Australia's most wretched Ashes day of all

England led the series 2-1, with two Tests to play. Considering what was at stake, Australia's 60 all out at Trent Bridge made it their most wretched Ashes day of all, Greg Baum writes in the Age.

But Broad and Co. - Co. were also excellent - could not have reckoned on Australia's meek co-operation. Good balls were made better by hard hands pushing at them. Nearly every batsman was classically squared up, and Steve Smith cubed. Not until the appearance of tailenders Peter Nevill and Mitch Johnson did it seem to occur to the Australians that the leave was an option. It will be a long time before the Australians stop waking in the middle of the night to a translucent image of Broad, a ghostly sighing and a breathy voice-over: "English conditions."

In the case of the beleaguered Clarke, an average ball was made into a wicket-taker by a wild drive at the first delivery he faced from Broad. His thinking? "If he pitches it up, I'm going to hit it as far as I can. I watched guys around me getting out defending. Live by the sword, die by the sword." But first ball? Like compatriot James Faulkner, Clarke should be banned from driving in England.

It was, as Adam Collins wrote in the Independent, "a bloody, crushing, generation-defining debacle".

Sixty all out sits so lonely and naked at the bottom of a scorecard, baffling each way you look at it. Maybe at a juniors game, or perhaps a lopsided village hit out on a nightmare track. Not at the game's highest level, and certainly not in an era where the scales have never been more tilted in favour of bat over ball.

Vic Marks, in the Guardian, considered Joe Root's century, which while overshadowed by events earlier in the day, should be considered a great Test innings.

It is not sacrilegious to suggest that there were echoes of Ted Dexter in his batting. Sometimes he would stand on tiptoe and demonstrate the back-foot drive with a perfectly vertical bat, the sort of stroke often present in the coaching manuals of the 60s and 70s (possibly augmented by a grainy photo of Lord Ted) but seldom seen on a cricket field. The stroke is too difficult for most.

In his piece for the Age, Chief sports columnist Greg Baum writes that hard work has been reduced to an alibi.

Somewhere along the way, sport went all Protestant and hard work came to be seen as achievement in its own right. All else might be turning to excreta, but the work ethic must remain intact. Hard work has become at very least an alibi, and often a KPI. Runs, cross. Wickets, cross. Hard work, tick.

But is hard work really such a big deal? Clarke is a professional. They all are professionals. Cricket is their job, at which they work, hard most of the time. As most others in other spheres do most of the time.