The longest postscript in sport is finally over. On the eve of the first Ashes test, which began on 21 November, English pundits were\u00a0talking up their team\u2019s best chance\u00a0of\u00a0winning down under\u00a0in 30 years. Australia\u00a0were\u00a0old, slow and injured. Mark Wood, Jofra Archer and Josh Tongue\u00a0would rough up the hosts with genuinely quick bowling.\u00a0And\u00a0Bazball, the only-good-vibes philosophy that had underpinned the team\u2019s\u00a0singular\u00a0focus on the Ashes for the past two and a half years,\u00a0would prevail.\u00a0Such predictions proved\u00a0as wild as Brydon Carse\u2019s new-ball bowling.\u00a0Australia mathematically retained the\u00a0urn before Christmas. But\u00a0in\u00a0reality\u00a0the Ashes were won on 22 November,\u00a0the day after the series began.\u00a0Two days\u00a0was\u00a0all it took for\u00a0Australia\u00a0to eviscerate\u00a0an undercooked England team\u00a0in the first test\u00a0in\u00a0Perth.<\/p>\n
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.\u00a0And England can be a devastating team when they click into gear. But for the first three matches they were a\u00a0shadow of themselves. The captain,\u00a0Ben Stokes,\u00a0will have\u00a0played through this series in his mind hundreds of times, but never\u00a0did it turn out\u00a0as\u00a0badly as\u00a0this.\u00a0England have spent\u00a0far\u00a0longer\u00a0trudging around\u00a0Australia\u00a0as defeated tourists than\u00a0they have\u00a0as a competitive sports team.\u00a0Their final\u00a0flogging\u00a0in\u00a0Sydney\u00a0felt occasionally cruel.\u00a0<\/p>\n
But English introspection does Australia\u00a0a\u00a0disservice.\u00a0This series was undoubtedly won by Australia, rather than conceded by England. And Australia won under\u00a0unusually challenging circumstances.\u00a0Their\u00a0metronomic opening bowler, Josh Hazelwood, missed the entire series.\u00a0Their captain and talisman,\u00a0Pat Cummins, was half-fit for a single game.\u00a0Their spinner, Nathan Lyon, played two games before tearing a hamstring. Opening batsman Usman Khawaja ricked his back in Perth, was shunted down the order and then announced his retirement. Steve Smith, their\u00a0stand-in captain, got vertigo. Their debutant opening batsman, Jake Weatherald,\u00a0only passed 35\u00a0once all series.\u00a0In spite of\u00a0this adversity,\u00a0they administered a thrashing, needing only\u00a0three matches and three players to do it.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Mitchell Starc set the tone for the series in Perth. The veteran left-armer took his first England wicket before the English batsmen had scored a run. He added another nine in the match.\u00a0Starc has been bowling on Australian pitches for almost 20 years; an England team full of batsmen playing a test match in Australia for the first time were woefully underprepared.\u00a0Nevertheless,\u00a0Starc\u00a0accounted for\u00a0England\u2019s two most experienced batsmen, Joe Root and Ben Stokes,\u00a0through\u00a0clever plans perfectly\u00a0executed.\u00a0Root was fed a series of wide balls and\u00a0then\u00a0couldn\u2019t help but nick a tighter one\u00a0to slip. Starc gave Stokes an over of out-swingers and then a fuller ball that moved in and splattered his stumps.\u00a0By the second innings\u00a0Starc\u00a0was in the zone; his other-worldly one-handed return catch from Zak Crawley evidence of a man operating at a higher level. Starc went on to take another\u00a0eight wickets in Brisbane and then top-scored with the bat.<\/p>\n
England\u00a0actually\u00a0kept\u00a0pace with Starc in Perth, setting the hosts\u00a0a target of 205, which required\u00a0the biggest innings of the match.\u00a0Then stand-in captain Steve Smith\u00a0opted to promote moustachioed middle-order thumper Travis Head to open the batting.\u00a0The reasoning was clear. If Head struck out quickly, then never mind. But in a low-scoring game, his ability to score quickly could put the pressure back on England. It proved a masterstroke. Head laid waste to England\u2019s pace bowlers, smiting\u00a0123 runs from 83 balls.\u00a0Australia\u00a0reached their target in\u00a0less than two and a half hours,\u00a0leaving England punch-drunk.\u00a0Head, now permanently promoted to opener, added\u00a0another\u00a0second-innings hundred in Adelaide\u00a0and a third century in Sydney. He finished the series with\u00a0629\u00a0runs. No-one else managed more than\u00a0400.<\/p>\n
\nThey ended the Ashes with a bits-and-pieces team that will change considerably<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n
And then there was Alex Carey, Australia\u2019s understated wicketkeeper. England have\u00a0regularly\u00a0suffered at the hands of Australian\u00a0glovemen. Even in the T20 era, Adam Gilchrist still holds the record for the fastest Ashes century with his 57-ball effort in Perth in 2006. Brad Haddin\u00a0set new\u00a0records for the\u00a0most catches (29) and\u00a0most runs (493) scored by a wicket-keeper in 2013.\u00a0Carey\u00a0is a less dominating figure than these predecessors, but his contribution was no less important. At Brisbane he\u00a0stood up\u00a0to the stumps to Australia\u2019s fast-medium bowlers. This denied England the opportunity to attack them and eventually bought the crucial wicket of Stokes. At Adelaide he steadied a wobbly Australian first innings with a century, before adding 72 in the second. His immaculate keeping outshone his young English counterpart, Jamie Smith, whose series was dogged by dropped catches and reckless batting. That he\u00a0hit the winning runs in Sydney was fitting.<\/p>\n
This is not the start of a new era for Australian cricket. They ended the Ashes with a bits-and-pieces team that will change considerably\u00a0ahead of their\u00a0matches\u00a0against Bangladesh, South Africa and New Zealand.\u00a0Selectors need to find long-term\u00a0successors\u00a0for Khawaja, Hazelwood and Lyon, and then for Smith and Starc.\u00a0However, the ability of\u00a0team to blow away their oldest rivals, even in a time of transition,\u00a0suggests a depth of talent and an appetite for the hard\u00a0yakka\u00a0that will have their counterparts at Lord\u2019s looking on with envy.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The longest postscript in sport is finally over. On the eve of the first Ashes test, which began…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":689157,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4101],"tags":[1406,79,16,15],"class_list":{"0":"post-689156","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-cricket","8":"tag-cricket","9":"tag-sports","10":"tag-uk","11":"tag-united-kingdom"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@uk\/115877181149003640","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/689156","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=689156"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/689156\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/689157"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=689156"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=689156"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=689156"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}