Mike Atherton: Joe Root’s decision to bat on a green-tinged pitch defines incredible Day 1 for Australia at the Gabba

The opening day of the Ashes could not have gone any worse for Root, who made a nine-ball duck while his opposite number, Pat Cummins, captaining Australia for the first time, took his first five-wicket haul against England. With Rory Burns becoming the first batsman for 85 years to be dismissed first ball of an Ashes series, it was a highly dramatic opening, in keeping with this storied contest.

Although this was far from being a quick Gabba pitch — nothing like the one on which Mitchell Johnson wreaked terror seven years ago — there was the usual extra bounce and, as has often been the case, England’s batsmen struggled to cope with it, defending too readily at good length balls that could have been ignored. Australia’s bowling was incisive, their catching wonderfully sharp and every mistake batsmen made was penalised. England looked as ill-prepared as we imagined they would be.

There will be a lot of focus on Root’s decision to bat first and definitive judgment must wait. In his defence, Cummins described it as a 50-50 call and would have made the same decision. Root’s justification — that the softer than usual pitch would dent, become quicker and therefore harder to bat on as the game progressed — demands our consideration and will only be proved right or wrong over the next few days. Still, at the close, he probably wished his time over again.

There was certainly enough movement off the surface, combined with the heavy cloud cover, to have justified bowling. The psychology of the decision is fascinating and may have played its part. Bowl first and mess it up, and the captain takes the flak, as Hutton did and Hussain continues to do, even though it is almost two decades now since he sent Australia on their way in the 2002-03 series. It is the batsmen, not the captain, who get the blame if a captain bats first and it goes wrong.

In his overnight column in the Sydney Morning Herald, Mark Taylor, the fine former Australia captain, had urged Root to forget history and bowl if faced with grey above and green below. In fact, there is history enough at the Gabba to suggest bowling first can work here, but the alternative examples of insertion going wrong are more memorable and have gained more traction in the imagination.

Confirmation had also come at the toss that England would be without either James Anderson or Stuart Broad for the first time in Tests for five years — a bit like the Royal Shakespeare Company announcing a season without Gielgud and Olivier. On the basis of their age and so little preparation — in a newspaper column Anderson had written that he had never felt so underprepared — it was a perfectly reasonable decision. Whether Olivier and Gielgud would have swallowed their egos to carry drinks, as Broad and Anderson did mid-afternoon, is doubtful.

The start of this series will go down in folklore, much as the 2006-07 series opening did. Then, it was Steve Harmison who betrayed England’s anxiety and lack of preparedness by sending the first ball straight into the hands of second slip. This time, the start was no less dramatic but was more consequential, as Burns became the first man since Stan Worthington in 1936 to be dismissed first ball of the Ashes. Worthington’s career lasted only two more matches.

This was Burns’s sixth blob of the calendar year, which suggests a nervous starter. Here he was bowled behind his legs, his footwork in a tangle, to a ball that was little more than an inviting leg-stump half-volley, a dream offering to an opener. Nerves and adrenaline exaggerate a batsman’s movements and Burns got so far across his crease he exposed his leg stump invitingly. Mitchell Starc’s reaction, with the veins on his neck bulging as he roared his approval and was swamped by his teammates, revealed this encounter had lost none of its meaning.

The ground was abuzz. Two more wickets fell in the opening hour, as the ball nipped slowly off a clearly receptive surface, and Cummins switched his attack intelligently. Dawid Malan failed to remove his bat from danger quickly enough, edging a ball he should have left alone, at which point Cummins brought himself into the attack immediately at the first sighting of Root — a revealing move. As opposing captains and top-ranked players of their respective disciplines, their battle will be fascinating, but it did not come to pass, as Josh Hazlewood worked Root over before drawing him forward to find the edge.

On the anniversary of the death of his father, Ged, Ben Stokes wore a black armband adorned with the number 568, his dad’s cap number from his rugby league days with New Zealand. But his return to the crease, after a lengthy lay-off since July, was a brief one, as Cummins squared him up on the back foot from round the wicket. This was Cummins’s first wicket as captain, his second coming immediately after lunch as Hameed propped forward and edged to second slip.

In his first Ashes Test, Hameed had shaped with composure, looking sure-footed and unfurling the occasional sweet drive. England’s other Ashes debutant in the top order, Ollie Pope, also fared well enough, always busy and stealing sharp singles repeatedly into the cover region. After Hameed’s dismissal four balls after lunch, England countered through Jos Buttler. So desperate was the situation that Buttler went into white ball mode, hitting Hazelwood twice over the top, and reminding Australia, briefly, what he had done to them in October in Dubai in the T20 World Cup.

Starc returned to find Buttler’s edge on the angle, and then Hazlewood pouched two superb diving catches at fine leg to put the gloss on a fine fielding performance, as Pope and then Chris Woakes took on the short ball. The first of them gave Cameron Green a first Test wicket, the second gave Cummins his fifth. In Mark Wood’s dismissal, fending a bouncer from Cummins to short-leg, there was a reminder of the pain England’s tailenders endured four years ago, but for the most part this was an examination of technique rather than ticker.

Dark, thundery clouds gathered, as England succumbed on the stroke of tea, and there were few silver linings. Every England captain wants to start an Ashes series well, but for Root there were echoes of Andrew Flintoff, as captain, who fell for a duck in 2006-07, as did Andrew Strauss four years later. Their fortunes thereafter could not have been more contrasting, with Flintoff suffering an ignominious whitewash, and Strauss leading England to one of the most memorable triumphs in history.

Whatever awaits Root over the next few weeks, there was a phalanx of journalists covering the game remotely from Sydney grateful not to have endured a 14-day quarantine in Queensland to witness that start live.

– TheTimes