THE ASHES: Wonderful decadence
First versus fifth in a nine-team competition does not usually pack spectators in. Test cricket tomorrow provides an exception: an extraordinary expectation surrounds the resumption of its originating rivalry, the Ashes. It is the first five-day international match played at Cardiff’s picturesque Sophia Gardens, where flags fly bearing such improbable greetings as ‘Wales says G’Dai’ and ‘Old South Wales Welcomes New South Wales'. Otherwise, the feelings occasioned are purely atavistic.
Not only do 132 years of history bear down on the competitors, but in form terms there is barely a chink of daylight between them. Save for the eighteen months following 2005’s Oval Test, Australia has held the Ashes for 20 years. Yet Ricky Ponting’s team hold their test match blue riband chiefly by virtue of past rather than present strength, having lost two of their last four series.
England, meanwhile, has been undergoing the latest stage of a long-term rebuilding that commenced at around the time of the Suez crisis. Back in harness after injury, nonetheless, are the talismanic presences of four years ago, Kevin Pietersen and Andrew Flintoff, and a captain in Andrew Strauss who looks the part more completely every day.
That said, form seldom seems a reliable indicator around Ashes series. Just before the opening test of the 1997 series, England’s captain Nasser Hussain found himself in a deep trough, and told his old county mentor Keith Fletcher: "God, Fletch. What am I going to do? I’ve got the Australians this summer and I’m in the worst form of my life." Fletcher reassured him: ‘You’ll be right, old mate. You’re thinking about it too much. Next week’s a test match. Completely different.’
So it proved – Hussain made a match-winning double-hundred – and the ‘complete difference’ of Ashes series has perhaps never been more pronounced than since the rise of Twenty20 cricket. The five-test series was for a century the standard unit of international cricket rivalry. Now it is only played by the format’s pioneers over the course of Ashes. Late last year, England played West Indies in a Twenty20 match that lasted less than three hours for a grubstake of $US20 million. For England to now spend seven weeks playing Australia mainly for honour and glory seems almost unpardonably decadent.
In a contest so close, availabilities will be crucial, so the cruelling of Brett Lee’s Ashes series with a low-grade abdominal tear has been an acute setback to the Australians, for whom he had gone from being eleventh-hour inclusion to form bowler in one spell of reverse swing against England Lions last week. Alas, in turning the clock back to his salad days, he demonstrated the march of time on his physique, and side strains are notoriously stubborn injuries, even for a bowler of Lee’s noted recuperative powers.
On a pitch forecast to be soft, and to take slow turn on the last two days, Lee might not have been decisive. But his absence makes likelier the selection of Nathan Hauritz, whose misfortune it is to be an Aussie slow bowler in the post-Warne years, and to have taken two for 260 on tour; certainly, if Hauritz does not play here, it is hard to think of circumstances under which he might be picked. There were no indications of preference today from Ponting, who looked like he was preparing to take Shane Warne on at poker.
What does seem clear is that the teams favour different attacking formations. Australia’s plan seems to be to bat deep, as they did successfully in South Africa, and a team with Marcus North, Brad Haddin and Mitchell Johnson at numbers six, seven and eight will be no pushover. England is preparing to include a fifth bowler, the attacking option, and recent history suggests that the attacking team wins.
In 2005, Ponting brought a team to England weighty with experience and honours that nonetheless foundered against hosts on a hot recent streak. With the exception of Warne, the Australians played a beige cricket, trusting in familiar routine to neutralise England’s disarming flair. The situation recalled Churchill’s description of the war cabinet during the Dardanelles campaign: "We conferred endlessly and futilely, and arrived at the place from which we started. Then we did what we knew we had to do in the first place and we failed as we knew we would."
In 2006-7, Australia won the first toss, took the first innings, and hardly relinquished the advantage thereafter, grinding England underfoot in five consecutive Tests. Ponting was this time so determined to discomfit his opponents that he warned team-mates against overfamiliarity: Flintoff, popularly ‘Freddie’, was to be called ‘Andrew’; Pietersen was ‘Kevin’ but never ‘KP’.
It is too much to hope for a repeat of the glories of four years ago, but a summer of attacking intent will be a welcome affirmation of the Ashes’ pre-eminence. The rivalry is prestigious, ancient, savoured among its traditional public. But this series will begin in a stadium with a capacity to cater for a fifth the number of people who turned out yesterday to watch Cristiano Ronaldo stroll along a catwalk in his Real Madrid strip. Rich as its laurels are, Ashes cricket cannot afford to rest on them.
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