Headingley 2019: How England Chased 359 and Stokes and Leach Added 76 for the Last Wicket

On 25 August 2019, the fourth day of the third Ashes Test at Headingley, England beat Australia by one wicket after chasing 359. Ben Stokes finished on 135 not out from 219 balls. Jack Leach, the last man, made 1 from 17 balls, and the two added 76 for the tenth wicket. The win levelled the five-match series at 1-1. Two days earlier England had been bowled out for 67.

The final hour is the part most people remember, but the chase was built in three stages: a long rebuild, a very slow middle stretch and a late change of pace.

The setup: a total of 67

England won the toss and chose to field. Australia were bowled out for 179 in 52.1 overs. Marnus Labuschagne made 74, and Jofra Archer took 6 for 45, his first five-wicket haul in Test cricket. England then lasted only 27.5 overs. Josh Hazlewood took 5 for 30, and Joe Denly's 12 was the top score in a total of 67.

That left England 112 behind. Australia’s second innings brought 246, with Labuschagne run out for 80 and Stokes taking 3 for 56. The target was 359, and no England side had ever chased that many in the fourth innings of a Test to win.

Phase one: Root and Denly rebuild

The chase started badly. Rory Burns went for 7 and Jason Roy for 8, and England were 15 for 2 in the seventh over. Joe Root and Denly then added 126 for the third wicket. Denly was out for 50 at 141, and England finished the third day on 156 for 3. Root had 75 and Stokes had 2, with 203 still needed.

Phase two: the long block

Root added only two runs on the fourth morning and was out for 77 with the score on 159 for 4. Stokes had started the day on 2 from 50 balls. He needed 152 balls to reach 50.

Jonny Bairstow made 36 and shared a stand of 86 with Stokes for the fifth wicket, taking England to 245 before Bairstow fell. Then the innings fell apart. Jos Buttler was run out for 1, Chris Woakes made 1, Archer made 15 and Stuart Broad was out lbw for a two-ball duck. From 245 for 5, England had dropped to 286 for 9, four wickets for 41 runs. They still needed 73.

Phase three: 76 for the last wicket

Stokes was on 61 from 174 balls when he changed gear. The 45-ball burst that followed was worth 74 runs, and seven of them were sixes. Stokes described the plan with Leach as "five and one". How it worked out shows in Leach's figures for the stand: 17 balls faced, one run scored, and that single was his whole contribution with the bat. A month earlier he had made 92 against Ireland at Lord's.

The finish was very close. Late in the stand Leach went too far down the pitch backing up, and Nathan Lyon fumbled the return, so a run-out chance was lost. Then, with two still needed, Australia had a second chance. Umpire Joel Wilson turned down Lyon’s lbw appeal after Stokes missed a sweep. Australia had used their last review earlier in the innings, so they could not challenge the call, though replays indicated it should have been out. Stokes then hit Pat Cummins through the covers for four, and England finished on 362 for 9 from 125.4 overs.

What the numbers show

Stokes’s innings split into two parts. His first 174 balls brought 61 runs, about 35 runs per 100 balls. His last 45 brought 74, about 164 per 100. The slow part kept a recognised batter at the crease while wickets fell at the other end. The fast part began only when there was nobody left to protect, which forced the change.

The long innings also put a heavy load on Australia’s attack. Lyon bowled 39 overs for 114 runs and two wickets, Hazlewood 31 overs for 4 for 85, and Cummins 24.4 overs. Hazlewood finished the match with nine wickets. By the time the last-wicket stand began, the bowlers had been in the field for well over a hundred overs of the innings. In our view, that made a sudden change of tempo harder to stop.

Leach’s part shows that a number eleven’s job in a chase like this is not to score but to survive. Seventeen balls sounds like very few. But each one Leach blocked was a ball Stokes did not have to waste on a single to keep the strike.

Where the match sits

At 359, it was England’s highest successful fourth-innings chase in Test cricket at the time. That record has since gone: in July 2022 England chased 378 to beat India by seven wickets at Edgbaston. The Headingley chase came six weeks after Stokes had played a central part in England’s World Cup final win at Lord’s. Australia’s captain, Tim Paine, called it “probably the best Test innings” he had seen.

It did not decide the Ashes. The series finished 2-2, which meant Australia kept the urn. That gives Headingley 2019 an odd place in England’s cricket memory: a famous win in a series England did not win.

The match is often compared with Ian Botham’s Headingley Test of 1981, the other great Ashes comeback at the ground. The two turnarounds were built differently, though. In 2019 the decisive runs came in the fourth innings, from a batter who had taken 152 balls to reach his first 50.