Australia v England: fifth Ashes Test, day one – live

Over-by-over updates from the Sydney Cricket Ground
Play starts at 10.30am local time, 11.30pm GMT
Get The Spin | The Ashes top 100 | Email Tim

Hello everyone and welcome to the final act of this drama. It should have been a cliffhanger, and could well have been if England hadn’t fluffed their lines on the second day in Perth. It should have been an epic, and might have been had the pitches in Perth and Melbourne not come straight from a seamer’s dream. The long and the short of it is that it’s been both long and short at the same time.

It’s been a long tour – four of England’s likely XI today left home on 10 October, for the baffling warm-up that consisted of two white-ball tussles with New Zealand. And yet it’s been a short Ashes series, occupying only 13 days so far. For the players, it may have felt a little like what was famously said about the First World War: months of boredom punctuated by moments of terror. They haven’t shot themselves in the foot, but they will have spent a bit of time kicking themselves. Continue reading...