Here’s what I’d like to see happen at Old Trafford this coming Thursday: Australia win the toss and bat, amass a total in excess of 600, and then bowl England out cheaply twice (following them on) and win by an innings and plenty. After that Australia go on to win the fourth and fifth Tests as well and so regain the Ashes. Everybody is gobsmacked at the dramatic turnaround in national fortunes.
I won’t indulge any other of my wishful dreams for you. That one only had the function of setting up what is to follow here – a passage by Scyld Berry recommending that England now go all out to ‘inflict maximum damage on Australia this summer’, destroying the Test futures of some of the Australian players in the process. I wanted to make it clear first that this is NOT what I would like to see. But it does describe what I take to be the true spirit of Ashes cricket, as against that soft stuff about wanting a more even contest. Here is Scyld Berry:
No Hiding Place was a television series of the Sixties. It is also another name for a five-Test series between England and Australia.
Therein lies the beauty of an Ashes series. And the cruelty. It is the time when the law of the jungle applies to cricket – the only time in this world of administrative folly where five-Test series have otherwise been abolished.
In this coming pair of back-to-back Tests, starting at Old Trafford on Thursday, England have the chance of making their task in Australia this winter a lot easier – by seeking out and destroying one Australian cricketer after another, as many as they can.
If this sounds too cruel for sport, it is exactly what Australia have done to England through the ages, especially in the recent era when they were world champions. Of Nasser Hussain’s team in the 2002-03 series in Australia, no fewer than seven players never played a Test for England again – the victims of Steve Waugh’s policy of inflicting mental and physical disintegration.
Of Andrew Flintoff’s team who toured Australia in 2006-07, four members never played another Test for England, physically or mentally broken by the experience. As war veterans, they retired to the allotments of county cricket and tended roses.
And so on. C’mon, Aussie. Don’t let it happen.