Broad Entertains to The End in Fitting Finale

It may not have ended this way. A mutinous interview took place in a portacabin at Ageas Bowl. He was unable to participate in the India series two years ago due to a calf ailment. He canceled the Ashes series out of frustration and left someone off of the team that traveled to the Caribbean.

But during the course of a 16-year career as a Test cricket player, Stuart Broad has frequently been asked about his temporality and has typically reacted in the same manner. Broad, a guy who continuously changed himself, was the maestro of self-improvement. Broad was a terrific survivalist, and that was the only way to stay alive.

This was a suitable conclusion. In the middle of a nerve-wracking last-day run chase, Broad's bail-switch that preceded his firing of Todd Murphy was another act of pantomime that only he could carry off. Broad was primarily a showman, a wonderful performer who played to the crowd.

And yet, there was another side to Broad, one that was difficult to discern from the public image that energized the audience, wore a bandana out of superstition, and was an accomplished comic in addition to being a cricketer.

He was regarded by his Nottinghamshire and former England coach Peter Moores as "the best tactician that I've been lucky enough to coach" because he was a careful game thinker when no one was looking. It was no coincidence that, with two left-handers frustrating England, Ben Stokes threw the ball to Broad.

"You've seen the way he bowls at them," Stokes said. It was not always that way: Broad took 71 wickets at 41.11 against left-handers before 2015. But extensive research ahead of that summer's Ashes series prompted him to change his default angle from over the wicket to around; since 2015, he has dismissed 122 left-handers at 24.85.

"That's part of my personality," Broad explained. "I've never been an amazing trainer. I need to have something to aim for in training all the time, that spurs me on. I need to have a new skill to be working on, otherwise I could float through training a little bit."

Returning after tea, Broad bowled exclusively from around the wicket, inducing regular plays-and-misses; two in a row from Murphy prompted his bail-switch in an attempt to change his luck. "I just kept saying, 'Keep bowling the same ball over and over again,'" Stokes said.

After Murphy edged behind, Broad created two final chances. Carey nicked him to second slip where Zak Crawley spilled a tough low catch, before edging through to Bairstow in Broad's following over. Both balls were textbook late Broad: angling in before nipping away off the seam to take the edge.

Another feature of Broad's self-improvement has been his desire to lower his "leave percentage" - a statistic that is rarely referenced publicly by anyone other than him. Four years ago, Moores told Broad that Kunal Manek, the Nottinghamshire analyst, had noticed an uptick in the proportion of his deliveries that batters left alone.

"I judge myself now on how much I make a batsman play in a day," Broad said during the 2019 Ashes. "If I am bowling badly, my leave percentage will be 30 percent - I am getting left 30 percent of the time. If I am bowling brilliantly, it will be 16 percent or 17 percent."

It was just eight percent on the last day of his Test career, with Australia's batsmen leaving just seven of the 88 balls he delivered. While Broad enjoys his farewell on Monday night, he won't be aware of that number, but there is one that makes him prouder than any other: his total of 153 wickets against Australia, the highest by an Englishman and a mark that might never be surpassed.

Broad downplayed his prospects of landing anything more than a small part in the lead-up to this season. 

Instead, he was the only England bowler to feature in all five Tests, finished the summer as their leading wicket-taker, and took centre-stage as six weeks of drama came to a head in the final moments of the series.

If there is such a thing as destiny in sport, Stuart Broad was destined not to bow out quietly. "I am not too emotional, to be honest," he reflected, speaking moments after clinching England's win. "Taking those last two wickets proved to me that I still loved taking wickets because I just ran around like a headless chicken. I still have that emotion and love for winning Test matches.

"To take a wicket to win an Ashes Test match being my final ball was something that will make me smile for the rest of my life," he added. "When the dust has settled it will sink in. It still doesn't feel massively real. When I told the guys I couldn't remember what I said. I didn't feel like I was in my own body; I feel a little bit like that now."

Broad made an admission on Saturday night that is rare to hear from an elite athlete: "I know I am not the most skilful player that's played," he said. But if his eventual Test bowling average, 27.68, does not secure him a place among the game's greatest fast bowlers, his longevity will - a longevity secured by his self-professed addiction to the sport.

Source: ESPN