Why the Ashes’ first ball could be the most important of all

Steve Harmison stood at the top of his mark, all alone. It is a naked place, preparing to bowl the first ball of a most-likely doomed Ashes series in a bearpit like the Gabba, surrounded by a wall of 40,000 rabid Brisbanites who do not wish you well and are vocally letting you know about it.

As he ran towards the crease the noise grew louder. Harmison has tried many times to explain what happened next, why the ball flew diagonally out of his grasp, skidded off the wicket and ended up in the lap of captain Andrew Flintoff at second slip. “I froze,” he said at the time. “My whole body was nervous. I could not get my hands to stop sweating. The first ball slipped out of my hands, the second did as well and, after that, I had no rhythm, nothing.”

Having stewed on that moment in December 2006 for more than a decade, he said in 2017: “I was trying far too hard to bowl too fast. Did I freeze? Possibly. I just think I tried too hard.”

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It is something unique in Test cricket before that first ball is bowled – the wait. The batsman shuffles on his crease, the wicketkeeper claps his gloves, the umpire straightens his hat. The morning sun has just emerged over the stadium and it feels like the start of something, something that may be magical or dramatic or destructive – no one yet knows what, but it will definitely be something. After all the build-up and preparation and mind games, the world slows down in those last few seconds before an Ashes series finally begins. And perhaps the ability of a lead bowler or batsman to handle that moment, that scrutiny, can ripple across the grass and take hold of a team.

Harmison’s famous wide has long been credited with “setting the tone” for what was to come: England meekly surrendering the Ashes in a 5-0 whitewash. But does the first ball of the series really indicate – even influence – what follows?

Most opening balls down the years have been uneventful, offering little in the way of a forecast, but there have been some significant moments. In 1994, Michael Slater bludgeoned England’s stand-in fast bowler Phil DeFreitas’s first delivery to the Gabba boundary, then proceeded to rack up a merciless 176. Needless to say, Australia won the series.

“I suppose DeFreitas being cut for four first ball did set the tone,” Phil Tufnell later reflected. “At the time it really didn’t feel like the end of the world. We just thought: ‘Oh right, that’s gone for four, next ball.’ There wasn’t a groan around the fielders or anything. It’s only looking back you can see that it was one of those moments.”

In the previous Ashes before his infamous wide, Harmison had opened the 2005 series with a fierce over of pace and bounce at Lord’s. The first ball whistled between Justin Langer’s off-stump and his nose, and the second crashed into the batsman’s arm. Yet England lost that Test convincingly, and it was only later that they rallied to eventual victory.

Then there was 2010, when Australian bowler Ben Hilfenhaus served up a loose opener in Brisbane which Andrew Strauss comfortably let by. Strauss’s control of the situation was mirrored by England’s performance as they clinched a 3-1 victory and won their first Ashes on Australian soil for 24 years. Yet that first delivery was no omen: Strauss was out two balls later, caught behind for a duck.

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Langer certainly believed Harmison’s wide ball in 2006 was more significant than the value of one Australian run, after which “England’s body language seemed flat and even a little intimidated”.

“To be perfectly truthful, I felt let down after that first ball,” Langer said. “It was such a comedown after Lord’s in 2005, where I remember the ball flying past my nose to Geraint Jones. I looked around and England were looking at their toes. It was just a huge letdown and that first ball was really key.”

Harmison rejects that idea. “That ball in Brisbane on the 2006-07 Ashes tour didn’t set the tone,” he wrote in his book, Speed Demons. “We weren’t good enough to beat Australia, whether that first ball of the series happened or not.”

Perhaps “setting the tone” is just an easy answer with hindsight. What the first ball really can do is solidify a feeling in the air. Australia were overwhelming favourites when England turned up in Brisbane again in 2021, and that sense of inevitability was quickly reinforced. Mitchell Starc started the series with an 88mph swinger which wrapped around Rory Burns’ legs and clattered the stumps. The “Gabbatoir” had another first-ball victim. Burns’ Test career never recovered, and neither did England, losing the match by nine wickets and the series 4-0.

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That was the last “first ball”. England have sparked an unimaginable shift in the Test cricket landscape since then. The next one could be James Anderson to David Warner, or perhaps Starc to Zak Crawley. For all England’s talk of fearless cricket, Crawley pumping the first ball to the Edgbaston boundary would be an apt way to spell out what’s to come this summer.

England would do well to be wary, though – they have generally been on the wrong end of most dramatic Ashes starts, and head coach Brendon McCullum knows the consequences of going hard early. He tried to knock out the floodlights at the start of the 2015 World Cup final, only to swing and miss, handing over New Zealand’s most prized wicket. The bowler that day was Starc too, and Australia never looked back.