Broad's Deft Dismissal Of Warner An Echo Of What Might Have Been

Veteran bowler was never going to save the series alone, but he might have produced more moments like this one

- Geoff Lemon

When Stuart Broad took David Warner’s edge on the first day of the Sydney Test, into the slip cordon to be safely clasped, it felt like something clicked into place. This was the scent of a familiar dish, or YouTubing a favourite scene from a movie. The reassurance of the familiar, and the rightness of something that should be just so.

At the same time, there was the sense that thousands of people across the world were shouting at their television sets that they had told you so, or told someone so, and why had nobody listened?

Warner’s 2019 Ashes immolation at the torch of Broad is the stuff of forever. Ten innings, 95 runs, a single-figure series average. Among cricket lovers, it lives on with the potency and permanence of race memory. Broad was the tormentor for seven dismissals of the 10, coming around the wicket to the left-hander, angling the ball in, using his mastery of English conditions to make it seam and swing from a length so full as to be always threatening. Sometimes it came in to hit pads or stumps, sometimes away to take the outside edge, even drawing nicks when an increasingly flummoxed Warner tried to leave the ball.