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7th over: Australia 15-2 (Head 13, Labuschagne 0) Pop goes the hammer! Split goes the field. Travis Head cover drives Rabada for four, in that rather rustic way of his, more whack than finesse. Full enough to play that shot. Rabada responds with one that whistles past off stump. Full and close to the stumps, and Head lets it go, and that ball might have come back a bit. The speed gun claims that’s almost 155 kilometres an hour. I don’t trust the radar in this series, it’s been clocking all the fast bowlers at speeds that seem unlikely. Within the bounds of possibility for each of them, at their peaks, but I’m not sure that they’re all bowling at the fastest rates of their careers, given the advanced years of the Aussies and Rabada just coming back from injury.

6th over: Australia 11-2 (Head 9, Labuschagne 0) One of the big stories of the day, then, will be Labuschagne, and whether he can build something of substance. He’s been good at times when the team has needed him to bat out time to protect a draw – think Lord’s 2019 and Old Trafford 2023. But the latter of those was also his most recent Test hundred, over three years ago. Has to get those performances out of the scrapbooks and onto the turf in front of him. He begins by leaving everything he can from Jansen.

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