Travis Head buries the team he helped create

As Brydon Carse's half-volley disappeared to the cover boundary, Ben Stokes must have felt an uncomfortable sense of déjà vu. For all Stokes' efforts to transform England's Test team since he took over as captain, they were right back where they started: spending six weeks getting thumped around Australia by Travis Head.

Head was nine runs short of his third century of the series when light rain brought an end to the second day at the SCG, but will resume on Tuesday morning in the knowledge that England's bowlers have no idea how to stop him. He scored at better than a-run-a-ball without seeming to get beyond third gear, and has been utterly dominant across five Tests.

His 69-ball hundred to win the first Test off his own bat left England "shellshocked" in Perth and England have never quite recovered. Head missed out at the Gabba, but then carved 170 to set up a series-clinching win in front of his home crowd at Adelaide Oval. Even in Australia's two-day defeat at the MCG, his second-innings 46 was the highest score of the match.

It is hard to believe that four years ago, he was only a marginal inclusion for the first Test of the 2021-22 Ashes, pipping Usman Khawaja to the No. 5 spot. By that point, Head had only scored two hundreds in his first 19 Tests and had scored at a strike rate below 50, but was taken aside by his new captain Pat Cummins and encouraged to play without fear of recriminations.

Head blazed 152 off 148 balls in his first hit of that series, a transformative innings for his career, and has never looked back. He missed the Sydney Test after testing positive for Covid-19, but cracked a 112-ball century in Hobart and was awarded the Compton-Miller Medal for player of the series. He has been a mainstay ever since, and has played in 42 of Australia's last 43 Tests.

England's bowlers found Head near-impossible to shut down throughout that tour. His idiosyncratic technique and ability to create width from straight balls helped him to score at a strike rate of 86.02. He left a particular impression on Stokes, who bowled 42 balls to Head across the series without dismissing him and conceded 50 runs, 34 of them in boundaries.

Head's two centuries helped Australia win the 2021-22 series 4-0, a result which cost Chris Silverwood and Ashley Giles their jobs as head coach and managing director respectively. Joe Root resigned as captain three months later, after a 1-0 defeat to West Indies rendered his position untenable, clearing the decks for Stokes to take over ahead of England's home summer.

The early months of Stokes' captaincy focused heavily on liberating his players in the way that Cummins had with Head, and it is no stretch to suggest that Head was an inspiration. "Him being allowed to go out and play the way that he has is why he has been so successful," Stokes said of Head before the 2023 Ashes. "He was so hard to bowl to in Australia."

England managed to limit Head's influence on that series: he made 362 runs but only three half-centuries and no hundreds, regularly falling into the short-ball trap. The same plan briefly worked on the first day of the 2025-26 series in Perth but since his last-minute promotion to open in the second innings, England have been unable to find a method that restricts him.

Head has been selective with his targets through this series, rarely looking to attack either Jofra Archer (37 off 92 balls, no dismissals) or Josh Tongue (46 off 81, one dismissal) but treating England's other seamers with disdain. The abiding image of the 2025-26 Ashes will be Head laying into Carse, whom he has hit for 19 fours - including five in Sydney - and four sixes.

Carse has bowled particularly poorly to Head, regularly offering him width outside his off stump and disappearing for boundaries behind square, and Matthew Potts was just as culpable in his first appearance of the tour in Sydney. After two flamboyant pulls early in his innings, England were so reluctant to offer Head anything straight that they leaked runs through cover-point.

Head turned 32 in between the fourth and fifth Tests and is playing like a man at the peak. He is quick to pick up length, and devastating whenever bowlers err too full or too short: he reached a 55-ball half-century by gliding Carse through the covers when he overpitched, then arched his back and upper-cut his short ball over the slip cordon four overs later.

"The way that he can score off the top of the stumps, both sides of the wicket," Root said, when asked what made Head so hard to stop. "He makes your margins very small and he's got such incredible hand-eye coordination. He's very good at putting bowlers under pressure at the right time, and making it very difficult to build a sustained period of pressure over the partnership.

"He's always looking to throw punches back in his own way, and he's got a very clear method of how he wants to do it and trusts it. He's had a brilliant series to date… Credit to him: he's got a really good understanding of his game and he's playing exceptionally well at the minute."

In all, Head has plundered 528 runs over four-and-a-half Tests, the most that any batter has managed in an Ashes series since Steven Smith made 774 in 2019 - and he will be back for more on the third day in Sydney. Only Mitchell Starc's brilliance with the ball stands between him and a second Compton-Miller Medal in three series.

Four years ago, Head's performances against England laid the foundations for Bazball. Now, he has buried it for good.