Joe Root kept England afloat on day one of the second Ashes Test with his brilliant 135 not out.<\/p>\n
It rescued England from 5-2 and an unbroken last-wicket partnership of 61 with Jofra Archer dragged the tourists to 325-9 at the close.<\/p>\n
But did Ben Stokes make the right decision in not declaring? <\/p>\n
It is often said the pink ball used in day-night Tests is most difficult to face when new under the lights and if England had declared when their ninth wicket fell they would have had 30 minutes to bowl at Australia in ideal conditions.<\/p>\n
“The strategy of day-night Tests is you want to bowl under lights with the new ball,” former Australia bowler Glenn McGrath told the BBC’s Daily Ashes Debrief.<\/p>\n
“He [Stokes] will have thought Jofra wasn’t going to last. <\/p>\n
“As it turned out Australia bowled pretty poorly. They didn’t bowl real good bouncers, didn’t mix the pace up.”<\/p>\n
Former England captain Michael Vaughan backed Stokes’ decision to bat on, however.<\/p>\n
“When Jofra Archer went out there he was told to launch,” Vaughan said. “When he hit a few you say ‘keep going’.<\/p>\n
“If England can bat for 20 or 30 minutes [on day two] you take the game a bit deeper, the pink ball will be a bit harder [in Australia’s innings] when the twilight comes. <\/p>\n
“Those runs are invaluable. It buys you a bit more time in the second innings.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Joe Root kept England afloat on day one of the second Ashes Test with his brilliant 135 not…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":299749,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[34],"tags":[1721,101,56,54,55],"class_list":["post-299748","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-cricket","tag-cricket","tag-sports","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom","tag-unitedkingdom"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/299748","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=299748"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/299748\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/299749"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=299748"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=299748"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=299748"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}