On the first anniversary of Jonny Bairstow’s controversial stumping at Lord’s, former England captain Joe Root has admitted he might well have taken the same action as his Ashes rival had he been faced with a similar scenario.
England’s players have had their say on the pivotal moment of last year’s drawn campaign – when Australia keeper Alex Carey threw down the stumps with Bairstow ambling carelessly out of his crease – in a three-part documentary series ‘The Ashes 2023 | Our Take’.
The series, produced and aired by England and Wales Cricket Board, provides the counterpoint to Cricket Australia’s latest edition of ‘The Test’ with the central characters of the incendiary second Test at Lord’s revealing new insights.
Veteran England bowlers Stuart Broad and Moeen Ali both note Bairstow had developed a habit of walking down the pitch “quite early” after the ball had passed through to the wicketkeeper, which is what caused his dramatic downfall on day five at Lord’s.
But it’s the view of Root, who had led England in the preceding three Ashes campaigns before handing over the role to Ben Strokes, who somewhat surprisingly sided with the laws of cricket which left no doubt over the legality of Bairstow’s dismissal.
“Initially I was quite angry, but I think when you’re involved in the game it’s very difficult to put yourself in the other position,” Root said.
“So I’d like to say I would have dealt with it differently (than Australia), but I could very easily have done the same thing.
“At the end of the day it’s within the laws of the game. You should be aware as a player.
“Jonny will hate me saying this, but if you stay in your crease you can’t get given out can you?”
Bairstow is interviewed in the documentary series, but doesn’t venture a definitive view on the incident which sent the England fans at Lord’s into apoplexy and saw one member of the Marylebone Cricket Club slapped with a life ban.
Another two members of the once-venerated MCC were handed suspensions after being found guilty of “abusive, offensive or inappropriate behaviour or language” amid ugly scenes as the team left the field for lunch.
“Who knows whether it was right or wrong, or anything in between,” Bairstow said of his second innings dismissal for 10 that preceded England’s 43-run defeat.
“We’re out there representing ourselves, and as long as you can go home and be all right with yourself then so be it.”
The suggestion Australia’s players should have taken a moral stance rather than sticking to the letter of cricket’s laws was also raised by Moeen and Broad who obliquely referenced the 2018 sandpaper incident at Cape Town, and its fallout.
“I just thought it was a great opportunity for Australia, with everything they’ve gone through over the years, it’s a missed opportunity I guess,” Moeen said.
“(But) it’s the law and it’s out.”
Broad made the same point directly to the Australia players as the teams returned to the field after lunch on day five at Lord’s, when he claims he inadvertently found himself in the midst of his rivals’ group huddle.
In the documentary, Broad can be heard pointing out to Carey, Steve Smith and other Australia players that “not one single player in your team said ‘look this is a bad decision’.”
“I don’t know if I meant it particularly, but I said it,” Broad told the documentary.
Broad also concedes his sustained verbal stoushes with his opponents during his two-hour stay at the crease either side of lunch that day – when he and Stokes added a gallant 108 for the seventh wicket – was a “pantomime performance”.
“It was genuine anger and red mist for about ten minutes,” Broad recalled of his arrival at the crease in the immediate aftermath of Bairstow’s wicket as the crowd became increasingly febrile.
“I can’t really remember what I was saying, I had lost the plot a little bit.
“I kept up this sort of pantomime performance for about three hours.
“I carried on doing my petulant nonsense. “This … ignited the series. This is what we wanted; the fans are properly with us here.”
For his part, Stokes claims he opted not to directly engage in the controversy beyond querying officiating umpire Ahsan Raza as to whether he had called ‘over’ prior to Carey throwing down the stumps.
When it became clear the ball remained ‘live’ at that moment and the dismissal was upheld, Stokes focused on the 178 runs England still needed for victory with only a handful of tailenders to lend support him.
“Broady has always been a person who looks for something to get him going,” Stokes recalls in ‘The Ashes 2023’.
“He came out fiery, he wasn’t happy and he felt he needed to pick a fight with the whole Australian cricket team out on the field.
“I don’t think I’ve ever witnessed a cricketer shouting at the opposition captain from 40 yards away.
“Broady did say ‘am I going a bit too far here?’ and I said ‘nah, keep it up, it’s class’.
“It was some good spectating but I chose to stay out of it and just concentrate on what I needed to do.”
Stokes’s extraordinary 155 from 214 balls faced, strewn with nine sixes and as many boundaries, briefly gave the braying Lord’s mob hope of an unlikely England win to level the series 1-1.
But when Stokes finally mishit another attempted big hit, England lost three wickets for the addition of a solitary run (including Broad) as Australia secured a 2-0 Ashes lead.
When players assembled on field for post-match presentations, Stokes is seen in conversation with rival captain Pat Cummins who congratulated his foe on a remarkable innings which Cummins described as “top drawer”.
“Can you just do it to another team?” joked the Australia skipper, who was on the receiving end of Stokes’s match-winning rearguard innings at Headingley during the 2019 Ashes series.
But while Stokes’s efforts at Lord’s proved in vain, Root claimed the example England’s captain showed helped dispel doubts over the team’s approach that were raised after their loss in the series opener and a middle-order surrender in the first innings at Lord’s.
He believes the belligerence Stokes displayed in the face of near-hopeless circumstances underscored the merits of England’s ‘BazBall’ method of relentless attack, which proved a key to them ultimately levelling last year’s series 2-2.
“It deserved more than for us to come out on the wrong end of that (Lord’s) result,” Root said in the documentary.
“For England’s captain to show us this is how we play our cricket regardless of the situation, regardless of what people might have said in the first innings, how we got dismissed, reckless, careless, no thought behind it.
“It was a really powerful moment for us as a team and the rest of the series as well.”