Ashes 2011

by Gideon Haigh

  'Crikey,' said an Australian colleague behind me after tea yesterday. 'I've looked up and Prior's forty already. How did that happen?' This is Prior's chief faculty, for surprising opponents with instant aggression, sucking bowlers into his off-stump slot by hanging slightly back, then veritably pelting between wickets. Not even Pietersen in this England line-up scores more quickly than Prior's 62.92 per hundred balls.

  Of all England's cricketers this summer, Prior has probably occasioned the fewest words – no bad thing, given that wicketkeepers become most obtrusive by their errors. He has taken twenty-two catches with scarcely a murmur of praise or blame, the best haul in forty years.

  Over the years, Australia has not been a happy hunting ground for English glovemen. Alec Stewart never managed a full series here. Geraint Jones and Jack Russell lost places mid-series, Jack Richards and Steve Rhodes post-series. Not since Alan Knott's two tours, furthermore, has a visiting keeper consistently made Ashes runs in Australia. Four years ago, Jones and Chris Read scraped together 98 runs in ten innings.

  Prior, by contrast, is that rare English player who looks born for Australian climes, in his keeping and batting enjoying the bounce, the carry and the minimal sideways movement. As he has assimilated these conditions this summer, he has proved more and more effective, helped by some opposition bowling and captaincy that might be politely described as thought-free. As is usually the case, fully 96 of his 118 runs were scored on the off side, including a six down the ground and all eleven of his boundaries. Clarke finally set an off-side sweeper when the quicker bowlers operated, but the simpler expedient of bowling straight and attacking the stumps was somehow thought either too obvious or too subtle. Prior took particular toll of the third new ball, which neither swung nor seamed for the Australian quicks, instead leaving the bat with a crack.

  Thanks to some sensible defence and bottom-handed hoicking from Bresnan, England's eighth pair added 102, as its seventh pair had added 107, its sixth pair 154 and … well, you get the picture. England's last pair, Graeme Swann and Chris Tremlett, then purloined another 35 in seven overs to add irritation to insult to injury, and extend England's lead to 364.

  As he has been inclined to do all summer, Watson set off as though planning to erase this deficit by stumps on his own, driving, cutting and pulling seven boundaries in forty balls. Hughes all but disappeared from view, only to re-emerge when both batsmen ended up at the non-striker's end having turned an easy two into their second run-out in three starts. Watson, of course, turns up at run-outs like Lara Bingle turns up at openings, but here he could at least share the blame: both batsmen cantered the first casually; both were ball-watching; neither appeared to call decisively. Perhaps still brooding, Hughes fenced at Bresnan six runs later.

  Captain Clarke and Usman Khawaja endured through to tea, and the latter had just begun asserting himself, with a reverberating pull shot from Anderson, when he followed one from the same bowler that swung away like a Roberto Carlos free kick. Clarke, who recovered something like freedom in his foot movement against Swann, had struck six affirming fours when he too misread Anderson's trajectories.

  Had Bell caught Haddin (7) diving to his right at short cover and reduced Australia to 139 for five, there might have been no reason to return tomorrow. As it was, England shortened their work when Pietersen caught Hussey in the gully. With shadows lengthening across the ground, the man with the longest shadow of all bowled his quickest spell of the match from the Randwick End, Tremlett beating Haddin's pull and Johnson's prod for pace with consecutive deliveries; Siddle just ensured that his would be the only hat-trick of the series by digging out a yorker.

  About half an hour after play, the ground was finally swept by a drenching rain, the results of which were left glistening on the covers beneath its floodlights. So it turns out that there was one new development today: Australia, it seems, can no longer even do rain properly.

  6 JANUARY 2011

  SHANE WATSON

  When Success Is Failure

  Shane Watson will end this Ashes series with an average of nearly 50. In a team as thoroughly beaten as Australia, such a statistical achievement would normally attract such adjectives as 'honourable', 'laudable', maybe even 'valiant'. Regard this as an exhibit in the case against interpreting a series from the average tables.

  Even before he concluded his Test summer today with a run-out of comical awfulness, Australia's Allan Border Medallist had been an underachiever. On seven occasions he has batted for more than 100 minutes; only once has he gone beyond three hours. Even leaving aside the argument that, thanks to flat wickets and fat bats, 50 is the new 40, Watson has achieved a conversion rate uglier than that between sterling and the Australian dollar.

  His bowling, a useful adjunct for Ricky Ponting over the last eighteen months, has also faded. Although he has probably bowled a little better than his three wickets at 74 would suggest, you would be hard pressed to bowl worse. His fielding, too, has remained clumsy, and he occupies first slip with as much animation as a waxworks dummy. For all that, a big innings today, as it has for Ian Bell and Matt Prior, might have put an attractive gloss on Watson's season. And the way it did not eventuate arguably explains quite a lot about the Ashes of 2010–11.

  The chemistry of some opening combinations produces spontaneous energy; in the case of Shane Watson and Phil Hughes, it is more like gradual decomposition. They cut a curious sight simply in walking out. Where Cook and Strauss walk side by side, parting after a final glove-touch, Watson and Hughes could be playing different sports. While Watson approaches the crease at a deliberate plod, Hughes runs out like an Australian rules footballer plunging through his team's crepe-paper banner.

  Nor do they exude permanence and cohesion in the middle. They have the potential advantage of being a left-hander and a right-hander, but neither the alertness nor the fleetness of foot to take advantage of it. Watson is a ponderous runner, and an apparently quiet caller, who had been involved in six Test run-outs before today. He is now in harness with a lazy runner in Hughes. To call them 'partners', in fact, is more a polite convention than a description; at the moment, they are simply two men who, for convenience's sake, happen to put the pads on at the same time. If they were in relationship therapy, the counsellor would tell them that they are 'bad for each other'.

  Today's mishap would have made club cricketers blush. Hughes turned Swann to mid-wicket, and both batsmen set off, albeit at no great rate. Michael Hussey, for example, would never have taken the first run so gently; he would have had his head down checking his partner's cues for interest in a second, in doing so increasing the pressure on the fielder. So slowly did Watson and Hughes chug, it was like Sky had gone to the slow-motion replay early.

  To the reason for this lack of urgency, one needed to cast one's mind back ten days, to when a hasty call from Watson and a tardy response from Hughes nipped their partnership in the bud. You imagined them between times discussing the importance of not being run out with the same emphasis as Basil Fawlty gave to not mentioning the war. The result was similar, although as funny only if you were English.

  Hughes, ball watching, turned and came back without pausing – without obviously calling either. Watson responded to Hughes's advance, set off for a second run, then turned to watching the ball too. In doing so, he missed that Hughes had pulled up, apparently transfixed by Pietersen's fielding. Soon enough, the pair were transfixed by one another – because of their close proximity. It was the sixth run-out in Australia's last seven Test matches, of which Watson has been involved in three, each ending an Australian opening partnership. England, by contrast, have sustained not one such casualty; Trott's at Melbourne is the only close call that comes to mind.

  Effective running between wickets is one of the most elusive cricket skills, and also one of the least practised. But it basically comes down to one thing: an understanding of, and a trust in, your team-mates. When you respond to a comrade's call, you are putting yourself in his hands as c
ompletely as at any time in the game. That is why good teams invariably run well, and why run-outs always seem to beget other run-outs. When understanding and trust break down in any community, the effect is contagious; a cricket team is no different.

  It is a truism to say that England have retained the Ashes this summer because they have been the more skilful side. It is more illuminating to refine that statement by concentrating on the broader aspects of the visitors' superiority, which involve those that bind eleven cricketers into an XI, and make cricket into a game rather than simply a collection of biomechanical processes.

  Bowl ten half-volleys to Watson and he would welly all ten through the covers for four – which looks good, is measurable, reproducible, and might lead to a defensible average, but is hardly the end of a cricketer's responsibilities to his team. When it comes to forming part of a unit that punches above its collective weight, Watson exhibits no extra dimension, none of the qualities that galvanise team-mates, light up a game or lift a crowd. He is about as good a cricketer as Australia has put in the field this summer – and he is still not very good.

  7 JANUARY 2011

  Day 5

  Close of play: Australia 2nd innings 281 (84.4 overs)

  As the morning waned, and the strains of 'The Last Post' reverberated again from Billy Cooper's trumpet, a disturbance of stumps at the Sydney Cricket Ground ended Australia's on-field agonies in the Ashes of 2010–11. The off-field agonies have barely begun.

  At nearly two hours, the fifth day took a little longer than expected, but new balls have been England's sphere of influence this summer, and twenty-eight deliveries with a new one sufficed to see off the last vestiges of Australia's tail, and conclude a victory by an innings and 83 runs. When Michael Beer was the last wicket to fall, it was possible we had seen the last of him in Test cricket. Australia are not scheduled to play a Test match until August in Sri Lanka – there will be a lot of brooding between now and then.

  Despite the overnight rain, Steve Smith and Peter Siddle resumed their overnight resistance on time, and brought up their 50 partnership after twenty minutes, whereupon one of the promised 'isolated showers' eventuated and the players dashed for the shelter of the pavilion – all save Tremlett, who allows nothing to disturb his steady, measured tread, and who wandered in some way after the umpires.

  Tom Parker's groundstaff did well to limit the interruption to three-quarters of an hour, the ground announcer rather less well when he decided to reintroduce all the players by reference to their images and stats on the big screen. There truly is no limit to the insults heaped on the intelligence of spectators inside Australian Test grounds. Gosh, here's a picture of Alastair Cook with his arms crossed. After all, he's only batted thirty-six hours this summer so you might have forgotten him. The Barmy Army responded as if on cue to mention of Mitchell Johnson's name by launching into another of its growing repertoire of tributes to Super Mitch, then continuing as a kind of human karaoke machine, rifling through its songbook at random.

  Finally they exulted in unison when Siddle holed out to Anderson off Swann in front of their lower terrace in the Trumper Stand. For those who enjoy such statistical curios, Siddle, by adding 86 in 131 balls with Smith, had participated in Australia's best partnership in consecutive Tests – which tells you as much as you need to know about Australia's ineffectual top order.

  Smith pressed on to Australia's highest score, showing some of his much-lauded spark, while not quite dispelling the image one has of him of a boy waving around a bat too big for him. Tremlett took the new ball at 261 for eight, and Anderson promptly removed Hilfenhaus to give Prior his twenty-third catch of the summer. Within a blink of Beer's stumps being rattled, four of them were souvenired, the two containing stump cams being left behind – even in their ecstasy, the players never forget their debt to television.

  Afterwards, Andrew Strauss looked as relaxed as he had with the bat on the second day, and was rather more expansive than usual, as befits the captain of what today became officially the world's third-ranked Test team. When discussing the task of managing off-field as distinct from captaining on, he sounded almost Obama-esque: 'People want to buy into something. People want to buy into the idea that we're going somewhere as a unit and we're not going to leave anyone behind.' You could not miss the allusion here to Paul Collingwood, to whom England gave every opportunity to succeed, and who has now repaid them by retiring with dignity. While his 83 runs in six innings do not suggest a player with much still to offer, England will miss his sticky palms at slip, responsible for nine catches, and demeanour in the dressing room, which caused his captain to describe him as 'very much the soul of English cricket'.

  To Michael Clarke then fell the job of defending the indefensible, admitting that this was 'as close to the bottom as it gets', while adamantly dismissing talk of a 'crisis in Australian cricket', and claiming that this was 'as gifted as any team I have been a part of' – a rather remarkable assertion given that his era overlaps with those of Shane Warne, Glenn McGrath, Adam Gilchrist, Matthew Hayden and others too numerous to mention. But then, perhaps a deeper point lurked here, that these Australians have been gifted quite a lot, and were strangers to struggle when they found themselves involved in one. It is a condition that they may well have a chance to get used to.

  7 JANUARY 2011

  ASHES VICTORIES

  Parallel Lives

  When Cricket Australia's sloganeers prophesied that 'History Will Be Made' this summer, it's fair to say that they wouldn't have had this history in mind – history involving Australia as loser of three of their last four Ashes series, and of six of their last eight Tests.

  But what does the history made here mean for England? For history's power is great. At the victory ceremony following events today, it was fascinating to note how reverently Andrew Strauss and his players treated the tiny replica urn that looked like it was worth all of $5, even bestowing gentle kisses on it, while swinging around the far more expensive Waterford Crystal trophy inaugurated by the Marylebone Cricket Club like a jerry can.

  History tells us that since the routine of deciding the Ashes over five Tests was established in the 1890s, England have only defended the Ashes successfully in Australia on four occasions: 1928–29, 1954–55, 1978–79 and 1986–87. In both the latter two cases, Australian cricket was weakened and divided, by Kerry Packer and Ali Bacher respectively. Mike Gatting's wins here twenty-four years ago were his only ones as a Test captain.

  Percy Chapman's tourists of 1928–29 rank among the very best in history: Hobbs, Sutcliffe, Hammond, Jardine, Larwood, Tate and the inexhaustible left-armer Farmer White, who ploughed through 3,252 deliveries in those five Tests, compared to the 1,315 bowled by Graeme Swann in these. But the margin of the supremacy of that team, 4–1, is exaggerated by the fact that Australian Tests were then played to a finish. Strauss's team blew their opponents away innings after innings. Today was the first time Australia's batting had lasted longer than 100 overs since Brisbane, and then only just: 106.1.

  The fairest, simplest and most illuminating comparison is with the team led by Len Hutton here fifty-six years ago. Like Strauss's men, they had beaten Australia by the odd Test with a win at the Oval fourteen months earlier.

  Like Hutton, Strauss is a seasoned opening batsman. Like Hutton, Strauss arrived with the prior experience of being towelled up in Australia. Like Hutton, Strauss learned from that misfortune. Perhaps because they were accustomed to bearing its brunt at the top of the order, both saw the solution to Australian conditions as pace bowling.

  Hutton's solution was Frank Tyson, who took 28 wickets at 21 on his tour of a lifetime. The 24 wickets at 26 taken by Strauss's solution, James Anderson, are actually the best in Australia by an England bowler since, even if Anderson is closer in method to Tyson's great partner Brian Statham: slim, whippy, untiring, unyielding.

  Since Hutton's era, the effect of raw pace has been somewhat mitigated by the advent of the helmet and improved protecti
ve gear. It is swing that confounds modern batsmen, with their techniques built around a forward press, and addicted to the sensations of bat on ball. The relative success of the bowlers finding edges in this series is evinced by Matt Prior's twenty-three catches to Brad Haddin's eight.

  What both Hutton's and Strauss's attacks also have in common is an orientation to economy, an end Hutton achieved both through the accuracy of his auxiliaries Trevor Bailey, Bob Appleyard and Johnny Wardle, and through slowing his over rate to a soporific degree. As The Times' venerable cricket correspondent John Woodcock has explained it, Hutton 'planned to keep Australia waiting, to make them fret, to get up their noses'.

  While the expedient of deliberate tardiness and nasal insinuation was not open to Strauss, the latter's conviction that 'strangling your opponent' was a key to success down under contains an echo of the former's approach. So where Australia's most penetrative bowler Mitchell Johnson leaked runs at more than 4 an over, Anderson grudged less than 3. Where Australia's spinners took only five wickets and gave up 3.65 an over, Swann and Collingwood as England's relief bowlers claimed seventeen wickets and gave up a run an over less. Among Australian batsmen lacking patience and touch, inclined to go hard at the ball and to trust in their powerful bats to get them out of trouble, the effect was regular self-immolation.

  The other advantage England have enjoyed this series has been their noisy, visible support. When Percy Chapman's team came here eighty-two years ago, they arrived with only a handful of wealthy camp-followers, who were treated almost as extensions of the touring team. These included the playwright Ben Travers, who, expecting that Chapman would be swamped by messages of support and patriotic injunction before the series, was amazed to find that the only message received by England's captain from HM Government was a tax demand from the Inland Revenue. 'England expects each man to pay his duty,' Travers told Chapman consolingly.