Ashes / Australia’s cricket was just too good |
The longest postscript in sport is finally over. On the eve of the first Ashes test, which began on 21 November, English pundits were talking up their team’s best chance of winning down under in 30 years. Australia were old, slow and injured. Mark Wood, Jofra Archer and Josh Tongue would rough up the hosts with genuinely quick bowling. And Bazball, the only-good-vibes philosophy that had underpinned the team’s singular focus on the Ashes for the past two and a half years, would prevail. Such predictions proved as wild as Brydon Carse’s new-ball bowling. Australia mathematically retained the urn before Christmas. But in reality the Ashes were won on 22 November, the day after the series began. Two days was all it took for Australia to eviscerate an undercooked England team in the first test in Perth.
This is a puzzling Ashes to pull apart. The current Australia team is clearly not a patch on the vintage sides of 2001, 2006 or 2013. And England can be a devastating team when they click into gear. But for the first three matches they were a shadow of themselves. The captain, Ben Stokes, will have played through this series in his mind hundreds of times, but never did it turn out as badly as this. England have spent far longer trudging around Australia as defeated tourists than they have as a competitive sports team. Their........