MELBOURNE CRICKET GROUND — In a series where Harry Brook has rightly been castigated for looking like a player who is wasting his immense talent, he perhaps played his best innings of this tour on a pitch so skewed towards the bowlers that 20 wickets fell on the opening day.
England fans will always fondly remember the Boxing Day Test here in 2010, when Andrew Strauss’ team skittled Australia out for 98 and ended the first day on 157 without loss.
It was the day the Ashes were effectively retained and is the most vivid memory of the last series England won on these shores.
Since then, they have failed to win any of their 18 Tests in Australia.
Although at 3-0 down, the Ashes are again out of reach for this England team, at tea on this opening day having bowled out Australia for 152, they looked in a decent position to maybe end that drought.
Things looked less optimistic less than three hours later when Ben Stokes’ men were bowled out for 110 in 29.5 overs.
Amid the carnage was an incendiary innings from Brook, who within 25 balls had managed to become the day’s top scorer.
That says much about a juiced-up MCG pitch that made batting so treacherous.
Coming to the crease with England eight for three, the Yorkshireman danced down the track to Mitchell Starc, the bowler of the series, and took a wild swipe that completely missed.
It was an ugly shot that summed up his helter-skelter series when he has too often thrown his wicket away. Before this his scores read: 52, 0, 31, 15, 45 and 30.
But the flipside to Brook’s unbridled aggression is the audacious stroke he played two overs later that saw him launch Starc over long-off and into the MCG stands.
Harry Brook slams Mitchell Starc over cover for six Watch #TheAshes LIVE on TNT Sports and discovery+ pic.twitter.com/nksngnfw7x
— Cricket on TNT Sports (@cricketontnt) December 26, 2025England had been reduced to 16 for four the previous ball – the last of the eighth over – when Joe Root edged Michael Neser behind to exit this Melburnian amphitheatre with a 14-ball duck.
Alongside Stokes, Brook helped his team add fifty for the fifth wicket, with another scarcely-believable six coming when he rocked back and smashed a slightly-short Neser delivery over the midwicket boundary.
In all, Brook scored 41 from 34 balls. A cursory look at the scorecard may leave you thinking this was another hair-brained effort from England’s vice-captain in a series where he has failed to apply himself and pick off Australia’s bowlers.
But on a day one scorecard where no other top-seven batter from either side managed more than 29, this was an innings born of circumstance.
What illustrates this best is the fact that the ball from Scott Boland that eventually dismissed Brook lbw moved 16 centimetres after pitching. What chance did he have?
Indeed, talk of Australian pitches becoming more bowler friendly in recent years had been well-documented before this series began.
But even after the surface in Perth that saw 19 wickets fall on day one and the entire first Test last less than two days, this Melbourne track was a shock. Maybe it shouldn’t have been given MCG groundsman Matt Page left 10 millimetres of grass on the surface.
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But even former England bowler Stuart Broad, a man who loved a green top during his career, was taken aback, saying: “The pitch is doing too much if I’m brutally honest. Test match bowlers don’t need this amount of movement to look threatening.”
That view was backed up by England’s 2005 Ashes-winning captain Michael Vaughan, who told BBC’s Test Match Special: “The pitch is a shocker for a Test match on the first day. It has just done far too much.”
Overall, Brook has had a poor tour, but on a day where England were bundled out for their lowest score of the series, he actually played the situation perfectly.
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