time he bowled that many in an innings in which he took five was back in 2009 – and there were moments when Khawaja, Starc, and Nathan Lyon were laying into him, when he looked just as vulnerable as any of his teammates. But he persisted, bowling a line and length that, the data showed, he’d often struggled to find on his previous three tours here. He drew more false shots from batsmen than he has done in the past, too. And he made his point. How bittersweet for the team that it came so late.