Ashes 2011 (14 page)

This English affinity for the draw might be said to stem from ancient roots. It's their game, after all. Incorporating it as a potential outcome was a conscious decision; some have always rather liked it. In a famous report for the
Spectator
of the Lord's Test of 1964, Neville Cardus contrasted the atmosphere in the Long Room during the game's intermittent periods of play and much longer rain-induced pauses. While cricket was in progress, Cardus reported, frustration seethed. Poor bowling was censured; ill-judged shots deplored; damn near everything was said to be going to the dogs. Whenever the players sought shelter from the elements, in comparison, merriment broke out, and conviviality prevailed. He had not, thought Cardus, seen Londoners so united since the Blitz. Could there, he wondered, be a market for cricket grounds at which it was guaranteed no play would take place, with perhaps a band on hand for general good cheer? One day, perhaps, a revisionist historian will acclaim Cardus as the forefather of 'cricketainment'.

At the time, England were midway through a long period in fruitless pursuit of the Ashes. They had just lost to the West Indies; they were about to lose to South Africa too. They were, in modern parlance, a 'mid-table' side. No wonder, perhaps, that inactivity was not an entirely unwelcome state. That state of mind certainly applied through the decades that followed Australia's 1989 cakewalk. A draw was received as manna; 'being competitive' was the repeated ambition.

Australians, by contrast, do not believe in 'honourable draws' – the very expression seems to them a contradiction in terms. There is probably some deep cultural reason for this that is above my pay grade to explicate: our distrust of ambiguity, perhaps, or our dislike of form and protocol. Whatever the case, we pine for results. Until World War II, all our first-class cricket, including Tests, were timeless. Most of Australian club cricket is played over two days and to a result. It does not rely on declarations, target setting and cooperating captains.

So here is a role reversal in a series already replete with them: England pressing for victory, Australia thinking that maybe 'match drawn' is not a profanity after all. After the Adelaide Test eight years ago, Melbourne's
Age
newspaper headlined its front-page report: 'Ho-hum, we've won the Ashes again.' You don't require a long memory to appreciate the piquancy of the turnabout.

For England, of course, the reverse in thinking must be decidedly encouraging. They came to Australia needing only to share the series in order to regain the Ashes. It would have been easy to slip into the frame of mind that the running was Australia's to make. Instead they have come to win the Ashes again, not simply to defend them.

For Australia, this shift in power may be a greater problem than is fully grasped. The whole of the Australian ascendancy was designed with results in mind. Aggressive batting; aggressive bowling; aggressive aggression, with its kit bag of verbal abrasion, extrovert body language and 'mental disintegration'. Yet Australia have now lost three of their last four Tests, which means that their problems are more than simply 'putting teams away', as they were interpreted originally, but concern basic matters of security and stability. Their batsmen are failing to turn fifties into hundreds; their bowlers are unable to bowl maidens. They are therefore not taking long enough to be bowled out, and are letting oppositions score too quickly. Ian Chappell, entrusted with rebuilding the Australian team in the early 1970s, had a nice way of putting it: before you can start winning, you have to stop losing. And there won't always be friendly cumulonimbus to come to Australia's aid.

The clouds at the Adelaide Oval this morning were high, tufty and really rather pretty, especially to English fans, concerned that the climate would cheat their cricket team of what nobody could deny were just deserts. Once it had been confirmed that the storms stalking South Australia would not arrive at the Second Test until later in the afternoon, they could relax and enjoy the view. There was no escape for Australia, and an early start was followed by an early finish, England's margin of victory coming out at an innings and 71 runs after an hour and a half.

It was better than that – or worse, depending on your point of view. England lost just five wickets in the game, and have made 1,137 runs for the loss of half a dozen batsmen since their Gabba first innings. Not since Australian cricket's dog days in the Packer era have the hosts been so utterly outplayed in their own backyard.

In truth, Australia had been behind since the first thirteen minutes of the game in which they disintegrated to 2 for three. Their last seven wickets in the first innings added 243. Had they done so from a position of 300 for three, they would have approached something like a par score for this very good Test match pitch. As it was, they didn't have a big enough total for bowlers who probably wouldn't have been good enough to defend anyway – like I said, this was a very bad Test match indeed.

At least the end was quick, as England looked confident it would be. When Hussey (50) bent forward to Swann's twelfth delivery, the ball gripped the footmarks but evaded the grip of Prior, who was surprised by the edge and bounce, and proved unable to recover the rebound from his shoulder. Yet Prior made it look like he had just been advised that the label was protruding from his shirt collar – no harm done, easily fixed.

If he brooded at all, it was only for fourteen deliveries. As Finn took the new ball, Hussey misjudged a pull shot – the same stroke he had played with profit and impunity for nearly eight hours in Brisbane – and Anderson calmly caught the top edge at mid-on. Anderson then zipped one away from Haddin that Prior took joyously.

Perhaps nobody had more riding on this final day in a personal sense than the embattled Marcus North. He could argue that in this Test he overcame his all-or-nothing habits, for he made starts in both innings and today struck three attractive boundaries in an hour's stay. But Swann further bolstered his stats against left-handers and his habit of obtaining lbws by turning one down the line of off-stump.

With the ball, Harris had quite a good Test. With the bat, his fortunes have been altogether bizarre. He called confidently for the referral of his first-ball lbw decision in the first innings, only to find it upheld. He requested the same after padding up to his first ball in the second innings, albeit somewhat more hesitantly, as though he simply could not believe how cricket apportions luck. It was to no avail: he was sent on his way for a king pair – the system showing the ball to be just grazing the off bail – thereby completing the surely unique experience of being given out four times in two deliveries. It was a shame for Harris that the system could not also immediately open a trapdoor beneath his feet to enable a prompt, private exit. As it was, he traipsed from the arena, feeling, as a batsman at least, acutely overdressed.

The luck denied Harris might be said to have settled on Siddle (0), who watched, mesmerised, as an inside edge on to his bat from Swann back-spun into the base of the stumps without loosening a bail let alone dislodging it. This backspin of Swann's is a remarkable feature in an English spinner. When they drop from a dead bat, his deliveries tend to fizz and whiz around the batsman's feet like a child's top – it testifies again to just how huge a rip Swann gives the ball, in contrast to English off-rollers of the past too many and mediocre to name.

The rest came quietly – as quietly as Strauss spoke during his post-match press conference. He was quiet
and
deliberate. 'When you're confident, things start happening for you as a matter of course,' said Strauss. 'You don't have to push it... Even when Hussey was getting them back in the game, they weren't going anywhere.' For Strauss, who normally addresses his interlocutors in a mild-mannered monotone, this virtually constituted fighting talk.

'We've got to go away and do some soul-searching,' mused his rival, as well as using the word 'execute' more often than a Texan politician. The rain? Ponting insisted that it hadn't come into Australia's calculations. 'If you start thinking about that, you're beaten already,' he averred. Yet at 2 p.m., clouds which had cast the ground into darkness exploded with their watery freight, and in half an hour had transformed the outfield into a shallow lake. Adelaide itself was under water. Rather like Australian cricket.

Yesterday, Simon Katich and Stuart Broad, opening batsman and opening bowler, were young men in the fight of their lives, a cricket contest for which both have effectively spent their whole lives training. Today, both learned that it was a contest in which they would play no further part.

Katich had waited more than nine years from his Ashes debut in England to actually playing an Ashes Test at home. Broad had arguably bided his time still longer. In his autobiography, father Chris Broad described how his then-wife missed hearing him attain a maiden Ashes century at the WACA in December 1986 because she was busy changing four-month-old Stuart's nappy. 'Stuart can be very insistent!' he wrote. Umpires and match referees the world over would agree.

Katich now has an Achilles tendon injury that reduced him to batting in Australia's second innings as though he had a club foot. Broad may have damaged his abdominal muscle in the act of striving to exploit Katich's immobility. While it is, as often remarked, a cruel game, the cricket gods sometimes sprinkle their cruelty with a pinch of whimsy.

In the media conferences after the game, their respective captains paid Katich and Broad heartfelt tribute. Both also took turns stating what on the face of it is the bleeding obvious – that England and Australia had so far played only two Tests in a five-match series in which there was therefore three to play.

If it sounded a little like
Sesame Street,
there was a point beyond the mathematical reinforcement of the understanding that five minus two equals three. Over the course of cricket's longest distance, vicissitudes of fitness and form take their toll. And in this an enormous amount of luck is involved. Surely one of the most freakish aspects of the preternatural summer of 2005 was that England made only one forced change in the whole series; one of the others was that Australia were deprived of their key bowler by their own hand, as it were, or ball, to be exact. Neither England nor Australia were ever likely to reach the end of the Ashes of 2010–11 with their first-choice sides intact; now they know they won't. Both will feel these losses.

For Katich, now thirty-five, this might be the end of a long, hard, rutted road. His wife is expecting their first child; he is known to be committed to home and hearth. Facing the media this afternoon, he pointed out that he had been regarded as finished three years ago, and that his resurrection as an opener had owed a lot to happenstance, the epilogue to his career being richer than the first draft. It sounded a little like someone thinking back rather than forward.

Katich has made eight hundreds and averaged 50 in thirty-three Tests since returning to Australian colours, and formed an unexpectedly adhesive opening combination with Shane Watson. Of Ponting at number three they have been contrasting protectors, Katich stepping across his stumps like a secret serviceman guarding a president, Watson more like a bouncer in a swanky nightclub. They have been the most reliable part of Australia's top order, even if of late they haven't had much to compete with on a scale of reliability.

Broad has also had a two-stage career, at least in a statistical sense. He arrived at last year's Headingley Test with a bowling average over 40; since providing England with its sole semi-competent performance there, his average has been under 30. Until that Test, Broad had looked to Australians like a Hugo Boss clotheshorse; he has become in the last year the bowler to whom Strauss looks for a bit of brass-knuckled bravado. 'I don't think he meant to hit him,' Strauss said after Broad threw the ball that struck Zulqarnain Haider at Edgbaston in August – perhaps a semi-conscious ambiguity.

So although it looks like one-all in the injury Ashes, the absence of Broad will hurt England more than the unavailability of Katich hampers Australia. Broad is one of four specialist bowlers, Katich one of six specialist batsmen. England must choose from within their squad, which contains no like-for-like replacement; Australia have, at least notionally, a whole country of batsmen, and indications of form by which to judge them.

It is evidence of England's preparedness that, learning from past misadventures, they brought to Australia their 'shadow' squad, from which the team itself has since drafted Ajmal Shahzad. When England last won in Adelaide, in 1995, it was with an XI cobbled together from an ensemble through which no fewer than twenty players passed, Mark Ilott's sole contribution being his appearance in the team's Christmas panto. But it is the lot of touring teams everywhere to be at a slight disadvantage where drumming up reserves is concerned. Broad's return to England, in fact, probably constituted Australia's best news of the day – by being the only development that was in any way favourable to them.

Here was a reminder, too, that the five-match series knows no equal as a test of physical firmity, mental resilience and professional organisation. Other fine cricketers will also fall by the wayside this summer; who fills that wayside may exert a considerable influence over the Ashes' final resting place.

1
 
For those uninitiated in Australian culinary culture, Milo is a chocolate powder made by Nestle that makes milk more congenial to the juvenile palate; the nearest English equivalent would be Ovaltine. The traditional green of its can has been adopted as the colour of Milo In2Cricket, the littlies' form of the game, representatives of whom lined up with the respective teams at each playing of the national anthem, and played in luncheon intervals.