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  It's probably India who tolled the knell on this form of the game following the 1987 World Cup. Soon after, India hosted West Indies in a five-Test series, which while it was under way was reduced, over the visitors' protestations, to a four-Test series, for the sake of adding two further one-day internationals to a scheduled five. India has not staged a five-Test series since.

  The West Indies' long-running Test supremacy fanned its interest in the five-Test series. They played South Africa at home in 1998–99 and away in 2000–01, Australia away in 2000–01 and India at home in 2001–02. But as its stock of talent dwindled so did dedication to the genre (five games were scheduled in the Caribbean early last year, only for the one on the ground better suited to cows than cricketers to be cancelled). Which left South Africa, until it lost to England at home in 2004–05. Since then the only countries to pursue the five-Test series have been its originators.

  Why would one want to argue for five Tests as a variation distinguishable from the two- and three-Test series that have since proliferated? Short Test series are too apt to hinge on one-off performances or particular sessions to be completely satisfying; the Tests are often held on top of one another after minimal preparation, so that the possibilities of regrouping after a defeat, or significantly rethinking selection, are minimised; the chances of a player having impact are likely as not to be a factor of conditions rather than of all-round skill.

  Yet India, the world's number one Test nation, likes its Tests in couplets – they are hardly worth the name 'series' any more. In order to keep its ICC rank, it squeezed couplets in against South Africa, Bangladesh and Australia, plus a three-Test series against Sri Lanka. All contained good cricket; all hardly seemed to start before finishing. What one would have given for more of the first encounter, after the rivals had taken turns knocking the stuffing from each other.

  The five-Test series, by contrast, gives a cricketer's temperament, technique, endurance, versatility and resilience the most thorough work-out possible, in all conditions and match situations, against all skills and variations, as an individual and a member of a collective. To be genuinely consistent over this longest of courses, to maintain a positive frame of mind far from home through a campaign of such duration, is to achieve something genuinely rare. On the evidence of last year's Ashes, in fact, modern cricketers are struggling to meet the challenge.

  This summer in Australia, furthermore, you may very well witness this event's last efflorescence: that is, five five-day matches as a season's centrepiece. If Cricket Australia has its way, by the time England is scheduled to return in 2013–14, international fixtures will be in competition with, if not overshadowed by, a supranational T20 competition. And that aforementioned Holy Trinity of formats might be looking more like the Odd Couple.

  26 OCTOBER 2010

  ENGLAND

  Please Enjoy

  Soon after arriving in Australia to follow Walter Hammond's English team of 1946–47, E.W. Swanton hailed a taxi. Swanton's plummy accent immediately gave him away. From England, eh? The cab driver was off. Well, Swanton simply had to do this. He must be sure to do that. He must go here, and be certain to visit there. In the course of the journey, Swanton barely slipped a word in, such was the torrent of information and recommendation. 'Yeah, it's a great country,' said the cab driver at last, setting his passenger down. 'Remember, it's yours as well as ours – and if you don't enjoy it here, it'll be your own ruddy fault.'

  Swanton's story came to mind this week as England foregathered for its long flight to the other side of the world. 'There is nothing to be afraid of in Australia,' argued coach Andy Flower. 'It should be welcomed as one of the highlights of a cricketing career. Enjoying it means, yes, enjoying the challenges on the field, but also enjoying seeing another country, culture, and meeting new people. It is one of the best places to go. It should be a lot of fun.' It's almost a shame Flower felt obliged to enunciate something so screamingly obvious but it was a helpful point nonetheless. Australian cricketers exhibit an impressive unanimity in pronouncing England the best tour of all. English cricketers seldom display a reciprocal enthusiasm about Australia.

  In one respect, this is easily explained. Australian cricketers have savoured a great deal of success in England, and enjoyment comes more naturally in such circumstances. English teams have achieved little in Australia for a generation, and there have been some spectacular misadventures: Phil Tufnell's panic attack in Perth sixteen years ago, Marcus Trescothick barely getting off the plane before he was back on it four years ago, and, perhaps ugliest of all, John Crawley being set upon by an unknown assailant as he returned to his team's hotel in Cairns in November 1998.

  Yet other factors seem to play a part here. Australians are big travellers – they have to be, if they're to see any of the world. The English are accustomed to shorter distances, cosier ambiences. The gap year might be to the 21st-century student what the Grand Tour was to the 19th-century man of letters, but aspiring professional cricketers, in their hurry to get on, deprive themselves of such experiences. To indulge in some national stereotyping, too, Australians have a more extrovert culture, while the English are identified with reserve and understatement – well, in the books of George Mikes anyway.

  There's reason to expect better of this England team. Seven players have toured before. Four have played first-grade cricket here, and the coach and his deputy have played Sheffield Shield cricket – the latter, David Saker, is, of course, Australian. Flower's seriousness about breaking past bad habits, of English players shuttering themselves in their hotels and socialising only among themselves, can be judged from his decision to delay the arrival of the team's wives and girlfriends until after the Second Test. And although such commandments always seem rather pettifogging where grown men and women are concerned, some evidence exists of their wisdom. When the Australians of 2005 placed no restriction on the comings and goings of partners, and even allowed players to set up separate lodgings outside the team hotel, the result was deep discord.

  The other reason to expect better of England this summer is that the behaviours of previous teams are not bred in the bone. On England's last four Ashes tours, their fans have had a wow of a time. Say what you like of the Barmy Army, and many do, they know how to enjoy themselves, and their dedication has been unflagging: the way they roared England to victory in the 1998 Boxing Day Test remains for me a special sporting memory. They have taken their setbacks, like Cricket Australia's killjoy diktats, in good part too. And they have experienced the sincerest form of flattery in their emulation by Australia's Fanatics.

  Sadly for the Barmy Army, the days of 'We're fat/We're round/Three dollars to the pound' seem a thing of the past, and word is that their numbers will be down. But England's cricketers should take their example to heart: the Barmy Army has always paid for the privilege they are about to be paid for. It is also hard to imagine a member of the Barmy Army remaining as mute as E.W. Swanton in the presence of a cab driver extolling Australian virtues.

  1 NOVEMBER 2010

  FORECASTS

  Future Imperfect

  Just as no battle plan survives contact with an enemy, few cricket predictions survive even a day of actual play. But the augurs of the forthcoming Ashes series are worth recording: England enter the series in the decidedly unfamiliar position of overdogs, forecast to ratify the possession of the urn they regained fourteen months ago.

  When did this last happen? England arrived with the Ashes four years ago, but vestigial belief in their hopes lasted approximately one ball – the Steve Harmison wide that zeroed in on Andrew Flintoff's sternum at second slip. Even when England last prevailed down under in Australia, they were decidedly unfancied, their tri-cornered triumph of 1986–87 coming after an immortal three-pronged assessment of their capabilities from the Independent's Martin Johnson: 'Can't bat, can't bowl, can't field.'

  There was 1978–79, although the forecast that stands out from that series was Australian captain Graham Yall
op's flippant prediction of a six-nil scoreline, which Mike Brearley's Englishmen almost entirely reversed. You must look back a further twenty years for a parallel with England's current favouritism, when Peter May's team of the talents arrived in Australia tipped to carry all before them – and were right royally ripped apart.

  Expectations weren't ill-founded. It's hard to pick a bone with selection when you run your eye down the MCC team sheet, studded with such names as May, Cowdrey, Graveney, Bailey, Evans, Laker, Lock, Trueman, Statham and Tyson. As Jack Fingleton records in his classic account Four Chukkas to Australia, May's team was thought so strong that it would have 'played the Rest of the World and beaten them'; their 4–0 defeat duly became the 'biggest upset of modern cricket times'.

  One individual not surprised was May himself. He embarked on the trip full of foreboding, believing 'we were always going to struggle'. The series was overshadowed by the Australian chuckers to which Fingleton's title slyly referred, but May declined to use this as an excuse, at the time or in retrospect: 'Australian cricket played on huge ovals is a young man's game and we had too many players on their last tour. If you have lost the keen edge, Australia finds it out.'

  So how does an XI's reputation inflate beyond its abilities, and do any such considerations apply to the circumstances preceding this Ashes series? May points to one common mistake: the tendency to read teams on paper, rather than gauge the potentialities of individuals at particular stages in their careers and against particular oppositions.

  Something similar applied ahead of the Ashes of 2005. On Statsguru, Ricky Ponting's team looked unassailable. McGrath, Lee, Gillespie and Warne versus Harmison, Flintoff, Jones and Giles? And had Glenn McGrath been injured at the end of the summer and Simon Jones at the start, what price the MBEs and open-top bus rides? Yet, as Adam Gilchrist has since admitted, the Australians, for all their battle honours, were an unhappy side, grumpily led by Ricky Ponting, absent-mindedly coached by John Buchanan. Andrew Strauss has also confided that a key conversation for him that summer was with Stephen Fleming after England's defeat at Lord's. Fleming urged Strauss to look past his chagrin – Australia were vulnerable, apprehensive about England's pace – and feeling turned out to matter more than figures.

  An interesting aspect of the prognostications about the forthcoming Ashes is that they might be thought guilty of the opposite sin, of being intuitive rather than empirical. Alastair Cook, Paul Collingwood and Kevin Pietersen rather drifted through the northern summer, in Pietersen's case drifting out. Andrew Strauss averages less than 25 in Australia and barely 30 this calendar year. Of England's key bowlers, Graeme Swann took just six wickets in the first four Tests of last year's Ashes, while Jimmy Anderson has paid 56 runs for each of his Australian wickets and 82 runs for each of his wickets in Australia. The vibe around England is that of a resourceful, well-led and well-coached team rather than a particularly accomplished one. But from whom do we members of the media pick up that vibe? Often from others just like ourselves, where it's easy to fall in with a consensus.

  How, meanwhile, does one read form ahead of an Ashes series? Ashes form seemed to point only one way in 1958–59. England had won the three preceding Ashes series; Australia had won only two and lost eight of the previous sixteen Ashes Tests. Yet there were other indicators. England had toured South Africa in 1956–57 and been well held; a year later, Australia had stuffed the Springboks out of sight, Richie Benaud and Alan Davidson, previously disappointments against England, suddenly coming of age. Why did observers choose to ignore this? Perhaps because of the Ashes' cultural hold on both countries – the sense that only what happened in Anglo-Australian competition counted. Perhaps also because overseas Test matches then took place well out of sight. Even their own countrymen were unaware what all-rounders Benaud and Davidson had turned into.

  Those considerations do not apply today. The Ashes are no longer the only game in town, nor do the cricket teams of Australia and England disappear from the view of their own followers when abroad, even if it is true that foreign cricket feats still tend to be discounted, football lording it over the sporting winter of both countries. A kind of comparative indicator is available today in the respective recent meetings of Australia and England with Pakistan. But who can now say with confidence that performances against Pakistan are corroborative of anything?

  The ultimate reason to distrust form seems to me to be just how different Ashes cricket has become from even the rest of Test cricket. The fashion nowadays is for two- and three-Test series; Australia last played a five-Test series against anyone other than England ten years ago; England last played a five-Test series against anyone other than Australia six years ago. Test cricket over the shorter time span is often about winning first up, then attempting to live off that modish cricket concept of 'momentum'; Ashes cricket, over twenty-five days, fluctuates naturally, involves accepting that this will be so, and cultivating the competence of regrouping. It is also a different physical proposition. The world now seems to want its cricket games to end in three hours. Each day this summer, Australia and England will spend almost as long as that simply preparing to play; twice, they face back-to-back Tests. So this is not like wondering whether racehorses bred to gallop a mile have it in them to tackle ten furlongs; it's comparable to setting thoroughbreds the challenge of a fifteen-mile cross-country course lined with hurdles and equestrian hazards.

  While contemplating the Ashes in advance might be confounding, it also reminds us of just how intricate are the contests within the contest of a team game played in changeable conditions over such a long duration. We are not simply looking at two teams; we are looking at two teams against each other and over the longest cricket haul of all. Swann has prospered against left-handers in his career, but how many will Australia pick? Strauss has fallen five times to Zaheer Khan in five Tests and four times to Mohammed Aamer in four, so how will he deal with the similarly left-armed Bollinger? And because England and Australia are now both middling international teams, it is almost the case that the longer you dwell on one or the other, the more palpable seem their vulnerabilities. England, you think, can't possibly be favourites – until you start looking at Australia.

  8 NOVEMBER 2010

  AUSTRALIA

  66 and All That

  At any one time in Australian domestic cricket, there are sixty-six players: eleven for each of the six first-class states. With the choice of John Hastings and Mitchell Starc for the last one-day international against India, preparatory to the Ashes summer, a curious symmetry was achieved. The number of Australian cricketers whom in the last two years have played Test matches, one-day internationals, T20 internationals, gone on tours or represented Australia A is ... sixty-six.

  When Bob Simpson became Australia's coach in the mid-1980s, he performed a similar exercise. On his figurings, there were forty-four players in the Sheffield Shield who had played some form of international cricket. This, opined Simmo, was 'a joke'. Numbers had blown out partly because of rebel tours and retirements, but he was adamant: 'There has never been a period in history when Australia had forty-four players good enough to play for their country.'

  Has the game changed so much in the intervening period that this is no longer true? Workload is more sedulously managed by player rotation these days, even if this never seems to prevent anyone getting injured: in fact, if Doug Bollinger's breakdown in Bangalore is indicative, under-bowling is every bit as problematic as overbowling.

  There are now three versions of the game where there were two, although on this list only three players have played T20 internationals alone. Fully forty-one players have played Test matches or one-day internationals, and there's actually a few more still involved in interstate cricket outside the sixty-six whom it could be argued deserve another look, including four very sweet strikers of a cricket ball in Brad Hodge, Mark Cosgrove, Phil Jaques and Luke Pomersbach. An honourable mention should also be made of Chris Rogers, with one lonely Test cap to show for almost 1
5,000 first-class runs at an average of 52.

  So why is Australia cultivating selection habits that appear as random as Mitchell Johnson's pitch map? One reason – and this is hardly a phenomenon confined to Australia – is that first-class and top-class cricketers now mix like oil and water. Want to see whether Clinton McKay has what it takes to succeed at international level? You'll have to pick him at international level, because he won't encounter any Test-match batsmen in the Sheffield Shield.

  One rationale, meanwhile, is that modern international cricket calls for strength in depth. Teams very seldom have the opportunity to select their first-choice XI. Rest is required. Injuries take their toll. Boot camps crop up. There's a logic to giving a taste of the big time to as wide a circle of players as possible, so that they are at least partly prepared when a more permanent turn comes.

  Yet there's something more than a little disorienting about this turnover. Many hints have been given. Few cases have been made. In Australia's green and golden age, there was always a solid sense of who was next in the pecking order. But who is primus inter pares among Adam Voges, Callum Ferguson, Cameron White and David Hussey? Who is the next best thing out of Peter Siddle, Ryan Harris or Shaun Tait? Above all, where is the spin to come from, the incumbent Nathan Hauritz suddenly looking like an outcumbent?

  This turnover coexists paradoxically with a sense of inertia where Australia's troubled batting is concerned. Since Matthew Hayden's retirement, Australia's top six has been occupied by only seven batsmen, and it is not as though any of them, save the ersatz openers Simon Katich and Shane Watson, has made an unassailable case for continued selection. The national selection panel – or the NSP as it is known in these acronym-happy times – has created not just a closed shop, but a closed shop without any opening hours on the front door, and precious little stock on the shelves.