BRISBANE — Australia had not lost a Test at the Gabba since 1988. Thirty-three years of that fact accumulated before England arrived in Brisbane for the first match of the 2021-22 Ashes, and it accumulated one Test heavier when England’s second innings folded for 297 on the third afternoon with Pat Cummins, leading Australia for the first time in an Ashes match, watching from slip.
The margin was 9 wickets. The message was clearer than that.
Mitchell Starc set the conditions in the first hour. His figures — 5 for 57 from 19.5 overs across England’s first innings — do not fully capture what he did to England’s top order between overs three and nine, but they are the closest shorthand available. Rory Burns was bowled for 0. Haseeb Hameed lasted eleven balls. Dawid Malan survived the morning session but could not last the afternoon. By close of play on day one, England were 147 all out.
What Starc produced was not simply pace — he has always had that — but a combination of pace and accuracy that had fluctuated before this Ashes. His radar, fixed from the opening delivery, landed the ball where it needed to go consistently enough that England’s top order found no adjustment that worked. The tail added nothing. The total ended discussion before the Australian openers had taken off their pads.
Australia’s reply began with David Warner.
Warner’s 94 — dismissed on the boundary attempting to bring up a century in the last session of day two — was the kind of innings that makes English bowling attacks reassess their strategies while still bowling them. His footwork against the short ball, his ability to find the gap at mid-wicket with drives that should not have gone there, his acceleration precisely when England’s fielding captain needed him to slow: all of it accumulated to 94 and all of it set the tone for a partnership that England needed to break and couldn’t. Marnus Labuschagne’s 74 followed a different logic — technical, deliberate, accumulative in a way that Australia’s batting structure demands from its number three. Together they built Australia past the 300-mark and into a lead that ended any realistic England response.
Cameron Green, 22, played his first Ashes innings in this match — 28 off 64 balls, a composure that marked him as a player Test cricket would have to take seriously. Australia declared on 425 for 8, a lead of 278.
England’s second innings was better. It was not enough.
Dawid Malan made 82, the innings of a player who understood the pitch better in his second visit than his first. Joe Root made 89 — his capacity to produce substantial innings regardless of what is happening around him has been Test cricket’s most reliable constant across a decade. Together they put on 159 for the third wicket and gave the game, briefly, a different complexion. There were overs, in the middle of that partnership, when England looked capable of making Australia bat a second time and making a match of it.
Josh Hazlewood removed Malan, then Root, then Stuart Broad in sequence. His 4 for 45 was the kind of spell that Australia’s three-seamer combination — Starc, Cummins, Hazlewood — has produced reliably in home conditions when all three are operating well. England’s remaining seven wickets fell for 138. Australia knocked off the 20 runs they needed without losing a wicket.
Cummins’s first Ashes win as captain came on day three of his first Test in the role. He had accepted the captaincy after Tim Paine’s resignation weeks earlier under circumstances that gave him almost no preparation time. What he produced at the Gabba was not an improvisation. His management of the bowling rotations across both innings — Starc’s sustained first-innings burst, Hazlewood’s patience in the second — was calibrated and unhurried, the work of a captain who had thought through the match’s phases before it started.
For England, the first Test established patterns the rest of the series confirmed: that their batting without the structural protection Ben Stokes’s Bazball would later build was not reliably robust against Australian pace in Australian conditions; that Malan and Root could produce extended partnerships without others contributing consistently; and that Starc and Hazlewood operating together on their own pitches remained a combination England had no consistent answer to. The series ended 4-0. The Gabba’s unbeaten home record extended to 35 years without interruption.
England’s last win at the Gabba was in 1986. They are still waiting.
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