Right now I’m furious with the Australian cricket team – and, if that term does not already include everyone associated with making the decisions that led to this miserable result, anyone else involved in anything that led to this abysmal piece-of-crap performance in England.
But I’m also annoyed with pretty much the entire sports journalism industry.
Why? Because of the idiotic way in which, after Australia’s win in the fourth test, it was announced the result of the fifth was a foregone conclusion with the prediction that the Aussies would continue the form they showed in the fourth and demolish the Poms without breaking a sweat.
It bugged me enough at the time, but – now that it turned out they were all so horribly, horribly wrong – I’m even more shitty.
At no point in the series, other than the couple of sessions in the fourth test, was Australia truly dominant. We struggled to bowl England out almost every time they batted, and our batsmen – on paper some of the best players in the world – never really took to the English bowlers as often as players of their talent should have.
In the first test we managed to bat well but couldn’t bowl out the English tail – Anderson and Monty fucking Panesar, for crying out loud – to win.
The second test had us once again struggling to finish them off, and the runs the tailenders made – and the time they spent at the crease, keeping us from it – had an impact. We then did a complete about-face from the impressive efforts of the first test and the innings collapsed to the point where we were facing a follow-on. The English batsmen went on a run-a-thon before we got back in and were let down by our top- and middle- order.
A drawn third test due to the weather – not a big shock; it’s England, after all.
The fourth test we won by a good margin: an innings and 80 runs. But, considering the position we had them in – 5/82 at the end of the second day; had we got them out then we’d have won by an innings and 261 runs – that they managed to hang on as long as they did (included flogging our bowlers out of the park and achieving the second-fastest century partnership in test history) was perhaps an indicator that we’d gotten lucky, rather than because of superior skill.
But somehow this piece of good fortune got interpreted as Australia’s obvious superiority and a precursor to the inevitable demise of England in the fifth and final test.
Which, of course, wasn’t how it turned out. We bowled okay, but still couldn’t manage to bring them down before they’d put together a decent total. And while we started out well, the sudden collapse to be all out for 160 wasn’t just a little less than was expected of a team who’d hadn’t out a shellacking the match before. If we’d managed to bowl them out for a low second inning score – as, once again, you’d expect we’d have been able to do if we really were the team they’d praised so highly only a week or so before – we might have had a chance. But once again their batsmen were almost entirely unthreatened by us, and put together what would have been a nigh-on impossible score to chase even if all our batsmen had been performing at their absolute best.
Which they weren’t; therefore, we fell way short. Game over. England take back the Ashes 2-1. A nation sits in shock, mostly because - prior to the toss - they’d read at least one of the approximately 17,000 articles about how Australia were going to romp it in because they’d showed their true form in the fourth test.
Wrong. So fucking wrong. Which matches had they been watching?
At no point except for day 2 and 3 of the first test, and the first session of the fourth test, did I feel we were playing at anything near well enough to win the series. And much of the good we did achieve was because we were playing against an understrength England team.
The problem was the bowling; we only truly dominated England with the ball in one innings of one test: the first of the fourth, when we took the ten for 102. Every other time they were at the crease we struggled to get them all out – the next lowest was 263, also in the fourth – and that was after we had them, as I noted before, 5/82. Every other completed innings was over 300.
Batting was better, at least in comparison – but, apart from the first test, never when it really counted. The first innings of the second test, third and fifth tests were all poor – 215, 263 and 160 respectively. With those poor starts we weren’t able to give our inexperienced and underperforming bowlers anything to try and defend.
I think it’s fair to say that, even if we’d won the last test and retained the poxy little trophy, we wouldn’t have had much right to say we’d done so in a decisive fashion.
But we didn’t win; we lost, and lost by a significant margin. And it pains me to say that, while England didn’t really deserve to win, they were – to put it bluntly - better at not losing than we were.
What to do now? Well, we really have to work on putting together a better, more consistent bowling lineup. Brett Lee, if he stays fit, is the key; if Mitchell Johnson and Stuart Clark can get back the consistency that served them so well in previous series then we should be able to put pressure on a batting side.
I don’t know what to do about a spinner. Perhaps between now and the firs test against the West Indies later this year one of the several options will present himself as the obvious choice for the turning pitches.
Actually, if what’s being reported in the media is anything to go by, the selecting may well be done by several people not currently holding the position of selector. While Cricket Australia is not quite as ready to let heads roll as, say, an English Premier League soccer club, they are now under a lot of pressure to answer the question of exactly whose fault it was our better-than-average team was bested by a bunch of very ordinary Englishmen.
And I’m not very happy about that, and am wondering if a new selection panel would do a better job. I guess we just wait and see.
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