Eight days before the curtain rises on the Ashes in the sold-out enormodome that is Perth\u2019s Optus Stadium, England\u2019s campaign began in semi-earnest a few actual kilometres and a million metaphorical miles away in front of a few dozen spectators in leafy, sedate Lilac Hill.<\/p>\n
What followed was intriguing, at times even encouraging, but for news of a potentially significant injury, and, while Ben Stokes had promised \u201cballs-to-the-wall\u201d action, it was more jaws to the floor as news of Mark Wood\u2019s stiff left hamstring<\/a> filtered through in mid-afternoon.<\/p>\n England had revealed their blueprint for the first Test in naming a lineup featuring five seam options including Stokes himself and no full-time spinner, with Shoaib Bashir relegated to the Lions XI. But however carefully it is prepared, sometimes a blueprint is destined to become nothing but shredder-fodder.<\/p>\n With Wood\u2019s participation in next Friday\u2019s opening Test now in doubt and Bashir\u2019s suddenly looking more likely, certainty has slipped through English fingers much as a few catches did across a breezy day by the Swan River. Brendon McCullum might have been expecting to be given food for thought here, but these will not have been the thoughts he was looking for.<\/p>\n Mark Wood went wicketless before injury struck. Photograph: Philip Brown\/Getty Images<\/p>\n While one England player was sparking fitness concerns another was dispelling them. Stokes was the most successful as well as, alongside Gus Atkinson, the hardest-working of England\u2019s bowlers and looked in impeccable fettle in bowling 16 overs and taking six wickets, all of them with short-pitched deliveries, all but one caught behind the wicket on the legside.<\/p>\n \u201cI think he was a little bit surprised,\u201d Harry Brook said, \u201cthat everybody got out the same way.\u201d Jofra Archer, the third of England\u2019s trifecta of fragile fast bowlers alongside Wood and Stokes, was less impactful but seemed no less fluent, and was midway through his 13th over when he ended the innings by dismissing Matt Potts.<\/p>\n Beyond Stokes and the wicketless Wood every England bowler snared a single victim as a Lions XI including five members of the Ashes squad \u2013 Bashir joined by Jacob Bethell, Will Jacks, Potts and, notionally at least, Brydon Carse (who sat out the first day, presumably much of it literally, with a stomach upset but is expected to contribute on Friday) \u2013 ended their innings on 382, a few minutes before the scheduled close.<\/p>\n Against England\u2019s strongest available bowlers but on a pitch Brook described as \u201ca little bit slow\u201d the Lions finished with five half-centurions. But perhaps the most notable contribution with the bat was brief and undistinguished, as another short innings extended Bethell\u2019s odds of elbowing Ollie Pope out of the first team.<\/p>\n Of Bethell\u2019s past 10 knocks for England only one has lasted more than the 17 balls he rather awkwardly faced on his way to scoring two runs here before becoming Stokes\u2019s second victim, and none has yielded more than 26 runs. He may not currently be in the first team but if any No 3 ended the day with their position in peril it was Bethell himself, as the rising star of England\u2019s young batting constellation.<\/p>\n skip past newsletter promotion<\/a><\/p>\n Subscribe to our cricket newsletter for our writers’ thoughts on the biggest stories and a review of the week\u2019s action<\/p>\n Privacy Notice: Newsletters may contain information about charities, online ads, and content funded by outside parties. If you do not have an account, we will create a guest account for you on theguardian.com<\/a> to send you this newsletter. You can complete full registration at any time. For more information about how we use your data see our Privacy Policy<\/a>. We use Google reCaptcha to protect our website and the Google Privacy Policy<\/a> and Terms of Service<\/a> apply.<\/p>\n after newsletter promotion<\/p>\n The Lions\u2019 top-scorers included Durham\u2019s Ben McKinney, who turned 21 a few weeks ago and opened the innings in assured style before becoming Josh Tongue\u2019s only scalp having scored 67, and Somerset\u2019s Thomas Rew, who turns 18 in a couple of weeks and scored 55 before becoming Gus Atkinson\u2019s. Jordan Cox, whose place in the Test side Bethell snaffled after the Essex player broke a thumb in New Zealand a year ago \u2013 during another one-off warm-up game, as it happens \u2013 scored 53 before being tempted to tuck in to one of Stokes\u2019s diet of short balls.<\/p>\n While England may decide, should picking Wood ultimately represent too much of a risk, to maintain the balance in their blueprint by simply replacing him with Carse, Bashir may look more appealing given the frequent marmalising that Joe Root\u2019s part-time spin received here.<\/p>\n Jacks scored 84 off 85 balls with three sixes, all of them off Root\u2019s bowling, while Potts produced an eye-catching late-innings cameo, motoring to his half-century in 40 balls by hitting Root for four successive sixes and then, in the following over, pulling Archer for another. Suitably encouraged he made no attempt to decelerate and duly top-edged Archer\u2019s next delivery with a wildly swinging bat to a back-pedalling Zak Crawley at slip.<\/p>\n \u201cWe obviously haven\u2019t spent much time together in the recent few months, so just to get back together as a group and get out on the pitch, it was a successful day,\u201d said Brook. \u201cHopefully tomorrow will be another gorgeous day in Perth, and hopefully we can pile the runs on. It\u2019s not just going to be easy \u2013 we\u2019ve got some awesome bowlers and the Lions boys too, there\u2019s a lot of their players here and some bowl rockets as well. It\u2019s not going to be light work out there. It\u2019s going to be a challenge and they\u2019re going to want to prove a point. So it\u2019s going to be a test and hopefully we can get some decent runs.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Eight days before the curtain rises on the Ashes in the sold-out enormodome that is Perth\u2019s Optus Stadium,…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":282225,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[564],"tags":[64,63,740,85],"class_list":["post-282224","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-cricket","tag-au","tag-australia","tag-cricket","tag-sports"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/282224","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=282224"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/282224\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/282225"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=282224"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=282224"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=282224"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}