Ashes 2017: No 'Miracle in Melbourne' for England as Steve Smith century steers Australia to draw

Australia 327 & 263-4 dec, England 491: Both captains shook hands on the draw as the visitors failed to get the wickets they needed to set up a dramatic finale in Melbourne

Smith and Root shook hands on the draw as England failed to take the wickets they needed (Getty Images)

There was to be no Miracle of Melbourne, then, although perhaps the real miracle is that everyone managed to get to the end without keeling over from the tedium. There are continental landmasses that have moved quicker than this fifth day, life insurance policies that have provided more basic entertainment. And as Australia trundled to safety at a little more than two runs an over, keeping their 3-0 series lead intact, perhaps the only thing more cataclysmically monotonous than the surface itself was the debate around it.

The pitch. Do we have to talk about the pitch? Oh god, do we really? Cricket people do love complaining about pitches, and strips like this that produce 24 wickets in five days do tend to bring out the amateur horticulturalist in everyone. Too much rolling. Too little watering. Insufficient clay content. Insufficient grass cover. That high-pitched noise you can hear in the background, meanwhile, is the general public screaming for mercy and seeking refuge at the nearest Big Bash game.

Was it a good pitch for Test cricket? Probably not. Too slow, too low, too little disintegration. Did it provide any less of an even contest between bat and ball than, say, the Lord’s surface for the West Indies Test in September or some of the anodyne turners served up to Australia on their tour of India earlier this year? Probably not. Pitch behaviour is the expression a hundred different variables: preparation, climate, weather, the skill of the participants, the skill of the curator, the sort of cricket being played, and occasionally blind luck. Sometimes you just get a dud. Spare us the hand-wringing, and let’s move on.

And England will move on, to Sydney, nursing a few tired limbs perhaps, but with the redoubled conviction that they can get the better of this Australian side for long periods. This was not the grandstand finish they were looking for, but if their final-day toil achieved anything, it was to underline the excellence of their efforts in bowling Australia out for 327 on day two. And despite taking just two wickets - again, neither of them Steve Smith - you would struggle to say they bowled badly. You might even conclude they did the best they could in the circumstances.

For apart from a brief 20-minute period when David Warner got going, Australia were allowed very little loose change, were simply unable to do much more than survive. There was occasionally a little movement in the air, some turn out of the rough, and yet such was the slowness of the pitch that the Australian batsmen could simply wait for the ball and play it as late as they wanted.


 Steve Smith hit yet another century for Australia 
 (AFP/Getty Images)

And so the morning passed, Australia nudging their way into the lead, Warner and Smith drawing whatever residual venom remained in the game. Warner, in particular, played a knock of uncharacteristic patience and selflessness, leaving judiciously outside the off-stump, refusing the numerous temptations to pull and hook, treating the spin of Moeen Ali and Dawid Malan with respect. But as it turned out, Warner still had one tiny kernel of hubris left in him, and shortly before lunch Joe Root worked out what it was: Root himself.

One of Root’s Australian friends once mused that Root just had one of those cheeky, cherubic faces you just longed to punch. Warner certainly found that out the hard way in Birmingham in 2013, and here again his ego found himself unable to resist trying to larrup Root’s first ball to him into the Yarra River. The ball spat out the rough, skewed high off Warner’s bat and landed safely in the hands of James Vince, running back from cover. On his 27th birthday, Root had been handed an ideal and surprising gift.


 England saluted the travelling fans at the culmination of the Test match 
 (Getty Images)

When Jonny Bairstow took a magnificent one-handed catch on the stroke of lunch to pouch an edge from Shaun Marsh, England briefly sniffed an opening. But that was really as good as it got for them. Mitch Marsh dug himself in, Smith ground out a painfully inevitable century, and as England kept running in and running in, the life slowly drained from the match. “You run out of superlatives for Smith,” one of the Channel Nine commentators observed, although to be fair we also ran out of quite a few other things, including patience, time, sanity and occasionally the will to live.

Hands were shaken and stumps drawn with 17 overs remaining. Naturally, Australia deserved their share of the credit too. These were favourable conditions for a rearguard, but it still needed doing, and for all the flatness of the occasion there were very few lapses in concentration, very few genuine alarms. They have still not yet let England take 20 wickets, and with Ashton Agar added to their side as a second spinner, will fancy their chances of wrapping up a 4-0 series win at Sydney.