Regaining the Ashes away from home is so hard; it makes fools of those of us who talk up the English challenge every four years and are left, by the end of another one-sided series, as speechless as England are winless.
Former England quick John Snow sends one down to Ian Redpath during the 1970-71 series in Australia.Credit: Fairfax Media
The lessons of 1932-33 and 1970-71 might be old, but they’re still relevant. On those two occasions, England blasted the Ashes out of Australia with pace bowling. In 1932-33 they had Harold Larwood, the fastest and most hostile bowler the game had known, assisted by a ruthless captain and a bunch of catchers behind the batsman’s backside like a cluster of dags. Bodyline was legal and fair but the Australians claimed, against “the spirit of cricket″.
In 1970-71, England brought John Snow, one of the fastest bowlers in the game and certainly the most aggressive when it came to attacking the batsman’s body. Snow hitting Terry Jenner in 1970-71 echoed Larwood hitting Bill Woodfull and Bert Oldfield in 1932-33, and Australian crowds threatened to riot both times.
That’s another obstacle for England in Australia: Australian crowds like winning, but even more than that, they hate losing. As much as they love their bowlers meting out physical intimidation, they really hate when the boot is on the other foot. But in a century of cricket, physical assault has been England’s winning formula in Australia, and this time they have very obviously come with the intention to intimidate.
Another fun fact. This year is one of the very rare Ashes series when Australia and England have claims to be the best two teams in the world. South Africa are nominal world champions and India always have a case, but in the world rankings, Australia are No.1 and England No.2.
This hardly ever happens. It happened in 2005, when England won one of the best Ashes series of all. Before that, you had to go back to 1970-71 when England and Australia had been the best two teams in the world (and even then it was only because South Africa, who had thumped Australia twice and England once in the late 1960s, were banned because of the apartheid regime).
England won a thrilling 2005 Ashes series 2-1 on home soil.Credit: AP
So the rarity of Australia and England being one and two is a reason these Ashes are being talked up so much.
Another, uncustomary, reason for the hype is England are the more interesting team in this contest. We know how Australia will attempt to play, following a proven formula, the main question being whether their old champions can keep doing it.
England? Everything’s a bit different about them. They haven’t seen fit to engage in serious competitive warm-ups. They are bringing the attacking attitude promoted by Ben Stokes and Brendon McCullum to Australia for the first time. It’s a method that’s been patchily successful against the strongest opposition, but it revolves around a kidology that “success” is not measured by winning.
And they are bringing a battery of fast bowlers with very little cricket behind them, either recently or not at all in Australian conditions, who are unproven quantities. Their approach is well personified in their captain Stokes, whose statistical record is nowhere near that of cricket’s great all-rounders, whose susceptibility to injury is high, but whose impact and threat is psychologically powerful.
Like Stokes, England are a mystery box. It’s just as easy to imagine them winning the Ashes handsomely as losing them before Christmas.
On top of all that, the Ashes are more important to England culturally, and less important to Australia, than they were when Jenkins and Engel were writing about them. Australia’s sporting landscape is more diverse and less cricket-centric.
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In England, where Ashes failure used to be accepted with gallows humour, Test cricket has shrunk in cultural importance but gained a kind of concentrated passion, as if the English cricket team is another Premier League club.
As Michael Vaughan wrote in this masthead on Thursday, “All the former players and media I have spoken to want England to win this series.” That is, with respect, not the tradition England built and preserved when its former players and media were objective observers who loved cricket rather than fans with typewriters.
Media partisanship is an attitude for which England used to mock Australia.
Overhyped? Most Ashes summers in Australia, by the first week of January we are left wondering why we ever thought England would be competitive. But since 2019, most of the series between Test cricket’s big three have been thrill-a-minute. There’s every reason to believe and hope that 2025-26 will be, if not an ever-recurrent wonder, a potent brand leader.
