Australia retain Women's Ashes as Ellyse Perry stars on a day that petered out...TALKING POINTS

The shortage of women’s Test cricket makes caution a common tendency. With no prospect of a follow-up fixture until two years down the line, to take any kind of gamble is considered a case of undue jeopardy

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An enforced naivety

As Anya Shrubsole danced down the Taunton pitch to meet Sophie Molineux midway, it was impossible not to wonder what might have been and why, before, it had not been.

The previous evening had been a crawl, a tentative fear of the worst, a resignation of sorts. There was fight; of course there was.

Laura Marsh had promised as much when she reflected the previous afternoon after rain had curtailed much of her side’s tangible hope of a victory that would have breathed some fresh impetus into a series on its last legs as a contest.

But it was a battle for survival rather than an audacious counter-attack, even in circumstances that truly only warranted the latter. The options were twofold: die wondering or go down without daring to dream.

The final 15 overs of Saturday evening brought with them 14 runs; the final session as a whole – a 42-over vigil – provided 81 runs at a run rate of 1.93. Nat Sciver maintained that her own plans had been both based upon and rearranged on account of what occurred around her.

When Amy Jones fell for a well-made 64, slapping Molineux to Rachael Haynes at mid-off, England remained 151 runs short of passing the follow-on target.

When Sarah Taylor was dismissed four overs later, Sciver was staring down the barrel of a one-bat band. There was certainly some merit to her claim that England had never planned to bat as they did.

However, the change of plan – a subtle one, perhaps – was evident in the opening blows of the final day.

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Ellyse Perry ended unbeaten on 76

There was no gung-ho fearlessness, but Shrubsole found the time to strike a boundary and pull another delivery for three between her arrival at the crease on the final day and her dismissal. Even the running between her and Sciver possessed a gusto previously absent.

Just 17 wickets fell in 261.5 overs of first-innings cricket after Meg Lanning won a crucial toss and elected to retain the Women’s Ashes. It felt a big moment as the coin was sent up into the Somerset air and as this game has progressed, that assertion has never waned.

In amongst the criticism of this England performance, however, is a simple fact – not an excuse, but a partial explainer. Sciver made her Test debut in 2014; Shrubsole a year earlier. This game marks Sciver’s fifth Test; Shrubsole’s sixth.

Quite simply, these games are too fleeting, they are a galling novelty – a pinnacle for players, a problem for administrators. There is a chicken and egg scenario at play here.

 

The struggle of Test cricket is not a new issue; that the one-day cosmos is the expanding centre of the cricketing universe is, frankly, a widely accepted truth. But the thought-processes, the tactics, the strokeplay – all of this can only improve with greater experience.

Australia were hardly blameless here for their part; many felt their batsmen – five of the top six passed fifty – could have reached for the accelerator sooner than they ultimately chose to.

That case was the same second time around; Australia, having clearly made the decision to rest their bowling attack ahead of the final T20 mini-series of this tour, trudged along at a rate that, really, benefited only Perry.

Of course, given the situation of the series, that was very much the prerogative of Lanning’s side. In its own perverse manner, this was a fairly alpha effort, batting until the very end.

Yet, what was evident was a Test naivety – the kind that blossoms naturally from a lack of exposure to the challenges of longer format.

Ellyse Perry – as is her wont – put it just about right as she looked back on her own hundred, a knock that never encountered peril and never dared consider the values of risk up against reward.

“I think it’s just an absolute pleasure to be out there,” she explained. “You want to make the most of it. We don’t play a lot of Test matches and they always feel like big occasions.”

The shortage of women’s Test cricket renders caution a common tendency. With no prospect of a follow-up fixture until two years down the line, to take any kind of gamble is considered a case of undue jeopardy.

The result, as it was here, was a game that hinged on adventure and fell away on its caution.

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Katherine Brunt took two of the four wickets to fall to seamers

Death, taxes…

And Ellyse Perry passing fifty. Quite simply, the Australian allrounder is a freak. Two years since her last Test – when she made an unbeaten 213, she filled her boots here once again.

She made the switch from white ball to red appear a seamless transition, an everyday changeover, nothing worth worrying about. She turned a complex game into the most straightforward of cakewalks.

She was fortunate on one occasion; when she had made just 20, she was rapped on the pad by Sophie Ecclestone. It was palpably out – the collision of leather upon knee-roll was a full-on knockout thump.

Perhaps, though, it caught out even the umpires – the very preposterous notion that Perry could have propped forward and missed, the sheer audacity to suggest that the impenetrable had been breached. She was relieved. For England, there was no mercy.

Perry needed no wake-up call; one senses that she never truly switches off, but this doubled her focus – possibly trebled it. There was no great reaction when she reached her milestones in either innings; there was a smile, a raise of the bat, but a recognition that this is what she does.

When she speaks, she does so with an almost disconcerting humility. She must know quite how talented she is; if she doesn’t, someone should tell her.

Pitch imperfect?

After the conclusion of the third day of this Test, just 14 wickets had fallen. England’s tail of Katherine Brunt, Anya Shrubsole, Laura Marsh and Sophie Ecclestone – all capable with bat in hand, it must be said – lasted 209 deliveries between them.

Between two hugely accomplished seam attacks including Megan Schutt, Tayla Vlaeminck, Perry, Brunt and Shrubsole, just four wickets in this game fell to seamers. One of them belonged to Nat Sciver’s part-time medium-pace.

Devoid of pace or bounce, even Vlaeminck, who tore in as if her life depended on it – as well it might have done on her Test debut, struggled to extract any assistance from a pitch that never truly came alive.

The two sessions lost to rain had as much an effect on the pitch as it did on the game itself. It meant that the surface never broke up as it otherwise might have done, given four days of dry weather.

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