Sometimes, the best thing to do in a cricket match is nothing. Often, it is the only thing to do. All sports have their tactical lulls, but cricket’s last for hours.

At any given moment, most of the people in the game, on the field and off, are not doing what they were picked to do. Most of the time, batters aren’t batting, bowlers aren’t bowling, but everyone at some point is fielding, which is mostly doing nothing. The game runs on latent energy. What a team has up its sleeve at any time can be as important as the hand it is playing.

Scott Boland and Mitchell Starc’s slavish devotion to the cause proved the perfect foil for Bazball.Credit: Getty Images

Bazball sits uncomfortably in this paradigm; it implies a need for constant, frenetic, stampeding action. Bazball abhors a dot ball like nature abhors a vacuum. The Brisbane Test again was driven by Bazball dynamics; even Australia were swept up, belting along at five an over for most of their first innings until it developed a speed wobble that threatened to derail it.

What happened next was the fulcrum of this match, and it was little to nothing. This was the work of tailend batters Mitch Starc, Scott Boland, Michael Neser and Brendan Doggett. It was industrious........

© The Age