Ashes 2011
Page 24
The staunchest group of supporters for Hutton's Englishmen was then their nineteen-strong press corps, one of whose number, Alf Gover of the Sunday Mirror, acted as the David Saker of his time by helping Tyson shorten his run, sharpen his pace and improve his stamina.
In days of yore, however, it could be a lonely life inside Australian cricket grounds for visiting cricketers. So the significance of the armies of spectators who have followed England this summer, Barmy and otherwise, cannot be underestimated. They have made Australia a home away from home for their team, as was recognised today when Strauss's men made a beeline for the serried ranks of red and white on the lower deck of the Trumper Stand as soon as the presentation was over.
It wasn't a spontaneous gesture, for Andrew Flintoff's team did the same here four years ago – deserving no more, frankly, than a massed raspberry in return. But it was a heartfelt one. Not every day is history made, and it is an experience to be shared when it is.
7 JANUARY 2011
AUSTRALIA
Australia Versus Itself
Did the Australian public turn on their cricketers during this Ashes series? You would be forgiven for thinking so, if you took the increasingly florid tabloid newspaper headlines to be an accurate reflection of public opinion. The truth of this annus horribilis is probably subtler: that Australians never believed their cricketers were in with a chance in the first place.
The tradition, of course, is that England cricketers arrive to a chorus of detraction, following in the hallowed memories of the wharfies at Fremantle Gages in the 1930s who welcomed the ships carrying Marylebone teams by reminding them whose side Bradman was on with choruses of 'You'll never geddim out!'
Not this summer. Australian cricket's fall from its lofty estate since the Oval Test of 2009 might have been swift, but it has registered. Almost three weeks before this Ashes series commenced, a big nationwide online survey in News Ltd papers concluded that the home side had no chance of regaining the Ashes, that coach Tim Nielsen was a failure, and that heir apparent Michael Clarke was the wrong choice to succeed Ricky Ponting.
When Michael Atherton arrived in Hobart to report on the tourists' game against Australia A, he was shocked by the degree of local pessimism, at a stage on tours when Australians were normally at least rehearsing their Schadenfreude. And it seemed to communicate itself to Ponting's team early on, when Mitchell Johnson mumbled a complaint after the Gabba Test that most of the fans seemed to be English. The fans' retort seemed to be that Australia's cricketers should not expect support they had not earned.
Quite what engendered this fatalism? The simplest answer is realism. The cycle of retirements in the four years since the last Ashes here has rendered Australian cricket a succession of curtain calls, to the extent that there now seems a good deal more talent in the commentary box than on the field.
These characters have not been replaced, and their continuing visibility in various guises, from charity worker (Glenn McGrath) to human headline (Shane Warne), offers a ready basis for unflattering comparison. It was the dearth of salty humanity in current Australian ranks that led to Doug Bollinger's brief cult-hero status last summer, which soon petered out when he lacked the game to go with it.
Certainly, this current team is one to which locals find it difficult to warm. Wild vauntings of Phil Hughes or Steve Smith have convinced nobody, while reservations remain about Clarke, thought a little too self-regarding and self-involved for high office, and also Shane Watson and Mitchell Johnson, imagined to be principally concerned with hair and tattoos respectively. Cricket Australia are encouraging their players to use social media in communicating with fans, but what it shows more faithfully is how superficial is the acquaintance of the team and its public.
Only Michael Hussey, Brad Haddin and Peter Siddle of the current XI are genuinely thought to be made of the right stuff. Administrators would kill for their own Graeme Swann – quick, gregarious, worldly and naturally funny.
The press, meanwhile, has actually been less capricious than usual. On the eve of the Perth Test, I had a conversation with a senior tabloid journalist, who admitted that he was under immense pressure from his office to condemn Ponting and his players in the most astringent terms, but that he was doing his best to resist. 'I don't know how much longer I can hold out,' he confided. 'They want names and they want faces. They want to know who to blame.'
When Australia capitulated on the first day of that Perth Test, the coverage was wickedly cutting. It wasn't 'Swedes 1 Turnips 0', but in years to come the back page of that day's West Australian may become a collector's piece. There they were, on the back page of the paper, the heads of Australia's selectors, bespattered with egg. The headline explained it all just in case: 'Egg On Their Faces'.
There was a little more egg to go round that evening after Johnson and Ryan Harris rock'n'rolled the visitors on a sporting wicket, but as a headline it has looked better by the day. For those who did in anticipation sense the weakness of the Australian team this summer, in fact, there is a perverse satisfaction to be derived from having seen it coming.
7 JANUARY 2011
ENGLAND
Stars among the All-Stars
In their green and golden age, Australian cricketers were apt to complain of never receiving the credit they deserved, results being customarily explained by reference to the weaknesses of opponents. Something similar may befall England's team in the Ashes of 2010–11 – think of it as the last of those reversals of traditional roles on which we have been musing all summer.
England seemed, after all, to do nothing spectacular. No batsman shredded an attack outright; of the mere three five-fors obtained, only one, Graeme Swann's in Adelaide, was in a winning cause. If anything, the high-explosive efforts were Australian, such as Peter Siddle's in Brisbane, Mitchell Johnson's in Perth. With the possible exception of the first day in Melbourne, England's cricket was like a series of controlled detonations at strategic intervals and locations.
So future generations may miss the overwhelming authority achieved by English individuals in this series; partly, too, because the players themselves were apt to underplay them. Alastair Cook's response to an interlocutor at Adelaide about the sweat of his long toil there was a kind of tour motif: 'I'm quite lucky - I don't really sweat that much.' Thanks for the ready-made headline, Cooky: England retain Ashes without breaking sweat.
Before the tour, Cook was an England player whose measure the Australians would have felt they had. In a gloating overview of the visiting team for the Sydney Morning Herald published on the eve of the Gabba Test, Stuart Clark dismissed him airily: 'Opponents around the world have realised he is predominantly a square-of-the-wicket player, and now bowl full and outside off stump as there is a question about his ability to leave the ball.'
Question answered, methinks: it was in the neglected art of leaving the ball that Cook gave his bat-on-ball-happy opponents a lesson. That flowed, however, from a confidence in his repertoire of strokes, and ability to dispose of the bad ball. It's when you're worried where your next run will come from that you play shots you shouldn't. Cook could be Sir Leavealot because he had the swordplay to go with it.
No other England player fits so seamlessly into the team's coaching structure. Andy Flower is a former close Essex teammate; Graham Gooch is a former county coach. They have modified his technique, but in such a way that it remains his, and that he now understands his game more completely. They backed him through thin times, so that they have seen his character in adversity. These factors make a powerful combination.
Jonathan Trott began the Ashes of 2010–11 as the only member of England's top six without prior Australian experience. On the odd occasion, too, he looked overeager to play the pull shot, which thrice cost him his wicket on tour. Otherwise, he was the complete number three, despite having first been drafted into the position for the want of something better. He and Cook were the kind of batting combination that bring to a camp calm and order. The middle ord
er could relax, bowlers put their feet up.
His outward phlegmatism notwithstanding, a passion seems to lurk deep in Trott. When he was left out of the Headingley Test of 2009, Andrew Strauss described his look as that of someone 'genuinely distraught'. He was the one England player who gave a hint of his team's latent rage at home last year by having a crack at Wahab Riaz. But in the main, that passion smoulders, summed up somehow in his technique: with his trigger movement forward, he always seems in danger of launching at the ball, yet somehow ends up playing exquisitely late, right beneath his nose. It is force under control. During his critical 168 not out at Melbourne, he never lost momentum despite the acutest self-denial.
What England's successes this summer have in common is that they were not players Australia would have spent much time worrying about in advance. Cook had had no impact on two prior Ashes series; Trott had struggled on bouncy wickets a year earlier. James Anderson? Before the tour, Australians remembered him mostly as the cannon fodder of four years ago, and a threat in the Ashes of 2009 only when clouds rolled in. Under cloudless Australian skies, Shane Watson and his top-order colleagues quite fancied their chances against him. Ahead of the series, Watson talked up Anderson's down-under record as a point in his team's favour: 'If he doesn't start out the way he wants to, those wounds can open up straight away.'
Watson's punditry proved as speculative as his calling. One of the most impressive features of Anderson's bowling in 2010–11 was his willingness to be struck for early boundaries in search of swing – he was like the proverbial spinner prepared to keep tossing it up even under attack. Anderson had some expensive opening spells among his successful ones, but he never lost faith in his ability to beat the bat with sideways movement, or his stomach for the contest. Even when Watson had another piece of him after Perth, chirping that Anderson's failure there as night watchman to protect Paul Collingwood had been 'one of my best moments on a cricket field', England's number one quick never stopped coming. Anderson's contribution as straight man to Graeme Swann's video diaries also made them among the tour's most successful partnerships. His deadpan retort to Swann in Adelaide – 'Excuse me, there's nothing wrong with being both informative and interesting, Graeme' – was perhaps the best line of the trip.
On preparing to face Chris Tremlett, meanwhile, Australia appeared to spend no time at all: indeed, the one aspect of Australia's preparation that Michael Clarke was later prepared to concede was deficient was the failure to train against 'tall fast bowlers', and they come no taller than Tremlett.
The reason, one fancies, was Tremlett's prior reputation for reticence, for temperament and body language that Shane Warne described as 'just a bit soft' and 'awful' respectively. Here, perhaps, we learned more about Warne than Tremlett, the Australian's deportment ideal being David Hasselhoff. From his first ball in Perth, Tremlett looked the part as a bowler, while remaining utterly impassive, even placid, between times.
Tremlett, in fact, might have been devised with batsmen accustomed to propping on the front foot and hitting happily through the line in mind. His ball to begin Australia's rout in Melbourne, forcing a skittish Watson on to the back foot and taking the shoulder of the bat, was the kind that sends a tremor through the dressing room – the hunters of Perth, it said, were now the hunted. Mind you, it was almost comical to contrast the consternation Tremlett induced in his own slips cordon with the total equanimity he exhibited himself, and the physical difference he opened up between the visitors and hosts. When 6ft 7in Tremlett walked past 5ft 7in Phil Hughes at the non-striker's end in Melbourne and Sydney, they seemed involved in different games, not just different teams.
England came to Australia shadowed by doubts about the efficacy of a four-man attack. They got a little lucky. Thanks to the unseasonally mild summer, fast bowling was not so physically extentuating as usual; the speed with which the tourists grew accustomed to rolling Australia over helped too, of course. Above all, though, it was thanks to Tremlett and also to Tim Bresnan that England were able to absorb the loss to attrition of Stuart Broad and Steve Finn: statistically at least, they were actually almost twice as effective, turning over 28 wickets at 21, versus 16 wickets at 39.
Yet in concentrating on the four statistical standouts of this England team, one is at risk of ignoring their most impressive quality, which was their strength-through-joy unity. After a rocky start at the Gabba, they caught superbly. Their ground fielding was electric, inflicting four damaging run-outs, while their own running between wickets was judicious, incurring not a single casualty themselves. Above all, they radiated confidence and pleasure in the contest.
This is not something for which England has been known down under. In a memorable passage in his autobiography, Adam Gilchrist described the air around Alec Stewart's team twelve years ago as 'the epitome of everything wrong with English professionalism', resembling 'office workers turning up for a dreary day behind the desk'. Thus it was not a spacefilling sound bite when Flower said on England's departure that there was 'nothing to be afraid of in Australia', that it was 'one of the best places to go' and 'should be a lot of fun'. It meant also that when the Australians tried something similar before the Third Test, with Steve Smith describing his mission as being to 'come into the side and be fun', 'making sure I'm having fun and making sure everyone else around is having fun', it sounded as if the locals had simply exhausted other possibilities. A winning team will always be the happier one, but in this case happiness also seemed to beget success. For this, England deserve most credit of all.
SCORECARDS
FIFTH TEST Sydney Cricket Ground 3-7 January 2011
Toss Australia England won by an innings and 83 runs
AUSTRALIA 1st innings
R
M
B
4
6
SR
SR Watson
c Strauss
b Bresnan
45
178
127
5
0
35.43
PJ Hughes
c Collingwood
b Tremlett
31
116
93
5
0
33.33
UT Khawaja
c Trott
b Swann
37
120
95
5
0
38.94
*MJ Clarke
c Anderson
b Bresnan
4
25
21
0
0
19.04
MEK Hussey
b Collingwood
33
108
92
2
0
35.86
†BJ Haddin
c †Prior
b Anderson
6
16
13
0
0
46.15
SPD Smith
c Collingwood
b Anderson
18
79
53
1
0
33.96
MG Johnson
b Bresnan
53
84
66
5
1
80.30
PM Siddle
c Strauss
b Anderson
2
3
4
0
0
50.00
BW Hilfenhaus
c †Prior
b Anderson
34
86
58
3
1
58.62
MA Beer
not out
2
22
17
0
0
11.76
EXTRAS
(b 5,
lb 7, w 1, nb 2)
15
TOTAL
(all out; 106.1 overs; 423 mins)
280
(2.63 runs per over)
FoW
1-55
(Hughes, 29.3 ov),
2-105
(Watson, 44.3 ov),
3-113
(Clarke, 50.6 ov),
4-134
(Khawaja, 58.6 ov),
5-143
(Haddin, 62.4 ov),
6-171
(Hussey, 79.6 ov),
7-187
(Smith, 84.2 ov),
8-189
(Siddle, 84.6 ov),
9-265
(Johnson, 99.5 ov),
10-280
(Hilfenhaus, 106.1 ov)
BOWLING
O
M
R
W
ECON
JM Anderson
30.1
7
66
4
2.18
CT Tremlett
26
9
71
1
2.73
(2nb)
TT Bresnan
30
5
89
3
2.96
(1w)
GP Swann
16
4
37
1
2.31