Stuart Broad has no regrets over not walking at Trent Bridge

Admittedly, the Ashes rivalry hasn't offered a lot to write home about from recent tours Down Under, but Australia in England on the other hand… now we are talking. From Edgbaston 2005, to the great escape at Cardiff four years later, all the way through to Ben Stokes' miracle of Headingley in 2019, there's scarcely been a summer of recent vintage that has not served up an all-time Anglo-Aussie classic. And ten years have now passed since one of the tastiest tussles of the lot.

England's 14-run win at Trent Bridge in the opening Test of the 2013 series had something for everyone… from Ian Bell's masterful second-innings century to the bittersweet romance of Ashton Agar's debut 98, all the way through to James Anderson's tireless ten-for on a dry and unresponsive deck.

But in spite of such rich pickings, the incident that truly endures is - from an Australian perspective - the one that got away. Or, as England's fans might prefer to see it, the one that Stuart Broad got away with.

England had conceded a first-innings deficit of 65, and were struggling second time around too before Broad and Bell came together in a match-turning seventh-wicket stand of 138. Without his doughty 65 from 148 balls that spanned the third afternoon and the fourth morning, there would have been no grandstand fifth-day finish.

And yet, as Australians recall all too well, that effort should have ended on 37, when Agar tossed up a wide one, into the rough outside the left-hander's off stump. Broad shaped to cut, the ball ended up in the hands of Michael Clarke at slip, and that should have been that.

Aleem Dar, however, thought otherwise, and as Clarke glowered and gesticulated from behind his sunglasses, Broad donned his finest poker-face and stared down his accusers.

"I was thinking, 'we need more runs here, we're 230 ahead,'" Broad recalled on the eve of the 2023 campaign. "If I get out, we lose the game. So I'm never just going to walk off and accept a loss. I looked up at Aleem and he said not out."

Moments later, in the Sky Sports commentary box, David Lloyd's instinctive reaction to the first slo-mo replay rather encapsulated the furore that was about to break out. "Oh my goodness me," he intoned, as the ball clearly kissed off the edge of the bat, onto the tips of Brad Haddin's gloves, and away into Clarke's hands... "speechless!"

"It was all absolute nonsense, wasn't it?" Broad said. "It still follows me around. Everyone's been convinced that I nicked it straight to first slip, which is remarkable really. Because even Brad Haddin said afterwards, 'did you nick that?', because it cannoned into his gloves and went to first slip."

Broad has had a decade to contemplate the incident, and so it's perhaps unsurprising that he's done his research in the interim. By his reckoning, across that year's home and away Ashes, there were 21 other instances of batters not walking for catches - including, it might be pointed out, Haddin himself, who would eventually be given out on review at the gripping climax to that Trent Bridge Test, when Anderson was shown to have found a thin inside-edge with Australia in touching distance of victory.

However, the optics of an edge flying into the hands of first slip - albeit via a double deflection - were always likely to inflame sensibilities. And this was especially so because, as Broad has also posited, the presence of one of two of the so-called press-box "Dukes", senior sportswriters with an angle to grind, meant the incident was ripe for sensationalism.

"If it was just cricket writers in the press box. I don't think it would have become a story because we've all watched a lot of cricket. But it was the weekend before the Premier League started, so it was the sportswriters in - your Ollie Holts, Martin Samuels. They were like, 'let's make a big story'. I don't know if that's absolute nonsense, but that's how I've dealt with it. That was the reason why it became a talking point."

Broad's certainly not wrong that the Dukes did go to town on it. "Did Broad injure cricket yesterday?" Samuel asked, rhetorically, in The Daily Mail "Sadly, he did. He didn't mean to. He was just playing hard, playing to win."

Writing in The Mirror, meanwhile, under the headline: "What he did wasn't just disappointing. It was deeply, deeply embarrassing," Holt said that the incident was reminiscent of "Rivaldo rolling around clutching his face when a ball kicked at him by a Turkey player had hit him on the arm".

"Let's be honest," he added. "It was hard to witness what happened without feeling a sense of sadness and contempt."

Broad, however, remains utterly unswayed by such sentiment. "I think I've only ever played with one true walker," he said. "That was Graeme Swann, because he just hit the ball to cover anyway. It's just not a thing in the modern game. I don't know anyone that does it. And ultimately, if I had have just wandered off having been given not out, I think I'd have been criticised the other way, because we've lost the game."

All of which helped set the parameters for part two of an extraordinary grudge match, in Brisbane four months and three England Test wins later, when Australia's media took up the cudgels ahead of a series in which Mitchell Johnson and Co. would deliver the ultimate act of vengeance with a 5-0 trouncing.

Upon arrival in Australia, Kevin Pietersen had been the initial target of the Aussie media, with the Courier-Mail proclaiming on its front page: "He's so arrogant not even his own team likes him". However, when KP responded in a tweet that such attention was good for his ego, the seed of an alternative strategy was germinated, as the newspaper's editor, Christopher Dore, later told The Guardian.

"Stuart Broad earned the role of Ashes villain ... by acting with complete contempt for the spirit of the game on that dark day in July," Dore wrote. "We settled on calling him the '27-year-old English medium-pace bowler' in all our reports. We felt this was an even a graver insult than turning him into an asterisk and refusing to publish his image. What fast bowler wouldn't be furious about being relegated to mediocrity?"

It wasn't just the papers who got stuck in though, as Broad recalled: "Darren Lehmann [Australia's coach] didn't help the cause, having eight beers and going on a podcast ..."

Lehmann, who had taken over from Mickey Arthur just two weeks before that infamous Trent Bridge Test, was cut from a very different cloth to his more schoolmasterly predecessor, and was clearly itching to lay down a marker for his first home campaign, as he addressed the radio station Triple M with a startlingly frank call to arms.

"From my point of view, I hope the Australian public give it to him right from the word go, for the whole summer," he said, to gales of on-air laughter. "I hope he cries and goes home."

Broad said: "A few of the Aussie players came and apologised for their coach, for what he said. But I didn't cry …" Instead, his response merely added to his legend - and, dare one say it, the grudging respect that he's long since earned over the course of eight previous Ashes campaigns.

After shrugging off the catcalls and banners in the crowd to pick off a first-day five-for at the Gabba, Broad strolled into the press conference with a copy of the Courier-Mail under his arm. Whereupon he was re-christened "The Phantom Menace" for the rest of the Test … at least until Johnson's fireworks came along to scorch the narrative.

"I really enjoyed that Australia tour because it was feisty," Broad recalled. "It was a bit niggly, I got booed, and all sorts of songs were sung. But that's quite unique. You don't boo a player you're not bothered about, so that's the way I took it, and that's the positive I dragged from it."

Overall, however, were he given the chance to relive the events of that first Test of the English summer all over again, how would he play it?

"I wouldn't change it for anything," Broad said. "Because we won the game by 14 runs, and if I'd have walked off, we'd have lost the game."