Ashes Tour Diary #8: Are England Pissing Away Their Legacy?

Posted on September 1, 2013 by Matt Larnach in Opinion, Tests

 

Well thank God that’s over. As far as Test series go it was ok, I guess. No real bore draws, a decent battle between bat and ball. But as supposedly the marquee series of the Test calendar? Forget it, it was awful, only rising above the utterly appalling due to some individual performances, most notably from Ian Bell and Ryan Harris. It didn’t so much feel like third versus fourth in the world as fifth versus sixth. If we didn’t have to go through the now seemingly inevitable post-2005 hype before every Ashes series it would be easier to critique the series overall. But any attempt at objectivity is drowned out by the wave of patriotic fervour that now surrounds the event, and those who try and buck the trend are heaped with abuse. Just look at the crap that Jonathan Agnew, one rare voice of reasoned critique amongst the hyperbole, has had to put up with of late.

One of the features of Ashes contests of recent years has been the myth making. Apparently every Australian success over the past few decades was treated with the same sort of jubilation that greeted the 1989 campaign. What a number of English observers seem to ignore is that depressed resignation didn’t just rule the roost on their side of the world. The series as a spectacle declined terribly through that period in both nations. It’s no real surprise that Australia turned more towards contests against South Africa and India as the true measure of their team’s prowess, rather than glorifying in yet another lopsided encounter against an undermanned opponent just because some toff happened to come up with a funny headline in a newspaper a hundred years or so ago.

What this is all getting at (and you probably saw this a mile away and already filed this article under ‘bitter Aussie loser’) is that England didn’t prove anything by beating Australia. Everyone expected them to, and looking at the comparative player stats before the series began (one Australian batsman with a Test average over 40, as opposed to six Englishmen), it was a foregone conclusion. An approach confirmed when Micky Arthur revealed that Australia had never really considered themselves contenders in the series and had approached it as a fact finding mission. In fact all England achieved (aside from the chance to wave that urn thing around, small fry compared to winning the Big Bash really) was to raise a whole raft of new questions.

Australia actually managed to answer a few questions over the course of the series, and not just questions everyone already knew the answer to, like ‘Is Usman Khawaja rubbish?’ Before the series they couldn’t even properly be described as a team in transition, as that would imply a destination of some kind, and a plan of how to reach it. Instead they were just an average team, hoping that a change in coach would help them become a good team. They didn’t get there, but they appear to be on the right track, a renaissance that undoubtedly owes less to Lehmann’s infamous repertoire of party tricks (the ‘squashed rat’ is apparently a popular favourite) than the all-encompassing rise of one Steven Peter Devereux Smith.

England’s main accomplishment, however, was to raise further concerns over the legacy of what is, on paper at least, probably the greatest English Test team of all time. Beating an undermanned opponent, even in a series that generates the sort of hot air the Ashes attracts these days, doesn’t necessarily confer greatness. If they had taken Australia apart, really dominated them, then that would be a different story. But they didn’t. In fact at times during the series it looked as if only one team actually wanted to be there, and it wasn’t the one that had won the first two Tests. The whole winning ‘professionally’ tag doesn’t fit either, since they have performed in exactly the same manner in recent years against New Zealand, Sri Lanka and the West Indies. It’s as if a team that was on the cusp of greatness has since resigned itself to periodic good displays, but rarely bothering to raise itself above the merely adequate.

The English players themselves seem to react churlishly to any questions regarding their performances. Their relationship with the media on the whole is awful. It’s like they want to have their cake and eat it too, to be as mean and unlikable as the Australian teams of yesteryear on the field, but be loved by the media off it. It doesn’t work both ways; Australia under Steve Waugh in particular were slammed by the media for the team’s on-field behaviour. He just didn’t give a shit. Australian performances under Waugh remained of a high standard because he didn’t let the off-field stuff get to the players. This English team, however, barely bothers to perform at all. And when Anderson et al step down in the not too distant future, people might wonder if they ever really saw the best of this team. Six months or so as the top ranked team in Test cricket seems like a pretty poor return right now.

Hopefully the return series might provide some answers as to their legacy, especially if it is followed by a raft of retirements of a few legends (we are waiting for Glen Maxwell to officially retire from Test cricket any day now). If it does the series will surely be a better spectacle than this shite was. All the talk about carrying momentum from this recently concluded series is, well, utter crap. Particularly since Australia play 678 ODIs before it even begins. The next one will represent a completely clean slate. And given it will be played on proper pitches there is every chance we might actually see a series where what happens on the field overshadows all the crap off it.

Yeah, ok. That’s clearly never going to happen.