Injured Nathan Lyon’s Ashes may be over and England must take advantage

Lord’s could have borne witness on Thursday to the 2023 Ashes’ equivalent of the Glenn McGrath moment. When McGrath trod on a ball and damaged ankle ligaments in the warm-up to the Second Test 18 years ago, an England team 1-0 down in the series cashed in to level it at Edgbaston and go on to win the greatest Ashes. 

The loss of Nathan Lyon in the evening session in equally innocuous circumstances may prove to be just as damaging to Australia. Lyon, languishing in the deep in front of the Grand Stand, had no inkling of the fate that was about to befall him and Australia as Ben Duckett shaped up to hook Cameron Green. 

The England opener miscued and as Lyon sensed a catching opportunity he pushed off to pursue it. The ball went nowhere but the right calf went ping and with it went the Australian attack’s control lever.

After a masonic raising of his trouser leg and some initial treatment from the Australian physio, he was helped gingerly back to the pavilion to sympathetic applause from a crowd dotted with red in support of the Ruth Strauss Foundation. Unable to hobble up the stairs, he had to take the lift back up to the dressing room.  

Lyon’s Test is over as a bowler – and that will lend England a significant second innings advantage – but, even more seriously, with such a compressed series, his Ashes could be too. The loss for the tourists will almost amount to a bereavement. An Australian side without him will be as unfamiliar as David Warner in a sequined ballgown.

Lyon has played in 100 successive Tests for Australia – the first specialist bowler to have done so and only the third in all after Allan Border and Mark Waugh. He is part of the furniture. The Hollies Stand taunted him at Edgbaston with chants branding him as “just a s*** Moeen Ali”.

Not even the most one-eyed Brummie believes that. Lyon has taken 496 wickets in this form of the game. His part-time back-up act after his untimely exit, Travis Head, has taken seven. Todd Murphy, the other specialist off-spinner in the Australian tour party, is 22 and has just 14 wickets to his name.

With Lyon it isn’t just the wickets he takes but the reliability he brings at one end which allows Australia to rotate their seamers at the other. He had already bowled 13 of the 37 overs by the time the dagger dug on Thursday. Back in 2005, the McGrath incident was destabilising to Australia – but only for one match.

They had to bring in Michael Kasprowicz as a last-minute replacement and he was the last man to fall as England squeezed home by two runs. In that epic series McGrath, who was watching on at Lord’s, defied the odds to return for the Third Test after his misfortune. Australia will be desperately hoping Lyon, their Mr Metronome, can do the same but the signs did not look good.

Head bowed as he made his way around the boundary, Lyon will have been thinking the worst. Sport at the sharp end, for all the meticulous planning, for all the resources poured into it, can be random. England may just have been given a huge break. Their job now is to make the most of it.