There we have it. \u201cHopefully we can put a good score on the board,\u201d says England captain Ben Stokes on Fox Cricket.<\/p>\n
Meanwhile, we have confirmation from Steve Smith that Todd Murphy will not play – so for the fourth time in six Tests, Australia will not play with a frontline spinner. Beau Webster is in for Jhye Richardson. For England, Matthew Potts is in for the injured seamer Gus Atkinson.<\/p>\n
No Australian spinner for the first time in almost 140 years is one thing. But a few more troubling high (low) water marks for the craft too.<\/p>\n
The MCG Test was the first time in history for an Australian Test not to feature a single ball of spin bowled.<\/p>\n
I imagine we\u2019ll see Travis Head at some point here in Sydney, a bit of Will Jacks for the tourists as well, maybe even some Beau Webster off-spin along with those medium pacers of his. But as it stands, we\u2019ve had just nine wickets fall to spin this Ashes – the equal fewest for a series (longer than two Tests) in this country.<\/p>\n
And we\u2019re easily going to have the fewest balls bowled by tweakers for an Australian summer since the start of the century. Tough times for turn indeed.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"There we have it. \u201cHopefully we can put a good score on the board,\u201d says England captain Ben…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":389872,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[564],"tags":[64,63,740,85],"class_list":{"0":"post-390124","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-cricket","8":"tag-au","9":"tag-australia","10":"tag-cricket","11":"tag-sports"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/390124","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=390124"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/390124\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/389872"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=390124"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=390124"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=390124"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}