England Need To Win to De-rail Ashes Revisionism

 

 

Ashes 2013

 

England Need to do Better

 

August 31^st

 
 

[09:00 CEST] England know that they are in a brawl. The first T20 did not go as planned, although Australia’s effort was very much of a one-man show however, that is the nature of T20: it is often decided by the efforts of just one or two players. England do not want to lose this series and a strong comeback to win the second T20 would  be the best response. It was a major surprise that Tredwell and Carberry missed out on Thursday and it is likely that both will play today, along with Boyd Rankin, although Jade Dernbach was one of the few successes of Thursday.

A major question for England is the status of Eoin Morgan. Another brief innings on Thursday – a 3^rd ball duck – when England needed someone to stand firm, added to an ambivalent attitude at best to the English season are beginning to threaten his place. His Test place is long gone and he has now gone 23 innings without an international 50. England are trying to encourage him with the Lions captaincy, with the T20 captaincy when Stuart Broad is unavailable and the ODI captaincy when Alistair Cook is rested, but his appearances and returns are reducing steadily: 96 runs for Middlesex in the Championship; 124 in the YB40 and 38 in the T20. Injury has not helped, but it seems that Eoin Morgan’s interests are more directed towards his IPL career although, in 2012 he did not play a single game for his franchise and, if his international runs dry up, his value to the IPL will disappear rapidly too. He urgently needs a big performance in this series of matches.

For Australia a win today and a 2-0 sweep in the series would put down a major marker for the ODIs and the return series in Australia. Continued success in the propaganda war requires them to point to T20 and ODI victories as proof that the side is a lot better than the Test result suggested. It would be asking a lot of Aaron Finch to repeat Thursday’s bombardment: can someone else repeat his feats? It may be necessary to make the series a 2-0 victory and to score the major propaganda success that Australia need to continue the revisionist war of the Ashes history.

Brilliant Finch Applies A Fig Leaf To Australian Cricket

 

 

Ashes 2013

 

Brilliant from Australia’s Men and England’s Women

 

August 30^th

  

[09:00 CEST] Sometimes you come up against a performance so gigantic, so extraordinary, that it defies belief. Aaron Finch did not just break the record for the highest score in a T20 international, he totally atomised it, scoring 62.9% of his side’s runs as Australia won their first international match in any format since February. England’s collective fifth bowler (Bopara, Root and Wright) went for 69 runs in 4 overs. Finch was utterly brilliant as he showed that T20 is the format where a single player can win a match on his own.

The bad news for Australia was that even a gigantic score of 248 and reducing England to 42-4 was, in the end, barely enough, as Joe Root and Ravi Bopara first righted he ship and then put England into a position where they were in with a real chance with 7 overs to go. It was only the loss of Bopara, followed by a tight 14^th over by Fawad Ahmed, that went for just 8 runs, that killed off England’s challenge, when a big over could just have tilted the balance. The previous 4 balls had gone for 17 runs, but were followed by 4 dot balls, including the wicket and Australia, who were just beginning to look a little rattled, saw their nerves settled again: the next 17 runs took 14 balls to arrive and the moment was lost by England.

Ahmed’s figures of 0-43 were not spectacular, but the Australian bowlers were consistent while, for England, only Jade Dernbach’s 3-34 was respectable in a match that produced 457 runs in 40 overs. Joe Root’s 90 from 49 balls showed England what they have been missing by playing him as an opener in the Tests and Ravi Bopara showed, once again, that he is a dangerous player for England in the short formats.

Despite Australia’s dominance in this game, one is left with the feeling that unless Australia can produce something else spectacular, this may prove to be an isolated moment of success, as this was really an individual performance, not backed up by anyone else.

Those spectators who had arrived early had a real treat as, in a display of inventiveness not common in English cricket, the match at the Rose Bowl was played as a double-header, with the ladies playing first in what was their Ashes decider.

Having looked to be heading to likely defeat at the half way point in the Test, which would have made winning the Ashes almost impossible, England sealed the series 11-5 with one match to play, having utterly dominated the last four games. It had all looked unlikely in the Test at 113-6, chasing Australia’s 331-6. However, from this bad position where the follow-on had looked almost certain, they had come back strongly and, for a time on the final morning, Australia were even under real pressure. From then on the series has been almost one-way traffic. Australia won the first ODI, but then lost the next two and the first T20, leaving England only needing victory at the Rose Bowl to win the Ashes.

A collapse from 95-2 with almost 5 overs remaining to 127-7 had left England a target of 128 to seal the Ashes with a game to go.  Despite a poor start, 80 from 64 balls by Lydia Greenway took England to a what was ultimately a comfortable win.

Sadly, rather than be presented with the Ashes at the end of the matches at Chester-le-Street on Saturday, with a full house cheering to the echo, England’s women will receive the trophy in a low-key ceremony at 10am, long before the double-header even starts, in front of empty stands. It would be nice to think that there will be a re-think of this as the team deserves to be cheered by a full house, not to have the ceremony hidden away.

While Australia have had their moments during the series, the fact that they pace spearhead, Ellyse Perry who, not so long ago, it was being boasted would blow England’s men away, let alone their women, took just 2 wickets for 229 in the six matches was a key issue. Jonassen, Osborne and Coyte took plenty of wickets, but lacked support, with no one else taking more than three in the series. For England, the runs of Sarah Taylor and Heather Knight have been backed up by an attack that shared the wickets around. For Australia it is a story familiar from their men: too many collapses and a lack of support for the main wicket-taking spearhead.

In an Ashes summer where, between the men and the women, the collective score is England 7-1 Australia, Aaron Finch has applied a fig leaf to Australian cricket but, even if Australia’s men do salvage some pride in the remaining matches, it has still been a bad summer for them and all the spin in the world cannot hide it.

Shifting To The Short Stuff

 

 

Ashes 2013

 

The Focus Shifts

 

August 29^th

 

[09:00 CEST] With the dust finally beginning to settle over the Ashes series, despite some attempts to re-ignite the propaganda war with news of ungentlemanly late-night celebrations, reported by horrified scribes of the losing side, the focus shifts. Two T20s are followed by six ODIs for each side, with Australia playing Scotland in a warm-up and England taking on Ireland in what is becoming a regular fixture.

Today, the circus starts in the Ageas Bowl which, in its previous incarnation of the Rose Bowl, heralded one of the most historic limited overs internationals ever played, as England dismissed Australia for 79 in 14.3 overs in a T20 in 2005, to win the match by 100 runs and cause a psychological shift in the balance between the sides. A great quiz question is: “who was the bowler who led the carnage?” (answer at the bottom)

While the ODI squad is missing some familiar names, the T20 squad is just about England’s strongest, although it features only 3 of the Ashes-winning team, with a whole string of short-format specialists being included. Two of the more contentious names are Jade Dernbach, who seems to get an extraordinary number of opportunities despite rarely showing his potential and Joe Root, who has played two T20s without ever wielding a bat in anger. Three of England’s squad of 14 will miss out, wih Lumb and Carberry probably contesting the opening spot, Rankin and Dernbach the fast bowling position and Danny Briggs almost certain to miss out to James Tresdwell.

Having had the courage to give up an international career with Ireland to push for England honours, one hopes that Boyd Rankin will get a chance to stake his claims. It would be galling to all concerned if he has jumped ship for the singular honour of only playing a single T20 for England against New Zealand. Seen at the start of the Ashes as the likely reserve for Steve Finn and Stuart Broad, he was never named in an Ashes squad, as the resurgence of Tim Bresnan made Steve Finn a peripheral figure in the series and a replacement for him an irrelevance.

Similarly, one hope that England will recognise the impressive form of Michael Carberry and will allow him to add to his single England appearance (a Test cap in Bangladesh).

While the big prize has already been decided, the T20s and ODIs have their role in deciding momentum. Certainly Australia will enter the return series in better heart If they can point to a solid showing and a win in the limited overs series to back up their claims that they were clearly the better side over the second half of the Ashes series. England, in contrast, will wish to ensure that they do not allow Australia to claim that the momentum has definitely shifted to them.

It is as well to remember that Australia’s record in this format is rather poor: they have lost their last 5 T20s and have won just 5 of their last 19. With the World T20 coming up in March, there will not be many opportunities for either side to hone their squads.

The ODIs are another matter. Australia’s Champions Trophy was, in contrast to England’s, brief and disastrous but, with England selecting a weakened squad, Australia will expect to take a crushing revenge. England will though have the advantage of a having a number of highly motivated players who did not figure in the Ashes and who will be hoping to ensure a winter trip to Australia, either with the main squad, or with the Lions, to give them a chance to be on hand if England come calling for replacements.

England will be hoping for a convincing win tonight to ensure that they will, at worst, share the T20 series.

Answer:

England’s new ball pair was Darren Gough and Jon Lewis (Steve Harmison and Andrew Flintoff were the change bowlers). Gough’s 3-16 was trumped by Lewis’s 4-24, as Australia slumped from 23-0 to 24-5 and then 31-7, with Lewis and Gough taking all seven wickets in 20 balls.

Some Myths And Legends About The 2013 Ashes Explored

 

 

Ashes 2013

 

Myths and Legends

 

August 28^th

 

[09:00 CEST] The just finished Ashes series has generated all kinds of myths and legends, some of them propagated by people who should know better. Let’s have a look at a few of them.

1.       The excellence of the Australian attack

One of the widest spread myths is that the Australian attack was generally excellent and possibly even superior to the England attack. There is no question that it featured the stand-out bowler of the series, but the back-up to him was inferior to England’s consistent attack. The strike rate through the series is a good way of judging bowling attacks. Qualification: minimum 2 Tests and 40 overs bowled.

Ryan Harris	Australia	40.5
Stuart Broad	England	50.6
Tim Bresnan	England	54.6
James Anderson	England	56.0
Graeme Swann	England	57.4
Mitchell Starc	Australia	65.4
Peter Siddle	Australia	67.0
James Pattinson	Australia	78.1
Nathan Lyon	Australia	78.7
Ashton Agar	Australia	252.0
Shane Watson	Australia	256.5

While Australia had a clear attack leader and more modest support, there was no clear attack leader for England, as all the bowlers came in with very similar performances in terms of strike rate over the series. The England attack had a pack mentality, rather than being “follow my leader”, which was one of the reasons for its success. With England having the next four best bowlers in terms of strike rate, the difference between the attacks is obvious: England's threat was consistent, even when the change bowlers were on. If you rode out Australia's strike bowler, what followed was less threatening, particularly when it came to the second change.

2.       The Australian batting was better overall because it made the big scores

Australia made the only two scores over 400 in the series, but the England batting was far more consistent, scoring 300+ on six occasions and managing a 300+ total in every Test.  The ten highest team totals in the series were:

Australia	527-7d	3rd Test
Australia	492-9d	5th Test
England	377	5th Test
England	375	1st Test
England	368	3rd Test
England	361	2nd Test
England	349-7d	2nd Test
England	330	4th Test
Australia	296	1st Test
Australia	280	1st Test

Only in the 1^st Test, which Australia actually lost, did they manage to score 250+ twice in a Test. England scored 350+ in every Test except the 4^th.

3.       It was only Michael Clarke’s efforts that made the final day of the 5^th Test interesting

Michael Clarke’s declaration set up the finish, but could not have happened without England’s contribution in the morning.

·         England scored 130 runs for 6 wickets in 28.4 overs at 4.53 runs per over to set up the challenge

·         Australia replied with  111-6d in 23 overs at 4.82 runs per over

·         England chased with 206-5 in 40 overs at 5.15 runs per over.

Had the England lower order not thrown down the gauntlet by sacrificing wickets chasing quick runs, Australia’s thrash after lunch would never have happened. Most pundits expected England to bat on and make a token declaration around Tea.

4.       The gap between the two teams was smaller than expected

This is an interesting one. There is a great deal of statistical evidence that England only ever shifted out of second gear when significantly challenged. One classic case was at Chester-le-Street, when the threat that Australia would chase down 299 stirred England to play probably their best cricket of the series to date, reaching a level that would not be equalled until the final day at The Oval.

The clearest evidence that England were struggling for motivation at times though is the batting. In the first four Tests, with the series live, England lost their first two or three wickets very cheaply on all but two occasions. The correlation between England’s start and their final total makes interesting reading:

	Start (or score at 100)	Final Total
1st Test, 2nd innings	11-2	375
3rd Test, 1st innings	64-3	368
2nd Test, 1st innings	28-3	361
2nd Test, 2nd innings	30-3	349-7d
4th Test, 2nd innings	49-3	330
4th Test, 1st innings	100-1	238
1st Test, 1st innings	100-2	215

Only twice in the series did England have what you could call a reasonably solid start, passing 50 with fewer than two wickets down while the series was live and those were the only two occasions in the entire series that England failed to reach 250. It required the batsmen to feel challenged by Australia and the adrenaline rush of a bad start to get the side to shift into top gear.

When England were not feeling sufficiently threatened, they simply stayed in second gear and cruised. It was not deliberate, it was just the psychological need to feel really threatened to come out and perform at their best. When England had the motivation to step up their game, the difference between the sides widened considerably.

The impression that ne gets from some of these numbers is that there is much more to come from England, but only if Australia pose a much greater challenge this winter on home soil than they have done on English soil.

Reflections On The Ashes

 

 

Ashes 2013

 

What to make of the Ashes series?

 

August 27^th

 

[09:00 CEST] Sometimes it is best to wait a day or two before making snap judgements. It applies both to a day’s play in a Test match and to an entire series. One of the themes of this Blog has been the way that snap judgements, made in an effort to be the first to rule on what a day’s play means, have often been completely wrong. It is ludicrous to think that one can judge the direction of a whole series by the first day’s play, yet people did and their conclusion was that England were in for a nasty shock. Well, it finished 3-0 and England were a tick mark on a light meter from making it 4-0.

When Sir Ian Botham said, early on, that it could end up 10-0 over the two series, he was laughed at loudly and quite properly, but not too many people would have predicted before the series that England would get so close to a 4-0 win. Certainly, with Australia and Australia A running amuck early in the summer, even after a poor Champions Trophy, the Australian fans were bullish. In fact, the Australian fans are still incredibly bullish. They have managed to spin this series as having been a moral victory and that, had it not been for outrageous luck and bad umpiring, Australia, in their view, would have been clear victors.

Test series are decided by what actually did happen and what is recorded in Wisden, rather by “what ifs” and “maybes” and “what might have beens”. England fans can look back to 2006/07 and Adelaide and say “ah yes! But we dominated 4 days of that Test. If we had won/drawn it, the series would have been different. It should have been 2-1”. Yes, it would have been different, but it was not! The simple fact is that the series went down in the records as a 5-0 defeat. Australian fans can look at key moments and decisions in this 2013 series and say that the result should have been 3-1 or even 4-1 to Australia, but the fact of the matter is that it was not: Australia failed to seize those key moments.

During the 5^th Test there was a sense that the series had fallen a bit flat and never quite hit the heights expected of it. That seemed to be very much influenced by the reaction to Day 3. England scored slowly and Australia’s attack was totally impotent, taking just 4 wickets in 116 overs up to the end of Day 3. As Cook and Root settled in to make their only fifty partnership of the series, their task was aided by the fact that much of the bowling was so wide that five and sometimes six balls per over could be safely ignored. With a turgid Day 3 followed by a washed-out Day 4 (these days it seems that the loss of a full day is extremely rare), there was a natural reaction to think that the whole thing had fallen very flat and it affected perceptions of the whole series. This sold the series short and the fact that the game ended in such a marvellous climax, with the largest number or runs ever scored on Day 5 of a Test was perhaps a better reflection of a series that has had some remarkable highs and lows and some extraordinary passages of play. It is a series in which we have seen remarkable innings and crazy collapses and a debutant number 11 bat almost scoring a century in a stunning last wicket stand. There have been nine centuries, three of them went past 150 and nine, five wicket hauls, with Ryan Harris’s 7-117 and Stuart Broad’s 6-50 taking pride of place. Broad, Swann, Harris and Anderson all took two five-fors in the series. All in all there has been plenty of cricket to savour, with the momentum in matches changing constantly and, at times, with bewildering frequency. Anyone who had predicted in advance how the 1^st, 4^th and 5^th Tests were going to end would have been locked-up as insane.

Part of the series spin has been that Australia have played the exciting, attacking cricket, but their efforts have been stifled by boring England, who have suffocated them to death. Certainly there has been a feeling that England have been willing to sit back and wait at times in the series, rather than to go out from the start and seize the initiative. England played in an efficient manner, but did not add that level of fantasy to their play that would have marked them as a great side, rather than just a good one. There were sessions, days too, that hinted at how much there was to come should the side have hit their straps: the final session at Chester-le-Street; the final day at The Oval; the first two and a half sessions of Day 2 at Lords and Day 3 of the Lords Test were as one-sided as anything that the Australians ever inflicted in their years of dominance. It is easy to forget that six overs into the Lords Test England were 28-3 and in desperate trouble, yet they showed their resilience time and again, as Australia had in their great years when, even the opposition thought that they were right on top, there was always a sting in the tail. Similarly, after going 2-0 down in the series and suffering a filleting at Lords, Australia showed great resilience to keep the series respectable afterwards (the caveat on that is that of the last three Tests, only one was able to go to a conclusion and, in that one, Australia suffered a catastrophic session right at the end, to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory; in the 5^th Test they were perhaps no more than 2 overs from turning a strong position into another defeat – who knows what would have happened if the Old Trafford Test had run its course?)

One of the key factors in the series was that England played a settled team throughout. Whereas Australia chopped and changed and used 17 players, constantly modifying both their batting order and their attack, England, in contrast, made just two unforced changes all series, only one of them while the series was live; even that change was almost more a case of England going back to their preferred XI, with Tim Bresnan having proved his fitness and Steve Finn going back to being drinks waiter.

In cricket it is not hard to argue with the old saw that there are “lies, damn lies and statistics”. One crumb of comfort to Australian supporters has been the fact that they registered the only two scores above 400 in the entire series. That disguises the fact that neither led to a win and that the next six highest totals in the series were all made by England. In fact only in those two innings did Australia pass 300: where Australian batsmen made big runs, it was to ensure the draw, not to win a match; in contrast, four of England’s totals over 300 contributed to wins: England made their runs count. Three of the four lowest completed innings totals in the series were by Australia; the exception was Trent Bridge, where England’s big second innings score put the match beyond Australia’s reach.

A consequence of the chopping and changing for Australia is that three of the top four wicket-takers in the series were English: Swann, Broad and Anderson (none of them with a dodgy passport or funny accent), summed 70 wickets between them, with Swann’s strike rate of 57 – exceptional for an off-spinner – the worst of the three; Tim Bresnan also had a strike rate of 55. In contrast, Australia’s three highest wicket-takers managed just 52 wickets between them. Of the front line bowlers used by Australia in more than one Test, only Ryan Harris has a strike rate better than 65 – had Harris, far and away the standout bowler of the series, had better support, England would not have recovered time and again from poor starts. However, Pattinson (strike rate 78), Lyon (79), Agar (252) and Watson (257) just did not carry the same level of threat, but bowled 379 pressure-reducing overs between them.

There were two keys to the series.

One was that England bowled as a pack, as they had in the halcyon period of 2004/05. When someone was required by England to step up and take a key wicket or wickets to wrest control, someone  always did. It was Jimmy Anderson at Trent Bridge, Graeme Swann at Lords and at Old Trafford, Stuart Broad at Chester-le-Street, but with key strikes to create openings from Tim Bresnan. The attack was no one man band, as has been suggested after Trent Bridge. Australia though had Ryan Harris or… Ryan Harris. Peter Siddle started brilliantly, but took just 2 wickets in the last 5 innings of the series, as he faded completely out of the reckoning. No one really stepped up consistently to replace Peter Siddle for Australia and support poor Ryan Harris, who bowled his heart out.

The second was the England showed an innate ability to recover from poor starts. At Trent Bridge, 11-2 became 375 all out. At Lords, 28-3 became 361 and 30-3 became 349-7d. At Old Trafford, 68-3 became 368. At Chester-le-Street, 49-3 became 330. In those first four Tests, the only two occasions that England passed 50 with fewer than two wickets down were the two were they made their lowest totals of the series! It seemed to require the pressure of a bad start to get the team to raise its game. It is hard to resist the feeling that England were cruising because they did not feel sufficiently challenged and did just enough to win.

Australia undoubtedly got better as the series went on and, by hook or by crook, seem to be coming close to their best side. The top five look well balanced, although neither Rogers nor Clarke are likely to be around for too much longer, the former because he will be 36 this weekend, the latter because a bad back and the strain of captaincy are a bad combination. Haddin too will have to be replaced soon, but there is a ready-made replacement in Matt Wade. The weakness is undoubtedly the bowling attack. If Ryan Harris gets injured it could be a long and painful return series for them in Australia.

England can pencil in ten names for Brisbane now. The only real doubt is whether or not to persevere with Joe Root as Alistair Cook’s opening partner – most people would prefer to play him at six again. If Root continues to open, Jonny Bairstow, James Taylor and Chris Woakes all seem to be in a scrum to seal the number six spot. Chris Woakes has done enough to suggest that he could play at six and act as fourth seamer. The only other doubt would surround Tim Bresnan’s availability and fitness. If he is not fit for Brisbane, Chris Tremlett and Steve Finn would certainly come into the reckoning, as would Boyd Rankin. An interesting name though would be Chris Jordan who has had a splendid season at Sussex, until going off the boil in July, although recently his form has been returning. This has earned him a Lions call-up and now he is in the ODI squad: a good performance in the six ODIs against Ireland and Australia starting next week could yet put his name in the frame too.

If I had to make a prediction now for the return series, I would put the result somewhere between 2-2 and 3-1 to England. At present, we are closer to 3-1 because I think that the Australian pitches will favour England more than they will favour Australia and Australia are much further from knowing their best XI and the order that it should bat in.