England’s grim fascination with the batting collapse: ‘You feel like you’ve had no time to breathe’

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Have you ever been walking over a bridge when the thought pops into your head: “I wonder what would happen if I flung myself off?”

When chopping vegetables, does your mind ever momentarily go to a place where you’ve hacked your own fingers off — not for a laugh, exactly, but because you could do that. You won’t. But you could.

What about when batting on a bouncy track in the Australian city of Perth, during the opening match of a hugely anticipated Ashes series? You know the expansive cover drive isn’t the shot to be attempting. Hell, you’ve seen your team-mate perish in exactly that fashion a matter of seconds earlier. You won’t do that. But you could.

Ah, and now you have.

The French have a phrase for this sudden and fleeting urge to do something dangerous. Of course they do. It’s L’appel du vide — ‘The call of the void.’ It is apparently a sign of a healthy survival instinct, the recoiling at the ‘void’, a sign of a desire to live.

Except England’s batters didn’t recoil during that Test last week. They threw the blade on the up outside off stump and plummeted head-first into the abyss at Perth Stadium.

There are those who think this Ben Stokes-captained, Brendon McCullum-coached side don’t give a hoot about optics, that they sneer in the face of self-reflection and contrition and would most certainly flick the Vs at morbid French idioms. But after the humiliation of Perth and the lengthy post-mortems, pot-stirrings and existential crises, England’s top order might will live again in the second Test starting in Brisbane next Thursday and breathe life into the series.

This team can both confound and astonish, defy logic while also reinforcing time-old tropes — sometimes in the space of a single game.

It’s not like we haven’t seen this sort of thing before, with either this England side or those of the past. Batting collapses are as English as the stiff upper lip, drizzly Tuesdays and a penchant for queuing.

Any English cricket fan of the 1980s and 1990s is well versed in the particular lurching dread of a batting order falling apart like tissue paper under the pressure hose of an Australian bowling line-up. Or West Indian, South African, Sri Lankan… and whoever else, come to think of it. You name ’em, we can collapse against ’em. But this one was right up there with the worst in living memory. Surely?

With three unexpected days to kill in Perth, The Athletic invites Andy Zaltzman — statistician for BBC radio’s Test Match Special — for a coffee to talk all things batting collapse. What else are we going to do? Swim in the shark-infested waters of Cottesloe Beach? No thanks.

So over a flat white at a Kinky Lizard cafe, Zaltzman enters his mind palace to sift through the rubble of English batting collapses.

He starts by picking over the bones of what we’ve just witnessed.

England’s second-innings collapses of 3-0 (three wickets going down without a run being scored) and 4-12 followed a first-innings capitulation of 4-5.

Pretty bad, but they’ve had worse. Indeed, they nearly did. Zaltzman points out that, if Jamie Smith had not been dropped by Usman Khawaja three balls after Joe Root chopped on, it would have been just the fourth time in England men’s Test history that they had lost four wickets without scoring a run, and the first since 1977.

In the event, it was only the eighth time since 1970 that England lost three of their top-order wickets without scoring a run.

Still, it gets worse.

Since the beginning of 2024, Stokes and company have been dismissed in under 40 overs seven times: twice on the pacy (but by no means unplayable, just ask Travis Head, or the ICC, world cricket’s governing body) track in Perth; on the turning wickets of Rajkot (India), Rawalpindi and Multan (both Pakistan); and at opposite ends of the earth — at Hamilton against New Zealand and the Oval in London against Sri Lanka.

Zaltzman informs The Athletic that this is as frequently as it happened for the England sides of the 1980s and 1990s combined, and something England teams entirely avoided between 1921 and 1976. Plenty of those had played on uncovered pitches, too.

There have been some pretty bad collapses of late, then, but was the one in Perth last week England’s worst ever?

Zaltzman proposes the final Test defeat to South Africa at Cape Town in 1996 as a potential contender.

With the series tied 0-0 after four matches, England were 138-4 and 47 runs ahead in their second innings, with Graham Thorpe and Graeme Hick well set. Hick and Jack Russell were out in the same over to Shaun Pollock. Thorpe was then run out. England fell to 140-8, and then to 157 all out. They lost the match by 10 wickets and the series 1-0 at the last.

“England were so shot mentally they might have been blown down with a feather,” wrote Matthew Engel of the defeat in that year’s Wisden.

Honourable mentions must go to the collapses of Jamaica 2009 and Brisbane 1990. Then there is Adelaide 2006.

On the evening of the second and final day of that disastrous first Test in Perth, the city’s bars and pubs were reverberating with forlorn comparisons to England’s final day capitulation to Australia 19 years ago. That was the one where Shane Warne well and truly got in their heads and winkled them out for 129 in their second innings. England went on to lose a game they had dominated — they declared their first innings at 551-6, for goodness sake — and never recovered.

The series went on to be surrendered 5-0.

“That 2006 Adelaide match was a total mental disintegration,” Michael Vaughan tells The Athletic.

The former England captain was out of the side injured during that series, and replaced by Andrew ‘Freddie’ Flintoff, but remembers the horror of watching it unfold as the tourists, having taken a 97-run lead into the final day with nine wickets in hand, choked spectacularly. “That’s the hardest position to be in as a team: when the opposition can’t lose and you can. Horrible.”

Vaughan made his Test debut in the guts of a collapse against South Africa at Johannesburg in 1999, with Pollock and Allan Donald running amok and reducing England to 2-4.

“You almost feel like you’ve had no time to breathe in those situations,” Vaughan says. “Chris Adams came in at No 6. I couldn’t give him any help because I’d not faced a single ball. I basically said, ‘Good luck. I’ve got no idea what’s happening!’”

Vaughan’s 2005 side were no strangers to a batting collapse, notably on home turf at Lord’s in the first Ashes Test, where they went from 10-0 to 21-5 and eventually lost. “Glenn McGrath had it on a string,” he says. “I maintain mine (he was clean-bowled for three) kept a bit low though, and Freddie’s (Flintoff got clean-bowled for nought) did too, for that matter!”

At Trent Bridge a month later, when chasing 129 to win and go 2-1 up in the series, England staggered to 116-7 before the unlikely duo of Ashley Giles and Matthew Hoggard saw them home. Wicketkeeper Geraint Jones was that seventh wicket to fall in Nottingham. He danced down the wicket to Warne (him again) and was caught at mid-off.

“It’s the stuff of nightmares, isn’t it?” Jones tells The Athletic. “You’re scrabbling around to get your pads on, there’s a load of commotion, and you keep telling yourself to be calm and collected, but how can you be when you are due in the middle and you’re only half-dressed?

“The other thing with collapses is that you arrive in the middle and the opposition are absolutely flying high. There’s often a lot of chatter. A lot of pressure.”

Jones does not regret his shot that late August day. “I was millimetres away from middling it, and I was trying to change the momentum,” he insists, even if the home fans at Nottingham did not see it that way.

“A few of the old Notts boys let me know it wasn’t something Chris Read (Jones’ rival for the England gloves then, and a Nottinghamshire player) would have done. Thankfully, a few minutes later, it was all forgotten as we knocked off the runs — not that I could watch back in the changing rooms.”

Jones was one of the procession in the collapse Down Under a year later.

“Adelaide was a real gut-punch,” he says. “An awful loss. We needed to be more assertive, but we just couldn’t. When they chased them down late that evening (Australia knocked off the required 168 runs, winning by six wickets), we were shell-shocked and just felt… lost. I can totally relate to how Ben Stokes said he felt after losing in Perth.”

The scoreboard paralysis and dawning realisation of defeat meant the Adelaide match was a gripping kind of loss for England and their supporters, the kind that sticks with you decades later. Those two days in Perth last week may well become the same, even if it feels more like a happy-slapping snatch-and-grab in comparison right now — albeit one where England slapped themselves around a bit first, before dropping their golden handbag into their assailant’s lap, adorned with a post-it note saying ‘Steal me’.

Actually, maybe this one does feel worse.

England were in a position to win, never mind draw.

Another few hours of batting would have set up the men’s team’s first Test victory in Australia in 14 years.

“Instead,” Zaltzman says, his mouth flickering somewhere between a smile and a grimace, “they actually had two of the worst back-to-back sessions in their Test history: 105-9 in 19.5 overs with the bat, followed by 205-2 in 28.2 overs with the ball.”

“You know,” laments Vaughan, “most collapses happen because one of two things: great bowling and hard conditions, or one team reacting in a way that’s not the right way to react at that moment. The latter is what happened in Perth. England got ahead of themselves and thought they had the job done. They’ll be absolutely kicking themselves they gave that position away.”

Batting collapses borne out of opposition genius or in treacherous conditions are one thing, but those that are a result of a team’s own hand, such as ‘Perth 2025” (is it being called that yet?), are far harder to stomach for players and fans.

“Absolutely, those ones are the ones that are harder to reconcile,” adds Vaughan. “The ones that you, as a team, feel responsible for.

“It’s like, y’know… we did this to ourselves.”