England pacer Mark Wood has lifted the lid on just how deeply Travis Head’s Perth blitz rattled the visitors, admitting the first Ashes Test felt as if it had disappeared in 10 minutes under the weight of the Australian left-hander’s assault.
Still processing the two-day defeat, Mark Wood spoke with a mix of disbelief and exhaustion as he recounted how England’s plans, fields, and lengths were shredded by a knock that turned a tricky chase into a training drill for the hosts.

“He just smacked everything”: Mark Wood.
Speaking on former teammate Stuart Broad’s For The Love of Cricket podcast, Wood said Head’s counterattack left England’s dressing room “flattened”, with several players choosing to bunker down in their hotel rooms on Sunday after one of the shortest completed Tests in history, finished inside two days and just 847 balls.

“It didn’t matter what we did; he (Travis Head) just smacked everything,” Mark Wood said, his exasperation still audible. “I know he’s a good player, and we all respected how good he is, but that was something else.”

For an attack that had dragged England into the contest, the speed of the collapse was as bruising as the result itself. Australia chased 205 in barely 30 overs, Head thundering a century at the top to flip the script on a pitch that had seemed treacherous for two days.

“We bowled, what, like 30 overs? And it felt like it was over in 10 minutes... the game was almost like in fast-forward mode,” Wood said. The sense of helplessness ran through his description: whatever England tried, Head found an answer and usually a boundary.

The surprise started before the scoring spree. Wood admitted England’s bowlers were blindsided when Australia promoted Head to open in the second innings, with Usman Khawaja again hampered by back spasms. The tourists had expected Marnus Labuschagne to move up, as he had in the first innings, and had shaped their plans around that.

“When he first came out, I didn’t expect him to be so gung-ho,” Wood said. “I expected it (the ball) to nip around, I expected it to be difficult, especially going off the first innings,:

Instead, Travis Head toyed with them. Wood described how the left-handed batter kept drilling the ball into gaps, forcing captain Ben Stokes into an endless shuffle of fielders that never seemed to plug the next scoring option. England were chasing the ball, the fields and the game - and losing all three.

The abruptness of the defeat hit Wood so hard he even considered an impromptu road trip from Perth to Brisbane, where the second Test starts on December 4, just to clear his head. Only when he was reminded how long that drive would actually take did he abandon the idea.

For now, the drive he can’t escape is the one Heat put on in Perth - a blur of boundaries, in Wood’s words, turned an Ashes Test into something that felt like it flashed past in fast-forward.