Eye on the Ashes

‘Shoddyline’. ‘Wide They Bother’. England’s woeful direction has already been a cause for rejoicing among tabloid headline writers. But the Gabba Test is also beginning to look a little like a tale of two lengths: England’s too predictably short, Australia’s suitably generous.

This was especially obvious in the afternoon, as Australia’s tail failed to expire of its own accord, the last three wickets spacing themselves over 133 runs. Glenn McGrath’s batting doesn’t usually tell a lengthy tale, but one ball in Steve Harmison’s 29th over yesterday told at least a little one. So predictable had Harmison’s intent become that Australia’s last man slid into position to play a hook before the ball was bowled; he shovelled it, inelegantly but effectively, to fine leg for a single.

In the Gabba Test of the 1974-5 Ashes – the series that is remembered as the harbinger of the era of epic fast bowling – Dennis Lillee was incandescent with rage when bowled a bouncer by Tony Greig, from which he was caught behind. He claimed it as a cassus belli for the bouncers he and Thomson sent England’s way; in reality, it was more a case of getting one’s retaliation in first.

England’s short bowling at the Australian tail on this occasion, however, showed both how familiar and how futile this tactic has become: the likes of Lee, Warne and Clark, heavily helmeted, comfortably upholstered, are not so easily intimidated. Alternatives were laid to one side. The yorker, standard issue in one-day cricket, was nowhere to be seen. The ball, having shown signs of swinging after 130 overs, was pounded in mindlessly short. As Lee and Clark laid about them in every direction, adding 50 in 44 balls, Flintoff seemed for the only time in the innings to lose his way as captain, scattering seven men to the boundary. Anderson certainly lost his way as a bowler, leaving Clark too much room to swing his arms; Clark carved him for consecutive, impudent sixes. The only chance the attack generated, to Cook at backward square leg, predictably went down, amid howls of execration.

Sometimes you arrive at a cricket ground wondering if the day’s play will offer anything worth writing about; other days you are greeted by decision like the omission of Monty Panesar from England’s XI and there’s scarcely need to see a ball. Of course, you could see it coming a mile off, Duncan Fletcher’s three weeks of purse-mouthed pragmatism having softened watchers up. Yet it was somehow still a shock to be handed the England team sheet today: not quite a suicide note to rank with the 1983 Labour manifesto, but a failure of nerve and imagination.

Against Australia, thirty-three-year-old Giles averages 15 with the bat and 52 with the ball. He is an honest cricketer who has never disgraced himself, but he has not played a first-class game this year. Yet he has walked back into the England team at the expense of the world’s best orthodox finger spinner, nine years his junior, chiefly on the basis of his ancillary capabilities with the bat and in the field. It’s like a restaurant choosing a short-order cook over a chef de cuisine on the grounds he makes a better cup of tea. If a modest lengthening of the batting were sought, Sajid Mahmood would arguably have been the better bet – into the bargain, he would have been more adept than Anderson with the old ball. Any ball, if today was much to go by.

There’s no ignoring that Australia has an incontestable edge in its order from number seven onwards: Gilchrist, Warne and Lee are probably the best batting trio in their respective roles in the world. This edge, though, is so little narrowed by Giles’s selection that the gesture is scarcely worth making, and hardly at all at the cost of a bowler in Panesar who, as Flintoff noted yesterday, ‘gets good batsmen out’. This, I suspect, was the selection of a team for its appearance on paper rather than its efficacy in a match. In Ray Illingworth, England were said to have a ‘one-man committee’; Fletcher might be auditioning for the role of ‘one-man bureaucracy’.

After pondering Panesar, of course, it was on with the game, Steve Harmison’s first ball wide probably being worth a thousand words or two as well. The toss has conferred on Australia a considerable advantage – all the more reason to lament that England yielded them another at the selection table.

It was Ian Rush who said that he could never get used to playing football in Italy; it was like living in a foreign country. Something similar applies to playing cricket in Australia. The surroundings are reassuringly Anglophone, from the right-hand-drive cars to the voice on the speaking clock. But appearances can be deceptive.

Traditionally, Australia in Ashes cricket have enjoyed far greater advantage from their conditions than England have from theirs. Australia won 46 and lost 43 Ashes Tests in England, but their lead at home stretches 80 to 54 – empirical attestation of Len Hutton’s advice that a touring team must be 25% better than Australia to beat them in their own backyard.

'You’re going to give all this up are you? You don’t want to do this any more? Don’t you think you’ll miss it?’ The excited new boy speaker was Marcus Trescothick after a high-scoring one-day international at Lord’s four and half years ago, the careworn addressee Graham Thorpe, who quotes the sentiments in his exhaustingly candid autobiography Rising From The Ashes (2005), and also his reply: ‘Tres, mate, I could not give a fuck.’

One of the surprising features of Trescothick’s travails is that they should have befallen so consummate a professional. English cricket has had its Tufnells and Lewises, its Hicks and Corks; but Trescothick’s game has been so steady, his technique so economical, his manner so unflappable. Perhaps, though, therein lay the dilemma, that he undertook to tour because there seemed no professional alternative open, as Thorpe confessed became his own default setting: ‘I kept playing because I felt it would help me keep a grip on things. What else was I supposed to do?’

The response to Trescothick following Thorpe’s example and standing out of cricket has actually been pretty encouraging. Jeff Thomson found the germ of a jest in there, but Thomson lavishes the same thought to his public statements as he famously did in his bowling, just shuffling up and going wanggg. It’s arguable he should never have been chosen; but it’s also arguable that his selection was a risk in the same way as the choice of any player recovering from injury is a risk, like [Andrew] Flintoff with his ankle, [Ashley] Giles with his hip or [Steve] Harmison with his passport. At least, England did not dither as they did, for instance, in 1994-95 with Phil Tufnell, who Mike Atherton wanted to send home after a psychological breakdown in Perth, but whose contract was sufficiently ambiguous to prevent it. Saying that England will miss his runs‚ is nonsense; he was obviously not in the frame of mind to make any.