Stuart Broad: ‘The Gabba holds the key to the Ashes’

Australia, after all, will have not played a Test for almost 11 months by the time the teams convene at Brisbane on December 8 – the same venue at which India overturned them in January to claim a famous 2-1 series win, and in the process inflict a first defeat at the Gabba for 33 years.

And given the competing demands of the T20 World Cup, which gets underway this week, Broad is confident that the experience he has gleaned from his 145-Test, 14-year career will compensate for a lack of game-time as a “fascinating” and “unpredictable” series gets underway.

“The old sports saying is try and find positive in everything,” Broad said during a #Funds4Runs event in Leyton. “My positive is that this has allowed me to have a training period where I’m not constantly thinking ‘I’ve got to bowl in three days’ time’. I can actually train, and adapt my body really well.

“The Aussies haven’t played for a great deal of time, a lot of our guys are playing T20 cricket, some guys haven’t played since September, so I don’t feel like I’m behind the eight-ball at all. I actually feel like I’m approaching the series mentally fresh, and ready to hit the ground running.”

Broad returned to light training two weeks ago, working at his local club in Wimbledon as well as at Loughborough University to get “13 or 14” overs under his belt, all the while monitored by GPS to ensure he’s not over-exerting himself before his body is ready.

“I wish I’d had all this GPS stuff when I was 18,” he said. “I can control the intensity, run-up speed and pace I’m bowling at, so that when they want me to do a session at 80%, we actually can judge that I’m bowling 80%, which is quite cool.

“The rehab team at the ECB have been great, and got me back feeling really strong and fit,” he added. “I knew it was a bad calf tear but it was a clean one. It took at least two weeks to be able to put any sort of weight through my foot, and it was probably harder for my fiancée Molly than me because I couldn’t even get a cup of tea. But I did 7000 steps a day in the pool, listening to Stephen Fry talk about Sherlock Holmes on an audio book, and it’s got my muscle moving again, and new soft tissue growing, which I’m training to be as robust as it possibly can.”

“I’m not going to bowl at a batter until we land in Australia, because I can’t control my competitive instincts,” he added. “If I get whacked through the covers, I might try a bit hard and put myself in some sort of danger, so I’m just going to control that until early November, or whenever we get out of quarantine, and then build up for Brisbane.”

The final arrangements for the series remain shrouded in some uncertainty, even though England named a 17-man squad last week, and have since backed that up with 14 further names in a strong Lions party that will shadow the main tour. But Broad insisted that the players would leave the higher-ups at the ECB and CA to thrash out the finer details. All that matters to the squad, he said, was to channel their energies into that first Test at Brisbane.

“We need our sole focus to be exceptional for Brisbane,” Broad said. “The Gabba holds the key to the series, because they’ve got a good record there. Admittedly they lost to India, but we need to start the series well, and make sure that we’re 100% on the money at Brisbane, because we can put this Australia team under pressure on the field, and off the field, if we do our job really well to start. We’ll be very well prepared for that.”

One of the key match-ups will potentially be the resumption of Broad’s rivalry with David Warner – a man who has scored 18 centuries in 45 home Tests, but who was picked apart by Broad in the 2019 away series, averaging 9.50 in the five matches, and falling to his nemesis in seven innings out of ten.

And while Broad did not deny that, as a new-ball bowler, Warner would once again be firmly in his sights, he insisted that the strange circumstances of the series meant that no-one would be able to come into the series with any real form to fall back on – not even England’s captain, Joe Root, who has racked up 1455 runs in a stellar year to date, but who won’t have batted competitively for three months by the start of the series.

“As an opening bowler you’re always targeting the opening batters and the top four, and Warner is a key part of that in Australia,” Broad said. “But it’s going to be a fascinating series, in the fact that no-one’s really played any cricket. I don’t see how anyone will be going into it in great form, so that means that, as a bowler, we should be really positive about exposing weaknesses if we’re relentless.”