As eye-catching as England’s bowling performance was to win the second Test against the West Indies inside four days, it is the batting that will please Brendon McCullum and Ben Stokes the most as they eye up the next Ashes series in Australia.
Big runs are what decide the most important games of all. So as pleasing as Shoaib Bashir’s five-wicket haul at Trent Bridge was on Sunday evening, this was a victory achieved by the three centuries England scored over the course of both innings.
Remarkably, this was the first time in 147 of Test cricket that England had scored 400-plus totals in both innings.
This was possible thanks to Ollie Pope’s first-innings hundred and two more from Harry Brook and Joe Root in the second.
Stokes pinpointed the importance in particular of those performances from Brook and Root when his team were up against it having conceded a first-innings deficit of 41.
“An important part of the game was Joe Root and Harry Brooks’ partnership,” he said in the afterglow of victory in Nottingham.
“It was the worst time to bat. The lights were on, it was dark, overcast and the ball was doing the most it’s done. For those to get through that period and have the scoreboard ticking over was a crucial part of the game.”
Stokes knows more than anyone that posting big totals will be key to any success his team has in Australia in the winter of 2025-26.
On the past three Ashes tours that has been the team’s downfall, with just five centuries scored by Englishmen Down Under across the past 15 Tests. Last time, in the Covid-ravaged series of 2021-22, Jonny Bairstow was England’s lone century-maker and even that came in Sydney at 3-0 down when the series was already lost.
It’s astonishing that Root, who in Nottingham scored his 32nd Test hundred, has never managed a Test century in Australia across 14 Ashes matches.
His home Ashes record, four hundreds in 20 matches, better reflects the stature of a batter who is set to overtake Sir Alastair Cook to become England’s leading runscorer and century-maker in Tests in the very near future.
But his record in Australia is the one blemish on a career that will go down as one of England’s greatest. He will be desperate to correct that next time.
Stokes now knows he has the firepower in his batting line-up to post the big totals his team needs to compete in that Ashes.
Zak Crawley and Ben Duckett will usually get innings off to fast starts but it is the middle order of Pope, Root, Brook and Stokes that will hold the key to winning in Australia. It’s no coincidence there was a more measured, ruthless approach to batting in that second innings in Nottingham. It’s not always a weakness to slow things down if it gets the job done.
Back in 2010-11, the only time in the past 37 years England have won an Ashes Down Under, success was built on the back of a remarkable series from Cook, whose 766 runs at 127.66 have gone down in folklore.
But as well as his three hundreds in that series, there were five other players who reached three figures – Sir Andrew Strauss, Jonathan Trott, Kevin Pietersen, Ian Bell and Matt Prior. Overall, England scored nine centuries in the series, including double hundreds from Cook and Pietersen.
The sheer weight of runs piled the pressure on Australia and allowed the bowlers, led by James Anderson, to go about their business safe in the knowledge games had been set up for them.
This was only the fourth time in the Bazball era England have managed three centuries or more across a single Test. All came in 2022, the first year of the McCullum-Stokes partnership, and all led to landmark wins – against Pakistan in Rawalpindi, New Zealand at Trent Bridge and India at Edgbaston.
In a summer where the pitches are expected to be flat and the opposition weak – three Tests against Sri Lanka follow this week’s series finale against the Windies in Birmingham – the runs really should flow.
And if England can get in the habit of posting big totals it will be another step forward in the team’s development as they target that series in Australia in 16 months’ time.