Ashes 2013
What to make of the Ashes series?
August 27th
[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 5th
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
1st, 4th and 5th 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 5th
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.
No comments:
Post a Comment