“Aw look, the Ashes is a long, long way away.” Is it, though? Is it, really? Ben Duckett hit all the right notes on Channel 7’s Big Bash coverage in the past week, speaking after his Green Team had beaten their Red Team local rivals at a beautifully sun-dappled Melbourne Cricket Ground.
Duckett clearly loves being in Australia. It suits him. The clipped cod-antipodean go-well-mate style. Beard, glasses, salt-stained nylon cap, the iconography of the alpha franchise dude. At that moment his scores for the Melbourne Stars this season read: 0, 68, 67, 0, 67, 20, which is also deeply in character. Go hard. Go home. Whichever. It’s a vibe, babes.
“Taking the ego out of it,” was how Duckett described his ur-Bazball batting style on the same broadcast, a genuinely interesting way of deconstructing what snarkier, more traditional voices might cast as the most egotistical approach to international batting ever devised.
Duckett is right, though, because it works. No top-order batter in the history of England Test cricket has scored 2,000 runs at anywhere near his 80 strike rate. All things being equal England will arrive in Australia in November fronted up by the most inventive high-class Test opener ever to make that trip. Judging by the lovestruck response to a helicoptering 60-odd on debut from Sam Konstas, if Duckett were Australian he’d have been appointed Lord Galactic High Awesome Protector by now and awarded his own goldmine.
He is right in other ways, too. The men’s Ashes is a long way off in traditional months and weeks notation. Talking about it at this distance is a breach of protocol, a red flag, signal for a weary roll of the eyes. It’s Big Three pandering, disrespectful to more marginalised nations, a diminishing of the contests in between.
It also involves reaching rudely across the Women’s Ashes, which kicked off over the weekend in Sydney, all set to be a genuinely fascinating spectacle. Australia have the numbers, the stars and the endless all-rounders. England have depth, reliable medium pace, dogged spin, and the quickest bowler in Lauren Filer, who was genuinely challenging in South Africa, but struggled to plant her feet during a rain-addled warmup this past week.
Yet the men’s Ashes, five Tests from November into January, continues to lurk potently, and with good reason this time. For a start it is actually close in cricket terms. There just aren’t many Tests between then and now. England have one against Zimbabwe and a summer series against India. Australia have two Tests in Sri Lanka and two against West Indies in June before it’s basically “see you in Brisbane”.
Otherwise the coming year is all white ball. The Champions Trophy and the Indian Premier League will spread a giant beach towel across four months. From mid-summer into October England’s men will play 21 white-ball games and a month of the Hundred. This is basically it for any serious Ashes selection issues. What we have is what we hold. There are various reasons why this matters, and why that series already looks like a stand-alone event in the long goodbye of the longest form, perhaps even the last Big Thing.
Fatalism is, of course, built into the form. Test cricket has been reaching for the cyanide pill, clutching its flushed throat, playing out its own death throes ever since it was born. But this time, the prospect of profound structural change is real, and driven by money, which always gets its way.
This does seem to involve the Ashes becoming something else. The proposals are floating around for an overhaul, with talk of two divisions, of England and Australia playing twice every three years. Sport’s hyper-capitalist model, the engine that drives this though TV rights and advertising eyeballs, is incapable of seeing any harm in this prospect. What could possibly be wrong with more of the thing you like! Wring that revenue stream. Give the consumers what they crave, cram this thing into their slavering maws now before they stop wanting it. Failure to feed demand, whatever the intangible effects, is a crime against More and a crime against Money.
Never mind that we have seen how this looks and feels. England and Australia played 15 Ashes Tests in two and a half years in the middle of the last decade, and it was the closest this thing has come to feeling done and spent. Never mind that rarity value, the sense of moments that simply must be seized is a massive part of the appeal; even if these qualities are in effect unmeasurable in dollars and cents, at least until you lose them.
The subsequent southern-hemisphere Ashes, the next classic, four-yearly, steamship-deadlines Ashes, is scheduled in outline for 2029-30. Is it going to happen like that? Nobody really knows. Either way the sense of something in its late Wile E Coyote years, out there suspended above the canyon floor, feet still whirring, is pretty hard to shake.
This is perhaps one ingredient in the slightly overwrought response to an excellent and defiantly lovely Australian cricket summer. Record crowds came through the gates for the Tests. The grounds looked beautiful. The cricket was gripping. Was Australia’s 3-1 win against India really a contender for “the greatest ever series” as local media outlets seem to have uniformly assumed? Is this really their greatest ever team, the completers of Test cricket, holders of every bilateral series against Test nations or some such slightly confected stat?
The Greatest Ever stuff does feel like wish fulfilment, a visceral response jazzed up by the beauty of the summer. In reality Australia’s last Ashes series was a draw. They haven’t won a series in India for more than 20 years. They drew 1-1 with West Indies in their previous home outing. India were basically Jasprit Bumrah and some other blokes.
Related: Radical plan may result in two England-Australia Ashes series every three years
All of which leads back to the actual Ashes contest itself, 10 Test-starved months from now. Where are we with that exactly? England’s victory in New Zealand before Christmas felt like a step forward. On the other hand they will arrive in Australia without a Test win there since 2011, and with a habit of simply capitulating, entire five Test series played out as an extended Rory Burns stumps explosion.
Bowling is clearly the best hand for both teams. Australia’s is stronger on numbers and pedigree. An attack of Pat Cummins, Josh Hazlewood, Mitchell Starc, Scott Boland, Nathan Lyon is better than Brydon Carse, Gus Atkinson, Mark Wood, Chris Woakes, Shoaib Bashir and a fragile Jofra Archer.
Injuries or a spike in form could shift that line. And England are at least planning with a clear method in mind. Hit the Deck seems to be the new Pick Loads of Tall Blokes, a key strategy of the past decade, and one that reached its nadir with the wheeling out of Boyd Rankin in Sydney like a creaking medieval siege tower.
In reality England have only ever done well in Australia when they focus on control. Victory in 2010-11 was a function of pressure, seam movement and reverse swing. Jimmy Anderson, Graeme Swann and Tim Bresnan were key. By the same token Cummins, Boland and Hazlewood aren’t going to blast you out, but they will strangle you with pressure, nip and bounce. If all three are still fit and functioning at their current level Australia have the obvious advantage.
Batting is more flighty for both sides. India’s top order were often dismissed in the same way Australia generally pick up Joe Root, orthodox off-side dabs, runs, prods and cuts transformed into a weakness by just enough extra bounce. Perhaps adrenal, Duckett-style attack really is the answer to this.
Clearly this is going to be something of an apex moment for the entire Bazball-is-life movement, and thrilling in that regard whichever way it goes. Ben Stokes has tailored the late stage of his career towards this moment. Why does he want to bowl now, and bowl as fast as he can? Why is he furiously rehabbing that bionic leg? Because he’s seeing the Gabba and Perth in his head. Stokes will be 34 in November. This is what his time as England captain is narrowing to, and it is a glorious thing.
It is also salutary. The end-of-days stuff is reflected in the ages of the players likely to be present for the next southern summer. England are old. Australia are ancient. Against India they fielded for the first time a team with nobody in their 20s, just 10 30-somethings and a teenager. This is the key demographic shift, the dying back of that generation of cricketers who came through when long form was the base skill, who had the incentive to spend 10 years learning to bat like a Test opener.
It isn’t necessarily a dilution. Test batting will simply be different. It is already different, and often much better for it. But how will this break down over time? There was a sense during the India series of Konstas being installed as a cricketing version of Raygun the Olympic breakdancer, a fun, gimmicky approximation of the real thing.
Related: The Spin | Let the Ashes mind games begin: gazing through a crystal ball at cricket in 2025
This is a nation that seems convinced the future of cricket is a spunky, mulletted, wispy-moustachioed bloke who hasn’t scored any runs but whacks it in interesting ways (see also: Jake Fraser-McGurk). Konstas will have a long and lucrative career in the form the sport now takes. But what are the odds he has already made his highest Test score?
This is not a criticism. Excelling at other forms is rational behaviour. England are scheduled to play six Test in the 12 months after the Ashes, and England actually make money out of red-ball cricket. Otherwise the gravity is only pulling one way. South Africa gave a stage last week to Kwena Maphaka, a hugely talented 18-year-old left-armer, who will now need to wait almost two years to play another Test at home.
How long before the red-ball game becomes properly marginalised by those top-down forces? How long before Ashes cricket is essentially a kind of morris dance meets the Ryder Cup, an exhibition event staged off to one side in strange traditional dress?
Always the death talk with Test cricket. But this is now increasingly formalised. The next one really could be the last one, or at least the last one like this. Hence the urge to drink it in, to close the blinds against the world, to enjoy a final flash of light before this star cruiser crashes into the sun. Who knows, that stopped clock might finally be telling the right time.
Article courtesy of
Source link
