Australia and Travis Head were brilliant, but England’s wounds were self-inflicted. They blew it

It would be insulting to Travis Head to say he beat England at their own game.

This was not Bazball. Not when Bazball is played the way England played it in Perth; a reckless, irresponsible brand of cricket that wasted one of the biggest opportunities they will have to break their long run without an Ashes victory in Australia.

This, instead, was one of the great Ashes innings from a batter who was only opening for Australia because Usman Khawaja had suffered a second back spasm.

This was controlled positivity, calculated risk, a world-class innings of the utmost quality and aggression by Head that is everything Bazball at its best aspires to be.

This was the way to do it; not the negligent, indefensible way England’s middle order attempted it when they threw away superiority of which they could only have dreamed.

This was the most extraordinary twist in a quite bonkers Test played in fast-forward, a dramatic change in fortunes that saw bat dominate ball for the first and only time in a match that, remarkably, was all over inside two days.

And this was the ultimate demonstration of how Australia always seem to have the ability and mentality to win the big moments and the big games against the old enemy on their own turf, irrespective of England’s approach.

First we must pay credit to Head.

He was the batter Stokes identified as Australia’s best Bazballer ahead of the 2023 Ashes and how he showed them how to do it here with an innings for the ages in the oldest contest in cricket.

Head was nonchalant and relaxed when Steve Smith floated the idea of him stepping into Khawaja’s shoes at the tea break just before Australia’s second innings. The 31-year-old’s laid-back attitude has made him such a popular player on the circuit, not least as an overseas signing with Sussex, but he went out in Perth and conducted a calculated assault on England.

To put Head’s 123 off 83 balls into context, it came after England had been hurried out for just 164 to leave Australia what appeared a tough target on this Perth pitch against this England attack — the highest score of the Test, 205 — to take a 1-0 lead to Brisbane.

Tough? Make that the simplest of tasks.

From the moment Head faced the first ball from Jofra Archer, sparing Jake Weatherald an immediate interrogation while on a pair on debut, the makeshift opener was in complete control.

After Head had raced to his 50 off just 36 balls came the defining passage of play which put any hopes England had out of their reach.

Captain Ben Stokes had the ball in his hand and was tasked with repeating his first innings intervention, when he took five wickets in six overs, if his side were to have any chance.

Instead Head, after pausing to take a drink and change his gloves, smashed Stokes for four boundaries in an over, then raced along to the third fastest hundred in Australian Test history, three figures coming off just 69 balls.

It was the moment a Test England looked destined to win at lunch on the second day was snatched from them, and it was quite possibly the moment Stokes’ chances of becoming the first English captain to win in Australia in 15 years went with them.

It is not without irony that England have spent three years chasing the fastest century in their Test history only for an Australian to come along and smash an even quicker one.

Such has been English expectations of seeing one of their Bazballers break Gilbert Jessop’s 76-ball hundred, a mark that has stood for 123 long years, that there was even a book written about it last summer. It is fair to say it will not be updated any time soon.

But if Head was the architect of a blitz that saw Australia race to their target for the loss of two wickets in just 28.2 overs, then the match was actually thrown away by England in the second session of another freakish day of Test cricket.

At lunch England, despite again losing Zak Crawley in the first over to complete a pair, had battled their way to 59-1, a lead of 99, and had batted responsibly while still looking to be positive on a pitch that was offering more assistance even than on the first day.

But from a position when they were perfectly poised to kick on and finally win a first match in Australia since that 2010-11 tour, taking full advantage of the absence of two of the hosts’ best bowlers in Pat Cummins and Josh Hazlewood, they simply blew it.

Admittedly Scott Boland, wicketless and going at more than six an over on the first day, displayed his character by pushing up his length and finally getting it right to take three wickets in 11 balls. But he was given a mighty helping hand by England.

The shots played by Ollie Pope, Harry Brook and even Joe Root to the brilliant Mitchell Starc were so senseless they bordered on arrogance.

They were dumb shots.

This was England surrendering any pretence they had added brains to Bazball.

Analysts CricViz have run an ‘expected leave’ model for every delivery tracked in Test cricket since 2006. Historical data suggests Pope’s delivery would have been left 72 per cent of times on average, Brook’s 68 per cent and Root’s 72 per cent.

England were bowled out in just 34.4 overs to follow being dismissed in 32.5 overs in the first innings. That is just 405 balls faced in the Test for the loss of 20 wickets. Again, for context, that is 23 balls fewer than Alastair Cook faced alone in scoring his double century against Australia in the first Test at the Gabba in 2010.

This is to take nothing away from the Australian bowling.

Starc has stood tall in the absence of Cummins and Hazlewood and thoroughly justified the player of the match award with his 10 wickets even after Head’s historic century. He has rarely bowled better.

And how Boland needed those four second innings wickets after England had successfully gone after him on the first day, just as they had during the 2023 Ashes.

But this was England yet again shrinking, as they did in the last Ashes at Edgbaston and Lord’s when a game was firmly in their grasp.

“This England team, at the worst possible moment when they have had the best team for the conditions in Perth, have made exactly the same mistakes as in 2023,” said the former England captain Michael Vaughan on the BBC. “That is inexcusable.”

England were meant to have learned their lessons from those painful defeats, but this was the worst one yet under Stokes and coach Brendon McCullum.

It was arguably the most damaging Ashes defeat since Shane Warne snatched what had seemed an inevitable draw away from them at Adelaide in 2006, a blow that was so painful they went on to endure the first of their 5-0 thrashings.

We have seen a few painful Ashes defeats for England over the years. This tops the lot.

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An admission. I am a huge fan of what England have done under Stokes and McCullum. I love the intent and I love the positivity of so much of the cricket. They came in with England at a genuine low and have transformed their Test cricket.

They will never win the Ashes in Australia playing the timid English cricket of old and their approach, when applied correctly, and their fast-bowling attack gives them the best chance of winning in this series despite this most grievous of blows.

But the Bazball project is at a crossroads now. It has not been enough to win a series against either of the big two, India and Australia ,up to now and has never prevailed in a five-match series. There is a very real danger this series will now escalate into the sort of debacle we have seen on their last three visits.

With that in mind, it is crucial England use the extended time they now have before the second Test, a day-nighter in Brisbane starting on December 4, to have a long hard look at their methods and learn from what Head did at the Perth Stadium.

The early signs are not encouraging. It would appear a no brainer that some, if not all, of their wounded players should play in a two-day tour match in Canberra against a Prime Minister’s XI starting on November 29 against the pink-ball they will face at the Gabba.

But as it stands that England team is more likely to be predominantly made up of Lions players. Nothing that Stokes and McCullum said after this shemozzle suggested an abrupt change of mind.

“We will trust our process,” said Stokes in a spiky interview with Test Match Special’s Jonathan Agnew while McCullum added to the BBC: “We don’t do anything for optics.

“We believe in our methods and all we are trying to do is give ourselves the best chance of how we believe we can win the Ashes.

“We’ll let the dust settle on this and over the next couple of days we’ll work out whether a couple of guys going to play in that game is the right thing to do or whether keeping the team tight and making sure morale doesn’t drop is the alternative.”

Australia are not without their problems. The failure of Khawaja to take his place at the top of the order in both innings was an embarrassment, particularly as he was fit enough to play golf on each of the three days before the Test.

It may be that we have seen the last of the near 39-year-old at the highest level, particularly now that Head has shown he is the perfect man to launch Australia’s innings at the Gabba in those demanding day-night conditions.

Australia will almost certainly still be without Hazlewood for the second Test, too, even if the captain Cummins is hopeful of returning to lead his side and take the job back from Smith, who led his team well on his latest return to high office.

But for now all attention is on England and whether this tour is now about to follow the same one-sided path of the last three. It will take a lot for England to recover from this.

They may just have seen their Ashes hopes go up in largely self-inflicted flames.