Ashes 2011 Read online

  Contents

  Title page

  Introduction

  Part I – Kindling the Ashes

  Folie à Deux

  The Fourth Protocol

  Please Enjoy

  Future Imperfect

  66 and All That

  For He Is an Englishman

  Men in a Muddle

  17 Again

  Yes, No, Wait

  Part II – First Test

  Gabba Jabber

  Day 1

  Up and at ’Em

  Day 2

  Two by Four

  Day 3

  Day 4

  The Power of Two

  Day 5

  Scarred for Life?

  Scorecards First Test

  Part III – Second Test

  Winds of Change

  Day 1

  Killer Looks

  Day 2

  Little Big Man

  Day 3

  KP or Not KP

  Day 4

  What Are They Good For?

  Day 5

  Collateral Damage

  Scorecards Second Test

  Part IV – Third Test

  Post-Warne Society

  The Recession We Had to Have?

  Thought Bubbles

  Day 1

  Perthabad

  Day 2

  Swings and Roundabouts

  Day 3

  Past, Present, Future

  Day 4

  One Crowded Hour

  Scorecards Third Test

  Part V – Fourth Test

  G Whiz

  Day 1

  One Out, All Out

  Day 2

  White-Coat Fever

  Day 3

  36 and All That

  Day 4

  A Hindsight View of Foresight

  A Bad Day at the Office

  Scorecards Fourth Test

  Part VI – Fifth Test

  In with the New

  The Living Dead

  Day 1

  Our Man Usman

  Day 2

  Disturbances in Sydney

  Day 3

  Strokes of Genius

  Day 4

  When Success Is Failure

  Day 5

  Parallel Lives

  Australia Versus Itself

  Stars among the All-Stars

  Scorecards Fifth Test

  Averages

  Plates

  Copyright

  Introduction

  In the southern summer of 2010–11, England retained the Ashes in Australia 3–1. The novelty hasn't yet worn off that statement, and it might be a while before it does. Had you envisaged such a prospect this time four years ago, you would have been laughed out of whatever hostelry you proposed it in – because you would have needed a few drinks to work up the bravado to say it. At the time, England had been on the receiving end of the most thorough defeat in Test history. Australia faced a wave of retirements, but they had regenerated before, and were backing themselves to do so again.

  The Ashes of 2009 were then played out by two battling, middling, sometimes shambling teams. But for the improbable resilience with the bat of James Anderson and Monty Panesar at Cardiff, Australia might have retained the trophy; as it is, an unlucky coin toss and poor selection cost them dearly at the Oval. In their summer of 2009–10, however, Australia won five of six Tests, a good summer's work even by the standards of their primrose path of the late nineties and early noughties. There was much talk of new fighting spirit, new talent like Steve Smith and Phil Hughes, new characters like Doug Bollinger and Ryan Harris. If not the magnificos of yesteryear, the Australia team still had a winning feeling about it, consolidated when they comfortably bested New Zealand in that country at summer's end.

  What Masaryk said of dictators, then, can also be said to apply to cricket dynasties: they always look good until the last minutes. Because cracks appeared when Australia went to England in the middle of 2010 to play Tests against Pakistan and one-day internationals against England; these were then widened by Tests in India and finally by one-day internationals against Sri Lanka at home. On the first day of the Ashes, an Australian bowler took a hat-trick; by the end, Australia had for the first time in the country's cricket history lost three Test matches by an innings. Had I not been there as eyewitness, I'd hardly have believed it; but I was, and the result is in your hands.

  This book is a collection of my despatches. It interleaves the daily match reports I wrote for Business Spectator, and the daily columns I composed for The Times. They are unaltered from the form in which they were sent, so you can see when my forecasts were awry, often enough, as well as right, just occasionally, albeit probably by accident. Players don't have the luck of magisterial hindsight, rewriting events to leave out the bad shots they played, the long-hops they served up, the catches they dropped; it's fairest to be read in parallel. And let's face it: if you were right all along, where would be the point in watching?

  One observation, however, may be pertinent. Reporting and analysing Test matches is both satisfying and deeply challenging, rather like trying to review a play at the end of each act, except from a distance of maybe a hundred metres, with little idea how the characters will appear and reappear, and no notion how the plot will unfold. With the online news environment having created a demand for round-the-clock content, both my report and my columns had to be filed within an hour of stumps, barely time to squeeze in the nightly press conference where a player from each side said not much about very little. I enjoy deadlines, and seeing something I have written posted within minutes of my completing it retains for me a heady novelty. Yet so heavily does the accent now fall on instantaneous judgement that the scope for considered journalism cannot but dwindle, with an impact on the way that cricket is perceived, understood and interpreted. Caveat lector.

  This was a tough tour from a personal point of view also, given the separations from my wife Charlotte and one-year-old daughter Cecilia, for which even the wonders of Skype could not make up. I finally had them with me in Sydney, which meant that I ended the Test with my head ringing from both Barmy Army chants and songs from In The Night Garden, idly transposing Mitchell Johnson and Makka Pakka. In doing so I obtained a better understanding of what it takes for a cricketer to leave home and hearth for a foreign clime. If Andrew Strauss's tourists missed their loved ones half as much as I missed mine, they have my deepest sympathy.

  It remains for me to thank my editors, Tim Hallissey at The Times and James Kirby at Business Spectator, for the opportunity to cover this constantly fun and fascinating series. I'd also like to acknowledge my estimable colleagues at The Times – Simon Barnes, Richard Hobson, Geoffrey Dean and especially the chief cricket correspondent Michael Atherton – for being a team scarcely less cohesive than England. I look forward to working with them all again.

  GIDEON HAIGH

  January 2011

  Part I

  KINDLING THE ASHES

  5 OCTOBER 2010

  THE ASHES

  Folie à Deux

  The wife of Australia's longest–serving prime minister, Robert Menzies, saw two days of Ashes cricket, at Melbourne and Lord's, separated by eighteen months. On the first occasion, England's Jack Hobbs and Herbert Sutcliffe batted all day; at the beginning of the second, she was bemused to see Hobbs and Sutcliffe again coming out to bat. 'Well, I never,' she said. 'Don't tell me those two are still in?'

  Good story – it also contains a kernel of truth. For those who don't understand it, but also for those who do, the Ashes is like one long, apparently unending, constantly fluctuating, seemingly unresolvable game – cricket's ultimate, insofar as even when a series is won or lost, that ascendancy is provisional until the resumption of competition. It never ends w
ith 'goodbye', always with 'check ya later'.

  And that it also is: a check. No matter where the two countries stand in cricket in other respects, Australia and England exhibit a perennial desire to ascertain where they rate in relation to one another. World Twenty20? A useful bookend. World Cup? Handy for keeping your cufflinks in. But on the national mantelpiece, England and Australia keep space permanently cleared for the Ashes, even if there have been spells like the 1940s and 1990s when that area in England has grown a mite dusty.

  There is something marvellous about this; also something quite mysterious. The Ashes is cricket's Stonehenge. Its origins are obscure. It was standing when we got here, and will outlast us all. Having outgrown its original purpose, its reason for being is not always entirely clear. Yet it goes from strength to strength, attracting more pilgrims than ever.

  It is Test cricket's definitive rivalry, not because it has always provided cricket of the best quality, but because of two aspects integral to it. Firstly, continuity: since England came round to the five–Test format in 1899, it has been decided over a shorter distance on only a handful of occasions. Secondly, conduct: it is rough, tough, even sometimes bitter on the field. 'Test cricket is not a light–hearted business,' warned Sir Donald Bradman. 'Especially that between England and Australia.' Yet off the field, it has remained, with occasional exceptions that prove the rule, remarkably civil and companionable.

  Not every English visitor finds Australia to their taste. 'Dear Father,' one of Douglas Jardine's team wrote home in 1932–33, 'this country is just hundreds and hundreds of miles of damn all, and then hundreds of miles more of it.' But the long distances and long durations involved in Ashes cricket beget hospitality: Alec Bedser and Arthur Morris played a decade's cricket against one another, then spent another five decades as friends and guests in one another's homes.

  To the Ashes, there is also a pleasing equilibrium. Although their countrymen sometimes like to pretend otherwise, no two competitors in international cricket have as much common cultural ground: of language, history, institutions and even sporting values. The differences stand out the more for those surrounding similarities.

  The conditions for cricket, for example, are radically dissimilar, and geography and meteorology have been hugely influential in the last five years: heat, harsh light and flat wickets in Australia, cloud cover and juice in England. And while globalisation should by rights be taking the edge off some of the distinctions between Australian and English cricketers, it's not doing so quickly. Ricky Ponting could be from no other country; Andrew Strauss likewise. Mitchell Johnson bounces it like an Australian; Jimmy Anderson swings it like an Englishman. From time to time, Australia and England eye one another with envious appreciation. Australians returned from England in 2005 wishing they had their own Andrew Flintoff; English spectators at the Oval Test of that series serenaded Shane Warne with a chorus of: 'We wish you were English'. But the fans of each country have ideas of the qualities in a cricketer they esteem.

  What has changed about the rivalry? It originates, of course, from English colonisation of the Australian continent and from the desire to test the prowess of one society against the other. Sport, offering results in a fixed time on a superficially even footing, was an ideal medium for patriotic expression. 'Read the accounts of … the cricket matches,' opined Marcus Clarke in The Future Australian Race during the year of the inaugural Test match, 'and say if our youth is not manly.'

  We sometimes think of this as all one way; that it was always Australians seeking an estimation of themselves against the imperial power. We should not underestimate how much the English enjoyed the challenge. The British historian David Cannadine has pointed out that the late Victorian age was one in which traditional power structures sensed menace from forces of equalisation – industrialisation, urbanisation, extensions of the franchise. Reminding an uppity colony who was in charge was therapeutic for the English too.

  What is impressive about the first decade of Anglo-Australian competition is its sheer frequency. Tours were huge, complex, expensive and slow-moving undertakings, yet Australian teams toured England in 1878, 1880, 1882, 1884, 1886, 1888 and 1890, and English teams reciprocated in 1876–77, 1878–79, 1881–82, 1882–83, 1884–85, 1886–87, 1887–88 and 1891–92 – all of it without a single complaint of 'burnout'.

  The seminal series was then the five Tests of 1894–95 in Australia, where the England team of Drewy Stoddart prevailed in the final match to secure the rubber 3–2, having won the first after following on. It was noteworthy not only for the drama and quality of the cricket, but the way in which the advent of the telegraph cable between the two countries permitted its following in both hemispheres.

  Australians did not learn that their countrymen had won at the Oval in 1882 until ten weeks after the event; English cricket followers, which legend has it included Queen Victoria, knew within hours the fortunes of Stoddart's team. Over shorter routes, the telegraph offered ever more real-time thrills. Official telegraph traffic one afternoon in 1894–95 between the Melbourne and Ballarat stock exchanges consisted of single wire: 'Nothing doing. Cricket mad. Stoddart out.'

  This took place against a backdrop of an evolving sense of distinct nationhoods, climaxing with Australia's Federation in 1901. In the nineteenth century, five players represented both England and Australia: Billy Murdoch, Billy Midwinter, Jack Ferris, Sammy Woods and Albert Trott. Murdoch, the first Australian captain to win a Test on English soil, was buried in it, having settled in Sussex; so was Fred Spofforth, his matchwinner in that fabled game, after putting down roots in Hampstead. Since Federation, Australia has chosen only a handful of players born elsewhere, and looked askance at England's partiality to cricketers from far away.

  Then, and actually only really then, came the Ashes. As any fule kno, the symbol of cricket supremacy between England and Australia derives from that victory wrung for Murdoch by Spofforth at the Oval in 1882, after which a jesting obituary notice 'in affectionate remembrance of English cricket' was published in the Sporting Times, with the coda: 'The body will be cremated and the ashes taken to Australia.' The jest was double-edged, conflating two news events: the cricket, and cremation, the legality of which was being hotly debated in England.

  This jest was then given physical form in Australia the following year, with the creation of an urn by a group of Melbourne society belles. They presented it to England's captain, the Hon. Ivo Bligh, in appreciation of his team's recent success in Australia. One of them, Florence Morphy, ended up marrying him too: they became Lord and Lady Darnley. But the original idea did not take off at once: it was, as it were, a slow burn. Not until Pelham Warner led an England team here in 1903–04 were the Ashes rekindled. For also en route to Australia aboard the Orontes was Lady Darnley, who so charmed Warner with her tale of her husband's cricket exploits that he adopted 'the Ashes' as a motif in the title of his tour book How We Recovered the Ashes. Even then, the urn itself did not come into the public eye until Lord Darnley's death in 1927, when it was bequeathed to the Marylebone Cricket Club.

  So here's a puzzle. Some breathtaking relics survive from that epoch-making Oval Test 128 years ago. In the museum at the Melbourne Cricket Club, you will find the ball with which Spofforth conjured victory, adeptly scooped up by Australia's keeper, Jack Blackham; you will also find a brooch Blackham had made containing a fragment of the ball. In a sense, these are artifacts far worthier of our veneration than a joke urn inspired by a joke obituary revived by a forgotten cricket book: they are relics of the game that made Australia's cricket reputation in England, not an object twice removed from it. The Frank Worrell Trophy contested by Australia and the West Indies obtains its totemic significance from the placement of the ball from the first Tied Test; as the Ashes urn has never been opened, it could contain crack cocaine for all we know.

  And yet … and yet … like I said, the Ashes is mystery as well as history. Perhaps we cherish it because among sporting trophies it is unique: not a
dirty great shield or shining metallic art work, but a tiny frail terracotta. Perhaps we covet it because it can't be bought or sold, can't be replaced, can't be replicated. It is, in the original sense of the word, a myth – as mythic as the beast once imagined by an elderly woman who wrote to England's captain Norman Yardley sixty years ago after hearing on the radio that Ray Lindwall had two long legs, one short leg and a square leg: 'Tell me, Mr Yardley, what kind of creatures are these Australian cricketers? No wonder England can't win.'

  That ineffability has survived enormous change in England, Australia, their relations, and in cricket itself. For in the century or so since it was successfully relaunched by Pelham Warner, the essence of Ashes competition has reversed, going from being regular because it is important, to being important because it is regular. But somehow the Ashes makes its own time, always coming up, even when it is over. And when it is happening you wouldn't be anywhere else.

  12 OCTOBER 2010

  THE ASHES

  The Fourth Protocol

  Cricket administrators nowadays are always prattling on about 'the three versions' of the game, trying to make it sound like evidence of marketing super-genius rather than of a Baldrickian cunning plan. You see, those clever johnnies in marketing know all about this stuff. There are Test matches, right? These appeal to … well, you know, the chap in the egg-and-bacon tie. Then there are your one-dayers. These appeal to … errrr, your average thirty-something binge-drinker. Finally, there are your T20s. These appeal to ten-year-olds – and doesn't cricket just love ten-year-olds at the moment? Complicated, eh? Are you still with me?

  Of course, this is mainly cant, even without making a pedantic point about the regional variations in one-day cricket between 40-over, split-innings formats etc. For one thing, four-day, first-class cricket is always left out of these vauntings. Why? Probably as much of it is played as any of the foregoing. But somehow, cricket administrators keep forgetting about it. The impression you get is that they would just as soon it was not around, standing as it does inconveniently in the path of wringing the maximum money from everything. The other variation that has stealthily peeled off is Ashes cricket: the idea of five five-day Test matches, once the summit format of international competition, now kept alive only by Australia and England.