Ashes 2011 (31 page)

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.

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 protective 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.

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.

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.

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.