Ashes 2013
End of Part I
September 15th
[22:00 CEST]
The international summer finishes in the Ageas Bowl tomorrow. There is much
more at stake than just the ODI series. For Australia, winning the series is
essential for their message that, even if they started the summer a little off
the pace, they have been the better side at the end of the tour and will be
going into the return series as the side in form. A defeat would not just lose
the ODI series and send Australia home with defeat in the Tests and ODIs and a
draw in the T20 series, but would see England go up to #2 in the ICC ODI
rankings, moving above Australia. It will make almost impossible the job of
selling the narrative that tour of England has only been unsuccessful due to a
catalogue of misfortunes that beggar the imagination, starting with a cursed
Champions Trophy campaign and passing through a Test series where umpires, rain
and technology conspired to stop Australia winning whenever they were on top. A
side that wins only 3 international matches out of 16 in the entire tour, one
of them against Scotland, can complain all it likes about the fates, but cannot
argue with the facts. In contrast, a series win, albeit in a shortened ODI
series, would allow a spin that, finally, justice was being seen to be done.
England’s
win yesterday has already been a healthy reminder of just why Australia have
not been successful. In conditions where the odds were strongly in favour of
the batsmen and Australia batted first, such as the first T20, Australia’s
batsmen have been able to express themselves and set big totals. However,
whenever conditions have required the batsmen to scrap for every run, Australia
have invariably come a distant second. The same effect was seen at the SWALEC.
At 8-3, after a McKay hat-trick you would have thought that Australia could
only win. However, as we saw in the Test series, losing three early wickets was
when England were most dangerous. Five times in the Test series England lost
early wickets (11-2 at Trent Bridge, 28-3 and 30-3 at Lords, 49-3 at
Chester-le-Street, 64-3 at Old Trafford), yet their average score in those
innings was 356 and none was lower than 330. The two occasions when England
started a Test well (100-1 at Chester-le-Street and 100-2 at Trent Bridge) were
the two occasions that England registered their lowest completed innings totals
(238 and 215 respectively). It is for this reason that I simply cannot hold
with the idea that Australia would have won at Old Trafford had rain not
intervened: it would have required them to buck the trend for the entire series.
It was at
the Ageas Bowl that Australia had their high water mark of the summer when
Aaron Finch singled-handedly won Australia a match that ended up being a lot
closer than they would have expected when they set England a mammoth chase.
However, the weather forecast for tomorrow suggests that conditions will be
more like those in Cardiff than those in Southampton a couple of weeks ago. It
will be cold, with a chance of rain in the afternoon. It is the sort of
conditions that may well persuade England to stick with Ravi Bopara as the
fifth bowler, rather than to try Chris Jordan. At the SWALEC it was vindicated
as Bopara turned in an excellent spell and the extra batsman proved vital as
the chase faltered. It will be interesting to see if England go for continuity,
with the same XI, or to learn about new players as they did, so surprisingly,
in the final Test. In a day-night game with conditions set to be decidedly
chilly by the end of the match, winning the toss may be vital.
No comments:
Post a Comment