Ashes 2019: Rory Burns lifts England spirits before Australia reassert their dominance in fourth Test

Australia 497-8 dec, England 200-5: To watch Burns and Joe Root chipping away at Australia’s mammoth first-innings total was to feel that rarest of sensations for followers of English cricket in recent years: calm. It wasn't to last, though

Three of them have retired. Four of them are playing in this match. One is now a limited-overs specialist who hasn’t played a red-ball game for almost a year. Six are still knocking around in Championship cricket, with varying degrees of success, although you could argue that one of them isn’t actually a batsman any more. One is unemployed after being released by his county at the end of the season. The 15 different opening batsmen that England have tried since the retirement of Andrew Strauss in 2012 have met with a variety of fates, but one thing links them all: none of them lasted very long. Until now.

It took one of the balls of the day from Josh Hazlewood to finally shift Rory Burns (No 13) from his five-hour vigil. But in that time, he had done enough. Not enough, perhaps, to save his side from defeat in the fourth Test. Not enough to complete his second Test century. But enough to prove to himself, to his team-mates and to English cricket at large that finally, their search for a reliable presence at the top of the order is at an end.

A Test opener bats in three dimensions. The first two – runs and time – are clearly the most important, but top-order batsmen in particular have a third imperative: mood. Their job is to set the tone, which involves more than simply keeping the scoreboard moving. The best openers emanate a sense of permanence that can waft through the rest of the dressing room like a pleasant aroma. Jonathan Trott (No 5) was particularly gifted in this respect, which is what made his brief recall as opener in 2015 so jarringly horrifying to watch. And to watch Burns and Joe Root (No 2) batting at Old Trafford on Friday, chipping away at Australia’s mammoth first-innings total, was to feel that rarest of sensations for followers of English cricket in recent years: calm.

For most Test sides these days, but for England especially, calm has been in exceptionally short supply. Seven years after Strauss’s retirement broke up one of England’s greatest ever opening partnerships, the rookie England opener stepping into the breach now has to face not just a fresh new ball and the world’s best bowlers, but the weight of all the failures that have gone before him. It’s a fatalism that rests not in the player himself, but one he can sniff in the air around him from the moment his name comes out of the selection hat: the nervous tension of a crowd willing them on through gritted teeth, the familiar mumble that accompanies their first play and miss.

And so when Burns steps out to open the innings for England, in a way he’s not simply battling the opposition. He’s fighting the ghosts of honest triers like Sam Robson (No 4) and Adam Lyth (No 6) and Ben Duckett (No 9) and Michael Carberry (No 3), the memories of failed experiments like Moeen Ali (No 7), and a watching public that on some repressed level already expects him to fail and has mentally prepared themselves for that exact outcome before he has even faced his first delivery.

Two early wickets either side of the delayed start – Joe Denly (No 14) late on Thursday evening and Craig Overton first thing on Friday afternoon – merely added to the sense of despondency. England were 472 runs behind, the Ashes were slipping away and Hazlewood was putting it exactly where he wanted it. Burns himself was coming off two low scores in Leeds and the lingering suspicion that his century in Birmingham had been a flukey aberration rather than a genuine measure of his class.

He wasn’t chanceless here, either. But in many ways, this was a far superior effort to his Edgbaston knock. After a few early scares, he climbed into Mitchell Starc, taking him for eight in an over to get England moving. Nathan Lyon was introduced for an early bowl and Burns resolved to play him off the back foot, cutting him well through point and cover.

Pat Cummins arrived to deliver his usual fusillade of head-bangers and rib-ticklers. This, in hindsight, was the key period of Burns’s innings. Australia have been probing this area of Burns’s game all series, convinced that he’s vulnerable to well-directed bumpers from over the wicket. Torn between allowing Australia to keep bowling there and trying to hit them off their plans, Burns chose a middle path. He withstood, held his nerve, got under the head-high stuff, got on top of anything lower, and eventually hooked Hazlewood fine for four.

The return of Starc, hit for 12 in his first over back, allowed Burns to reach his fifty. And as fresh afternoon melted into chilly evening, as the England fans cheered themselves by goading Lyon over his missed run-out at Headingley, as Australia began to look increasingly ragged, Burns could survey the scene with more than a little satisfaction. Against the best attack in world cricket, in the biggest series of them all, he had seen them off.

Jason Roy leaves the field after being dismissed by Josh Hazlewood (Getty)

A century would have been a fitting reward, but in truth Burns’s eventual dismissal for 81 had been telegraphed a little in advance. He was beaten a few times by Cummins and Lyon, almost run out attempting a quick single, nearly caught at cover trying to cut the spinner. This is the third dimension of Test batting: even with runs on the board and time in the bank, the evaporation of England’s composure would ultimately prove their undoing.

As England’s evening wobble proved, such a state of mind can be highly transient. But a measure of how adeptly Burns helmed England for most of the day was how frenetic they looked after he departed. His dismissal seemed to snap them out of their trance. Root looked discomfited and went LBW soon after; Roy (No 15) made a few quick runs but never got remotely close to serenity. As England limped to stumps, the calmness of Burns felt like a distant memory.

Still, he could be pleased with his day’s work. A testament to Burns’s excellence this series is how his counterparts have struggled. Burns now has 323 runs in this series at an average of almost 50. The other five openers in this series – David Warner, Marcus Harris, Cameron Bancroft, Denly and Roy – have 224 between them, at an average of just above 10. Whatever happens between now and the end of the series, Burns has surpassed all expectations.

The next Test match will be his 12th in a row. None of his most recent predecessors in the role – not Keaton Jennings (No 11) or Alex Hales (No 8) or Mark Stoneman (No 12) or Nick Compton (No 1) – ever got that far. And while his average of 30 may still be a little short of Haseeb Hameed (No 10), while he may have ridden his luck at times, Burns has at least done enough to secure himself a full winter touring schedule and a good deal of patience. Whisper it, but England’s seven-year itch may, at last, have been scratched.