3 minute read

No team likes being called inconsistent, but inconsistency cuts both ways. In a scenario where you’ve lost a Test match inside two days, ‘consistent’ is absolutely the last thing you want to be. More two-day defeats? No, thank you. After the first Ashes Test, England can console themselves that they have rarely been accused of consistency.

There’s a school of thought that England were so bad in Perth that another 5-0 is on the way. That scoreline has undeniably become more likely, but probably only in the sense that they’re now 20 per cent of the way there. Having watched this team for a while, we aren’t inclined to draw too many firm conclusions from the nature of the defeat.

Two (days) to tango

To us, the great hue and cry about the result seems a bit overblown. Yes, England lost inside two days, but it takes two teams to deliver a Test that short. England were bowled out for 172 and 164 – which is pretty dreadful – but there was actually another team involved that got bowled out for 132.

As rapid as defeat was, it was way less bad than spending that same span of time fielding, which is how they’ve usually gone about losing Down Under.

So there have definitely been more worrying defeats. Plus there’s the fact that, more than most, this is a team capable of oscillating between the sublime and the ridiculous. Expecting them to be consistently awful honestly doesn’t make a great deal more sense than expecting them to be consistently good.

Back in 2022, England played like a big bag of mashed-up arseholes against South Africa at Lord’s. They got bowled out for 165 and 149 and lost by an innings. Next Test, Bens Stokes and Foakes put on 173 and they won by an innings. The one after that, they got bowled out for 158 but still won the match by nine wickets. More recently – admittedly on two very different pitches – they delivered team totals of 823-7 and 112 all out in the same series in Pakistan.

We wouldn’t have them down as a predictable side, which actually makes horrific defeats a lot less meaningful. Strange things can and do happen. Remember when Zak Crawley made 189 in an Ashes Test? Zak Crawley! Try to superimpose your form guide on that one.

Going for Brook

England’s idiosyncratic approach to risk-reward calculations quite often sees them fall flat on their arses, but the rewards they shoot for can often be sizeable.

In a match full of daft shots, Brook running down the pitch and trying to hit Scott Boland over extra cover was the daftest and the fact he middled it and got six runs doesn’t make it any less daft. 

Brook plays more daft shots than anyone. He is also England’s most consistently successful batter. 

That isn’t to say England should go further that way. It’s just emblematic of a wax-winged side who enjoy being at high altitude. 

In short

This England can do a lot, but sometimes it goes very, very wrong. 

It seems to us the first Test might therefore have been a rather different brand of ‘things going very, very wrong’ than the kind of ‘things going very, very wrong’ that has more usually afflicted England touring teams.

We wouldn’t want to make any predictions though…

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