When a team makes 160 on a powder-puff wicket (Malcolm Conn may not agree, but he is way wrong) they don’t deserve to win the Ashes. There are Australian fans who will say we lost because England doctored the pitch, they are also wrong.
Not one wicket in this Test had anything to do with this pitch. And if the pitch was so bad, how come the two biggest totals were scored in the last two innings. Hey? Answer that. Exactly.
Australia made mistakes in this Test. They should have picked a spinner (England should have picked two), they should have let Ricky Ponting call (at least when running quick singles with Mr Cricket), and they should have not lost eight wickets in one session of cricket.
That is where they lost it.
Stuart “no one thinks I can play but I can” Broad went from project player to Sir Stuart Broad in just over an hour on day two. Then England’s fourth South African-born top-six batsman, Jonathan Trott, made a hundred and the game was well out of reach.
Everyone expected Andrew Flintoff to be the main man is this Test, however he was pretty useless: 29 runs, one wicket, one catch and one (all important) run out was all Freddie could muster in the best win England have had this decade (that wasn’t in 2005). He still goes out in style, as an Ashes winner.
Australia bowled England out once in this series, and won that Test. Two times they failed to make 250 in the first innings and lost both of those. Individually Australia dominated, but they can take their seven hundreds back home to Australia without the Ashes urn they wanted so badly.
It was a tragi-comic end to Ricky Ponting’s last English Ashes Test.
Just when Australia was making the English fans nice and nervous (even more than usual) Hussey — who played a possibly career-saving knock — called through Ponting who was hesitating and ball watching and Australia’s Ashes ended as the gimpish Flintoff picked up and hit the stumps. Michael Clarke was run out soon after when he hit the ball off the spinner, took off only for Andrew Strauss to run him out from a freakish effort at leg slip. Some days life is against you.
It seems fair enough. Neither team really dominated enough to win this series through a convincing win. So two run outs makes complete sense.
England had the best of three Tests, and Australia, two. So their win makes some sort of sense.
The Ashes never leave England, even when Australia wins, but in 16 months Australia get a chance to bring the metaphorical urn home.
For the next 16 months we have to endure open-top buses, MBEs for scratchy batsman and all the jokes about how rubbish we are.
*Listen to Crikey’s Leigh Josey and Jarrod Kimber’s “I can’t believe England won the Ashes” podcast
the better side one, the side that played better one. Although I thought that the captain was going to save them again with his prodigious batting talent. Unfortunately it was his less than prodigious judgement(not sending back a non striker after playing the ball forward and sacrificing himself) put the last nail in.
Is there any truth to the rumour aired last night on the bbc that the captain refused the spinner so he could reward the players for their last game effort. If so may it be the death knell for the club based Australian side, where blokes are allowed to play themselves back in to form after failing.
Congrats England, look forward to seeing if they can do it on our dungheap.
Does this ashes team get knighthoods too?
Thank you for some fine punditry
Cheer up Jarrod. The English supporters are already fearing a 5-0 drubbing when they next come to visit. It’s not so much England won, (rather than ‘one’) but that Australia lost that the English are celebrating. Read Simon Barnes in the London ‘Times’ (and Stephen Fry’s tweets).
My son, who lives in London, recently asked me who I thought would win the Oval test. Unhesitatingly I offered up England; not because I wanted them to win, but because they seemed to have some semblance of a game plan. I am yet to identify anything approximating such from the Australian team. I know they have a “batsmen’s weaknesses” audit courtesy of a former opener but that is hardly a game plan.
Who called whom through and who should have played have little bearing in my view on the outcome if our team does not have a clear idea how they wish to play against the other team whose two shining stars are carrying injuries. In the case of Flintoff, one who is also contemplating retirement from test cricket.
Intelligent Australian captains like Sir Donald Bradman and Richie Benaud, I feel sure, had a very clear idea about what they were trying to achieve and how they were going to execute their plans given roughly equal treatment from the cricketing Gods. Steve Waugh was a captain who worked hard to constantly build pressure on his opponents through identifying weaknesses and exploiting them. Others, I don’t feel have exhibited this ability and when the team strategist left the fold a couple of years ago, I have been hard pressed to find any instance where it hasn’t been purely the performance of a champion that has won matches for Australia. And, when those champions fail to perform which invariably they must, Australia has not won, parochial crowds notwithstanding. Now we have less champions and we are starting to falter. And this will continue to happen until cricket spawns a new generation of strategic thinkers.
You can always tell the end of the era when the Press starts predicting indisputable victorious outcomes. If you happen to believe these test match dullards which, clearly the Australian team must on occasions do, then more fool them and you.
South African-born players for England: Basil D’Olivera, Tony Greig, Andrew Strauss, Kevin Pietersen and Jonathan Trott. Makes 5, I think…
Good point Richard. The problem is that Ponting is the only superstar left in the team. The others are good, but have yet to really prove themselves over a number of years. In a couple of years, this bunch of players will be pretty good, and in their very early thirties which seems to be the Golden Age for Australian cricketers.