Pat Cummins is wide-eyed. Alex Carey offers a grin. Marnus Labuschagne is laughing incredulously. Usman Khawaja splutters, “We’re at Lord’s.” David Warner just shakes his head.
Australia’s candid dressing-room debrief, in the aftermath of the Jonny Bairstow stumping and a flurry of abuse from Marylebone Cricket Club members in the Lord’s Long Room, is revealed by the third season of the Amazon Prime documentary series The Test, which captures last year’s epic Ashes fight.
Alex Carey and Pat Cummins celebrate Jonny Bairstow’s wicket.Credit: Reuters
As much as the series was one of the greatest ever played, members of the touring Australian side were left with a sour impression of the way the crowds at Lord’s and elsewhere turned on them, combined with what Khawaja called the “self-righteous” attitude of the England team.
Hostile enough at Edgbaston, things went to another level with the legitimate dismissal of Bairstow, when captain Pat Cummins and wicketkeeper Alex Carey noticed a tendency to wander out of his crease – the gloveman hit the stumps with an instinctive underarm that found Bairstow well out.
At that moment, an injured Nathan Lyon reacts with glee in the dressing room. “That’s just blatantly out,” he says. “[Laughs] that’s made my calf feel better … Suck eggs.”
When the Australian players return to the dressing room immediately after being abused and physically accosted by MCC members, the three-part documentary directed by Adrian Brown and Sheldon Wynne captures their reaction.
“They were kicking off over the fence,” reserve batter Marcus Harris says. “I was like, ‘You wrote the rules you f—ing idiots’. It’s not our fault’.”
Labuschagne is chuckling as he relays what he saw in the Long Room of the Members Pavilion, and then an exchange between Bairstow and Warner in the two teams’ shared lunch room.
“I don’t think I’ve ever seen a group of grown, old men … This bloke was foaming at the mouth,” Labuschagne says. “A bloke kicked ‘Bull’ [David Warner] when he went up the stairs.
“You almost missed a brawl in the lunchroom. Jonny came in hot. He goes ‘Are you guys happy with that’, and ‘Bull’ goes ‘Yeah, very’. Freaking priceless.”
After conferring with the head coach Andrew McDonald, Cummins reflects on the stumping and the atmosphere to his teammates.
“There wasn’t anything cheeky about it, it was literally got the ball, roll it back,” he says, before being asked if any choice words were exchanged on the field.
“[Stuart] Broad saying, ‘Unfortunately mate that’s what you’ll be remembered for. I can’t believe you’ve done that’. And I’m like, ‘Oh Broady, because you’re such an upstanding citizen mate aren’t you’. He’s like, ‘Listen to the crowd mate, listen to the crowd’ and I’m like, ‘Yeah they’re not my mates, mate’.”
Later, he tells the filmmakers that this would be his indelible memory of the game. “Walking back into the Long Room, that’s how I’ll always remember the Lord’s Test match,” he says. “It was like we’d ripped the soul out of them.”
Australian opener Usman Khawaja walks past members inside Lord’s famous Long Room following a heated confrontation on day five of the second Ashes Test. MCC members hurled abuse at Australia’s players — for which three members have now been suspended — as they went into the rooms ahead of the lunch break following the controversial dismissal of Jonny Bairstow.Credit: Nine
After lunch, as the Australians return to the field and absorb a furious Ben Stokes innings to win the Test and go up 2-0 (an Ashes-sealing lead as it turned out), Carey reveals that Cummins specifically told the players not to play up to the crowd in their post-game celebrations.
“We won the Test match and to Patty’s credit he basically said to the group, ‘There’s no need to carry on like idiots to the crowd, it’s about us’,” Carey says.
As for the furore in the aftermath about the spirit of cricket, a conversation revved up by Stokes and England’s coach Brendon McCullum, Lyon is succinct: “It’s a load of crap. It’s a stumping, it’s out every day of the week.”
Earlier in the same match, Mitchell Starc is shown reacting to the (correct) decision to rule Ben Duckett not out for a catch where the left-arm fast bowler grounded the ball as he steadied his body.
Australian wicketkeeper Alex Carey was in the eye of the storm over the Jonny Bairstow stumping.Credit: Reuters
“No one walk off now if you get caught, just hang around and wait for the replay,” Starc fumes when he returns to the dressing room. The next day, when Duckett is caught down the legside by Carey while hooking, Starc is on the physio bench and sees the wicket on a TV set. “Yes … f—ing justice,” he declares.
Overall, the Australians found the rest of the series an unpleasant experience at times, with Carey facing particularly hefty abuse. Usman Khawaja, who was singled out by a trio of MCC members at the aforementioned lunch break, said that the nastiness of the crowds was augmented by the righteous attitude of “Bazball” England.
“The crowd was very different to what I was used to going to England to play,” Khawaja told this masthead. “Way nastier than I’d ever seen in England before, way nastier, way more personal, way different in general. But I love playing in England and the guys I’ve played against, I’ve played with some of them – Stokesy, Jimmy, Woakesy, Rooty. They’re all really good guys, I really like them.
“It was just a little bit frustrating that for me I felt they had lost a little bit of humility. We potentially could have lost that game at Edgbaston, but they refused to say ‘Look we lost’, it was more ‘We feel like we won the game’. Next match obviously the Bairstow thing happened, which they weren’t too happy about.
“But rather than taking the high ground and saying ‘It is what it is, we’ll let the officials officiate’, it didn’t feel like that at all. And right to the end they were talking a lot about saving Test cricket, and I just didn’t really understand that. I don’t think Test cricket between Australia and England in the Ashes needed any saving.”
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