‘Same old Aussies, always cheating!’ Chants cut deep for a nation still scarred by sandpaper

It was shocking to watch a baying crowd at Lord’s hurl abuse at players for effecting a stumping within the laws of the game writes Megan Maurice in The Guardian

In most sports, players simply follow the rules laid out for them, which are enforced by umpires or referees. If they break a rule, a consequence is applied and play resumes. There are times, naturally, when athletes are accused of being unsporting, but there is rarely a drawn-out debate over players following the rules exactly as written and being scolded for doing so.

Cricket is a very different beast in many ways. No more clearly did we see this play out than on day five of the second Ashes Test. Where the two cricketing nations of England and Australia are concerned, history is a living and hotly contested document, one that is constantly being grappled over and argued about. So as soon as Jonny Bairstow was stumped by Alex Carey and the third umpire sent him on his way, battle lines were drawn between Australian fans staking out their ground on the side of a “fair and legal dismissal” and the English abandoning their Sunday lunch plans to fight for “the spirit of cricket”. 

For those Australians, the incident cut deep. The scars of sandpaper-gate are still visible. Memories are fresh of cricket heroes crying on international television, the prime minister indicting it as a “shocking disappointment” and Australian cricket being brought into disrepute. It all sits just below the surface. Yet as difficult as it was, most Australian fans took the criticism on the chin; they were equally disappointed with the team and prepared for the onslaught of derision.

However, this is a new era of the Australian men’s cricket team. The biggest criticism most people can make of captain Pat Cummins is that he cares too deeply about social issues. Coach Andrew McDonald seems satisfied to work in the background, rather than front the media. The team has rehabilitated its image considerably over the last five years.

So it was painful for the scars to be ripped open so forcefully and painfully as boos rang out around Lord’s, followed by cries of “Aussie! Aussie! Aussie! Cheat! Cheat! Cheat!” and “Same old Aussies, always cheating!”

Then there was the abuse of players as they walked through the Long Room to lunch, which was perhaps even more galling considering the waiting list of approximately 29 years and £500 ($955 AUD) annual membership fee paid to be part of this exclusive club.

 


With history simmering under the surface, it was shocking to watch the baying crowd hurl abuse at the touring players – not for breaking a key law of the game around attempting to alter the condition of the ball – but for their keeper throwing the ball at the stumps and effecting a stumping within the laws of the game.

Once the immediate injustice of the situation settled down, responses have mostly been tinged with bemusement. Most people can name a similar incident that occurred in club or junior cricket, with an unsuspecting batter, who did not quite have a grasp on what a crease was or the importance of staying in one while batting, caught out by a more wily wicketkeeper.  

Many Australians have been quick to point out the hypocrisy of the uproar from England – with incidents from Bairstow’s shy at the stumps of Marnus Labuschagne the day before, to his similar dismissal of New Zealand’s Colin de Grandhomme in a 2022 Test match, to current England coach Brendon McCullum’s dismissal of Sri Lanka’s Muttiah Muralitharan while the latter was celebrating the century of teammate Kumar Sangakkara.

The mood of the nation was neatly summed up by cricket writer Dan Liebke who noted: “Always very interesting to me how the spirit of cricket seems to revolve around England batters being allowed to bat on even when they’re out.”

Between the jokes, there is a genuine confusion about what the “spirit of cricket” entails and when it is applied. These debates usually crop up whenever a Mankad is effected, but to have widened the field to include stumpings makes things even more complicated. For Australian fans, it was one thing to face up to the accusation of cheating when it was true, but quite another when it occurred in this murky, grey area between the rules and the mysterious “spirit of the game” – an area for which England, at least, seem to hold a map.

Ashes long-con exposed: England's dereliction of Test cricket threatens format as a whole

If the public loses confidence in the product, then its viability will be called into question Andrew Miller in Cricinfo 

As anyone who lived through the 2008 credit crunch will remember, economies are essentially built on confidence. So long as the public has faith in the robustness of the institutions charged with managing their assets, those assets barely need to exist beyond a few 0s and 1s in a digital mainframe for them to be real and lasting indicators of a nation's wealth.

When doubts begin to beset the system, however, it's amazing how quickly the rot can take hold. Is this really a Triple-A-rated bond I am holding in my hands, or is it actually a tranche of sub-prime mortgages that are barely fit to line the gerbil cage?

Likewise, is this really the world's most enduring expression of sporting rivalry taking place in Australia right now, or is it a pointless turkey shoot that exists only to justify the exorbitant sums that TV broadcasters are willing to cough up for the privilege of hosting it… a privilege that, in itself, feeds into the self-same creation myth that keeps the hype ever hyping, and the bubble ever ballooning.

On Tuesday, that bubble finally burst. After weeks of barely suppressed panic behind the scenes, England's capitulation in Melbourne deserves to be Test cricket's very own Lehman Brothers moment - the final, full-frontal collapse of an institution so ancient, and previously presumed to be so inviolable, that it may require unprecedented emergency measures to prevent the entire sport from tanking.

For there really has never been an Ashes campaign quite as pathetic as this one. Crushing defeats have been plentiful in the sport's long and storied history - particularly in the recent past, with England having now lost 18 of their last 23 Tests Down Under, including 12 of the last 13. But never before has an England team taken the field in Australia with so little hope, such few expectations, so few remaining skills with which to retain control of their own destinies.

Nothing expressed the gulf better than the performance of Australia's Player of the Match, Scott Boland. Leaving aside the rightful celebration of his Indigenous heritage, of far greater pertinence was his international oven-readiness, at the age of 32, after a lifetime of toil for Victoria in the Sheffield Shield. Like Michael Neser, 31 on debut at Adelaide last week and a Test wicket-taker with his second ball in the format, Boland arrived on the stage every bit as ready for combat as England's Test batters used to be - most particularly the unit that won the Ashes in Australia in 2010-11, which included four players with a century on debut (Alastair Cook, Andrew Strauss, Jonathan Trott and Matt Prior) and two more (Kevin Pietersen and Ian Bell) with fifties.

The contrast with England's current crop of ciphers could not be more galling. It is genuinely impossible to see how Haseeb Hameed could have been expected to offer more than his tally of seven runs from 41 balls across two innings at the MCG, while Ollie Pope's Bradman-esque average of 99.94 at his home ground at The Oval, compared to his cat-on-hot-tin-roof displays at Brisbane and Adelaide, is the most visceral evidence possible of a domestic first-class system that is failing the next generation.

Even on the second day at the MCG, England's best day of the series had finished with them four down for 31, still 51 runs in arrears, as Australia's quicks punished their opponents for a fleeting moment of mid-afternoon hubris by unleashing an hour of God-complex thunderbolts. It stood to reason that the morning's follow-up would be similarly swift and pitiless.






Watching a bowed and beaten troop of England cricketers suck up Australian outfield celebrations is nothing new, of course. But this is different to previous Ashes hammerings, because despite the Covid restrictions and limited preparation time, never before has a series loss felt further removed from the sorts of caveats that sustained previous such debacles Down Under - most particularly the 2006-07 and 2013-14 whitewashes, both of which were at least the gory dismemberments of England teams that had previously swept all before them.

The 2021-22 team, by contrast, has swept nothing before it, except a few uncomfortable home ruths under a succession of carpets. Despite the enduring magnificence of James Anderson - whose unvanquished defiance evokes Curtly Ambrose and Courtney Walsh's noble upholding of West Indies' crumbling standards at the turn of the millennium - and despite Joe Root willing himself to produce a year of such cursed brilliance it deserves to be inducted into Greek mythology, the rabble that clings to their coat-tails is little more than the zombified remains of the side that surrendered the urn so vapidly back in 2017-18.

They travelled to Australia with the same captain, for the first time on an Ashes tour in more than 100 years (and Root is destined for the same 5-0 shellacking that JWHT Douglas achieved in 1920-21); the same core bowling unit of right-arm medium-pacers, and by this third Test, the same outgunned middle order, with Root, Dawid Malan and Jonny Bairstow on this occasion physically united with Ben Stokes, compared to the spectre at the feast that had haunted the team's endeavours four years ago.

Nothing in the interim has progressed for this generation of players, in spite of a vast amount of hot air about how exhaustive the planning for this campaign has been - most particularly from England's dead-man-walking head coach, Chris Silverwood, whose epitaph deserves to be the same fateful phrase that he used to announce England's Test squad to face New Zealand at the start of the summer.

"The summer of Test cricket will be fascinating," Silverwood wrote back in May, shortly after he had taken over selection duties from Ed Smith to become the single most powerful supremo in the team's history. "Playing the top two teams in the world, in New Zealand and India, is perfect preparation for us as we continue to improve and progress towards an Ashes series in Australia at the back end of the year." Well, that aged well, didn't it?

And yet, Silverwood is just another symptom of English cricket's wider malaise. From the outset, and irrespective of his theoretical influence, he was only ever an uninspiring over-promotion from within the team's existing ranks - more than anything, a recognition of how undesirable the role of England head coach has become in recent years.

"All attempts to keep English Test cricket viable essentially ground to a halt from the moment that Tom Harrison was appointed as ECB CEO in 2015"

In an era of gig-economy opportunities on the T20 franchise circuit - when barely a day goes by without Andy Flower, the architect of England's last truly great Test team, being announced as Tashkent Tigers' batting consultant in the Uzbekistan Premier League - who wants or needs the 300-hotel-nights-a-year commitment required to oversee a side that, like an overworked troupe of stadium-rock dinosaurs, fears that the moment it takes a break from endless touring, everyone will forget they ever existed in the first place?

English cricket's financial reliance on its Test team has been holding the sport in this country back for generations, long before the complications of Covid kicked in to make the team's relentless touring lifestyle even less palatable than ever before. It was a point that Tom Harrison, the ECB chief executive, acknowledged in a moment of guard-down candour before last summer's series against India - and one that he will now be obliged to revisit with grave urgency as the sport lurches into a new crisis of confidence, but one that is effectively the reverse side of the same coin that the sport has been flipping all year long. English cricket's ongoing racism crisis, after all, is yet another damning expression of the sport's inability to move with the times.

"It is the most important series, then we've got another 'most important series' coming up, and then another directly after that," Harrison said of that India campaign - which, lest we forget, also needs to be completed next summer for the financial good of the game, even if the players would sooner move on and forget. "The reality is, for international players, is that the conveyor belt just keeps going. You want players turning up in these 'most important series' feeling fantastic about the opportunity of playing for their country. They are not going to be able to achieve that if they have forgotten the reasons why they play."

The issue for Harrison's enduring credibility, however, is that all attempts to keep English Test cricket viable essentially ground to a halt from the moment that he was appointed as CEO in 2015.

That summer's team still had the latent talent to seal the last of their four Ashes victories in five campaigns, but on Harrison's watch, the ECB has essentially spent the past six years preparing the life-rafts for the sport's post-international future - most notably through the establishment of the Hundred, but also through the full-bore focus on winning the 2019 World Cup, precisely because it was the sort of whiteboard-friendly "deliverable" that sits well on a list of boardroom KPIs… unlike the lumpen, intangible mesh of contexts by which success in Test cricket will always need to be measured.

It was a point that Root alluded to his shellshocked post-match comments, where he hinted that the red-ball game needed a "reset" to match the remarkable rise of the white-ball side from the wreckage of that winter's World Cup. But what do England honestly believe can be reset from this point of the sport's degradation?




It feels as though we've all been complicit in the long-con here. For 16 years and counting, the Ashes has been sold as the most glorious expression of cricket's noble traditions, when in fact that self-same biennial obsession has been complicit in shrinking the format's ambitions to the point where even England's head coach thinks that a magnificent home-summer schedule is nothing but a warm-up act.

Perhaps it all stems from the reductive ambitions of that never-to-be-forgotten 2005 series, the series upon which most of the modern myth is founded, but which was more of an end than a beginning where English cricket was concerned.

The summer of 2005 marked the end of free-to-air TV in the UK, the end of Richie Benaud as English cricket's voice of ages, the end of 18 years of Stockholm Syndrome-style subjugation by one of the greatest Test teams ever compiled. If English sport was to be repurposed as a series of nostalgic sighs for long-ago glories, then perhaps only Manchester United's "Solskjær has won it" moment can top it.

Sixteen years later, what are we left with? The dreadfulness of the modern Ashes experience has even bled into this winter's TV coverage, every bit as hamstrung by greedy decisions taken way above the pay-grade of the troops on the ground. It's symptomatic of a format whose true essence has been asset-stripped since the rivalry's heyday two decades ago, with those individual assets being sold back to the paying public at a premium in the interim.

It's not unlike a Ponzi scheme, in fact - a concept that English cricket became unexpectedly familiar with during a Test match in Antigua back in 2009, when the revelations about the ECB's old chum, Allen Stanford, caused a run on his bank in St John's, with queues stretching way further down the road that any stampede to attend a Caribbean Test match of recent vintage.

The warnings about Test cricket's fragility have been legion for decades. But if England, of all the Test nations, doesn't remember to care for the format that, through the hype of the Ashes, it pretends to hold most dear, this winter's experiences have shown that the expertise required to shore up those standards may not be able to survive much more neglect.

Tea and sympathy won't suffice as England face up to another drubbing

George Dobell in Cricinfo


There's a pattern of behaviour prevalent in England which dictates that, in times of extreme stress or emotion, we should do almost anything but acknowledge the truth.

So we sit around the hospital beds of the dying, telling them they'll soon be back on their feet. We tell doctors we hardly drink, never smoke and go the gym almost every night. We go to funerals and tell each other the wife-beating alcoholic had a heart of gold. Her bottom never looks big in that and there's almost nothing - not nuclear war or zombie apocalypse - that can't be overcome with a nice cup of tea.

It is, in some ways, a wonderful quality. It was that stoic refusal to acknowledge reality that enabled a previous generation to win a war that, in cricket terms, had them following on in gloomy light and on a pitch showing signs of uneven bounce. And the band on Titanic - just like the Barmy Army - played all the way down.

But there are moments when it is also an incredibly irritating characteristic. And damaging. So, just as you really should get that mole checked out, just as that lump probably won't go away, England really should acknowledge that this Ashes series really wasn't close.

There were moments - flashes might be a better word - when it looked as if England could compete. When James Vince reached 83 in Brisbane; when Australia were reduced to 76 for 4 in the same match; when Jonny Bairstow and Dawid Malan took England to 368 for 4 in Perth. On these occasions, it appeared England were working their way into a good position.

But they only made 302 in that first innings in Brisbane. They trailed by 215 on first innings in Adelaide (even though Australia declared their own first innings with eight wickets down). Only three men passed 25 in England's first innings in Perth, and only two men in the top seven managed more than 22 on the flattest Melbourne pitch you ever will wish you hadn't seen.

This was a team trying to snatch a goal on the break. This was Frank Bruno catching Mike Tyson with his left hook; Greg Thomas dislodging Viv Richards' cap; England's openers enjoying a good start (they were 101 without loss) against West Indies at Lord's in 1984; Graham Dilley reducing them to 54 for 5 at Lord's in 1988. Looking back now, they were far from reflective of the general balance of power. They were the cat hissing at the dog; the condemned man cursing his firing squad. To suggest they represent squandered opportunities is largely delusional.

So, while it's true that Steve Smith was a difference between the teams, he wasn't the only difference. The same could equally be said about Nathan Lyon and the Australian pace attack. So that's the batting, pace bowling and spin bowling covered, then. England were out-gunned from the start. They haven't squandered moments of great promise. They've occasionally caught sight of them in the distance when the clouds parted for a moment. But, actually, now they look again, it may have been a cow.

You can't really blame players for buying into the narrative - a narrative repeated several times by Joe Root and most recently by James Anderson - that the series was decided by a few key moments. It comes with the territory in top-level sport that the protagonists have to maintain high levels of self-belief. They have to believe they can win. It's part of the make-up of a champion.

But you would hope that none of those in positions of power fall for such nonsense. You would hope they reflect on this Ashes series - a series in which Australia scored in excess of 600 twice, won by an innings twice (despite losing the toss on both occasions), had the three highest run-scorers and four highest wicket-takers - and understand that it was a rout.

Nor should it be dismissed as an aberration. England have now lost nine of their most recent 11 overseas Tests. Sure, playing in Australia and India is tough. But England didn't win in the Caribbean, either. Or Bangladesh. Or New Zealand, the UAE or Sri Lanka. Living off their success against South Africa in 2015 - excellent result though it was - is a car driving on fumes.

It'll keep happening, too. Sure, they may snatch the odd series - perhaps in New Zealand in a couple of months, perhaps in the Caribbean at the start of 2019 - because they have, in Ben Stokes and Root and Anderson, a few top-quality players. But generally, such wins will come very much against the norm while England prioritise their white-ball development at the expense of their red-ball team. Until they can develop more spin and fast bowlers, until they stop hiding behind wins on home surfaces, they will remain also-rans in Test cricket.

Some will say this tour went wrong in September. And it is true England lost a key player - and just a bit of their energy and equilibrium - when Stokes was arrested that night in Bristol. Whatever the rights and wrongs of the affair (and the proper authorities can decide that) there are lessons to be learned about the level of sacrifice inherent in the life of an international sportsperson. There might well be some justification for some of Stokes' actions that night. But should he have been there in the first place?

But it went wrong long before that. It went wrong when the ECB continued their exclusive relationship with a subscription broadcaster long after it had become clear it was damaging the long-term health of the game. As a result, cricket lost relevance in the public consciousness. The talent pool on which the game relies has grown shallow and is absurdly over-reliant upon the private schools, Asian and ex-pat communities.

It went wrong when the Championship was shoved into the margins of the season, when counties were incentivised for fielding teams of young, England-qualified players, when the ECB stopped believing in their own domestic competitions and allowed them to be diluted and devalued.

While the suspicion lingers that Root caught the bug that laid him low on the final day of the series while eating jelly and ice-cream at a kid's birthday party (it was his son's birthday on the fourth day of the game), that will do nothing to derail the narrative that he lacks the maturity or gravitas of a leader, even though there is no evidence for that save his boyish face.

To see Root in the field, coaxing and cajoling his side into another effort, was to see a born leader. To see him behind the scenes, handling each crisis with calm good humour and ensuring this tour did not sink to the levels of the 2013-14 debacle, was to see a young man with strength, energy and integrity. He simply wasn't dealt a handful of aces. He's not the problem here.

And nor is Trevor Bayliss. Sure, he's not a technical coach. And nor is he a selector in the sense that he has the knowledge of county cricket to offer much there. His job, in essence, is to keep the first-team environment positive and focussed. And he's good at that. It's not his fault that England can't produce pace or spin bowlers. He's not an alchemist.

No, the trouble is much higher up the pyramid than that. The problem is the ECB chief executive, Tom Harrison, trying to kid us that English cricket is in good health, and Andrew Strauss who has achieved little in his time as director of England cricket other than settling a couple of old scores: getting rid of Peter Moores and Kevin Pietersen. If teams are judged by their success in global events - as Strauss has always said - it is worth remembering they did worse in the 2017 Champions Trophy than the 2013 Champions Trophy.

Blaming Stokes or Bayliss or Root for this loss will solve nothing. It's more fundamental change - and an acknowledgement of their problems - that England require. And a nice cup of tea. Obviously.

The Ashes is sinking into the mire of its own bullshit

George Dobell in Cricinfo


Perhaps, on a busier day - a day when almost half the overs had not been lost to rain - the "ball tampering" narrative would have been buried by more worthwhile content.

But, on a day which featured only five boundaries and saw the run-rate crawl along at 2.34 an over, an angle had to be found. And, with Australia struggling to save a game for the first time in the series, that angle turned out to be a thinly-disguised suggestion that England had engaged in ball-tampering in an attempt to gain reverse swing.

It's hard to interpret headlines such as "England in ball-tampering furore" (wwos.nine.com.au) and "England in the spotlight over ball treatment" (cricket.com.au; the website owned by Cricket Australia) any other way. Sure, there are some caveats in the articles. But the clickbait nature of modern journalism throws the mud before those caveats satisfy the lawyers. And it's the mud that sticks.

Maybe, on first viewing, the footage of James Anderson holding the ball might have raised some eyebrows. And maybe, by some interpretations, England's tactic of throwing the ball in on the bounce to ensure one side is worn is stretching legality to the limit. It is true that they were warned not to over-do it by the umpires. It is also true that Australia were.

But anyone looking closely - or doing some research - might have seen the England bowlers were standing next to the umpires when the 'incident' occurred. They might also have noticed that any alleged scratching was to the shiny side of the ball; an action that would counter the attempts to gain reverse swing.

Furthermore, they might then have checked with the match-referee before making any allegation. Had they done so, they would have been told that no complaint had been made. An England team spokesman subsequently said they had received apologies from a couple of broadcasters, an acknowledgement that checks should have been made before publication and an understanding the relevant articles would either be amended or deleted.

Trevor Bayliss, the England coach, described the story as "a beat up" subsequently suggesting that was also the expression used by the umpires. Asked to explain what that meant he said: "it's made up."

"As soon as I saw the headlines I raced into the umpires' room and that was their words: it's a beat-up, nothing to worry about, absolutely fine," Bayliss said. "You are allowed to clean the ball. [Umpire] Kumar Dharmasena had said to our guys - well both sides - that there is no problem but he would like them to do it in front of the umpires so they can see and there is nothing untoward.

"Kumar said there is a bit of dirt and mud out there. It does get on the ball and in some of the seams. You are allowed to clean it off. Watching the footage, if he was scratching it, it was the wrong side to get it to reverse. I'm quite sure that wasn't the case.

"Kumar just said, don't worry, there is absolutely nothing in it. His words were: it was a beat up - it's made up."

Maybe England only have themselves to blame. In the days when they used to be bowled out by the likes of Waqar Younis and Wasim Akram, allegations of ball tampering were never far from the surface - both from the media and the dressing room - while in the days when they were bowled out by Muttiah Muralitharan and Saeed Ajmal, whispers of suspect actions proliferated. On both occasions, there was a failure to appreciate the skill of the players. It's not so long since a UK paper published a match-fixing expose that exposed nothing, too.

And maybe, in the longer-term, broadcasters may seek to recalibrate commentary teams that are strong on cricketing experience - which is clearly a tremendous asset - but lacking in journalistic rigour. There are times when the Channel 9 commentary, predominantly staffed as it is by cricketers who have served Australia with distinction, becomes as partial as any broadcaster anywhere in the world. And yes, that includes the North Korean channel that only shows Kim Jong-un hitting holes in one on the golf course. While sitting on a unicorn.

But this latest non-story sustained what appears to be a pretty conscious campaign of sledging against the touring team that extends beyond the pitch and into the newspapers and broadcasts. Had the boot been on the other foot, talk would have been of "whingeing Poms" (surely a pejorative expression used to describe a nationality; you wonder if it will be in circulation in 20 years) and a "doctored" pitch. Recall the reactions to England winning the Ashes in 2013 and 2015? Was it more 'well played, England' or 'doctored Pom pitches define the series'? You decide.

In the last couple of days, Michael Hussey - who was also vocal on the ball-tampering issue - had somehow misconstrued Stuart Broad's concession that he "wasn't competitive" in Perth into an admission that he hadn't tried.

Under the headline 'Amazing 'Broad didn't try'' (foxsports.com.au), Hussey said it was "unbelievable" that Broad was "almost saying he wasn't trying hard enough in Perth", which "you find amazing in an Ashes series". Hussey signed off by wondering why Broad "hadn't been working this hard in the lead-up to Adelaide, Brisbane and Perth".

What Broad actually said was this: "I thought I bowled pretty well at Brisbane, okay at Adelaide, but very poorly in Perth. I didn't find a good rhythm and that probably showed. All you can do as a top-flight sportsman is make sure your work ethic is always at the top level, that you are looking to improve and that you are competitive. I was not as competitive as I should have been in Perth. I wanted to improve that."

But why would we expect any better?

When England scored at a run-rate of 2.58 in Brisbane, they were dubbed the "Bore-me Army" but when Australia scored at a rate of 2.51 they were praised for their determination.

When Mike Atherton - a man who stood up to Allan Donald at his best in a particularly thrilling encounter - wrote a considered, nuanced piece suggesting some tailenders (whatever country they might be from) might need greater protection from the short ball to avoid serious injury, he was lampooned as a "whingeing Pom".

When Anderson suggested there wasn't a huge amount of depth in Australia's pace resources - a suggestion that has largely been vindicated by Jackson Bird's attempt to stand in for Mitchell Starc (no bird has had a worse Christmas and plenty of turkeys have had a rough time of things) - it was dismissed as abusive and disrespectful.

When the Jonny Bairstow buttgate incident was first reported, one newspaper's page lead called it a "nightclub attack" while Moeen Ali - that's the Muslim Moeen Ali - was recently asked if he was going "to be able to keep out of the pub" for a few days. It is relentless, it is cheap, it is hysterical, it is parochial and, most of all, it is really, really boring.

Cricket is sinking into the mire of its own bullshit. If the Ashes, of all contests, needs this sort of tosh to remain of interest to the general public, we are in real trouble.

Why does county cricket always get the blame for England’s failings?

Andy Bull in The Guardian






A stock of explanations and excuses is a valuable bit of any cricketer’s kit and should be kept ready, stashed by bat, box, and pads. “The sun was in my eyes. I couldn’t pick it up in this light. My foot slipped. Somebody was moving behind the sightscreen.”

England, who, after all, have had no shortage of practice at this, have used some particularly ripe examples over the years. Ian Botham blamed the rain that ruined their chances in a group match against Pakistan at the 1992 World Cup on the team chaplain, Andrew Wingfield Digby “You’re useless, you are,” Botham told him, “It’s not surprising there’s a worldwide movement in favour of Islam.”

That was when Ted Dexter was the chair of selectors. Dexter, who once explained away his late arrival for pre-season at Sussex by saying “I was fascinated by an adorable girl”, had a fine line in alibis himself. When England were thrashed in Caluctta in 1993, he announced he was going “to commission a report into pollution levels in Indian cities” (India’s environment minister replied that Dexter should “commission a report into the effect of pollution levels on the trajectories of India’s spinners” instead). And when England lost the Ashes in 1989 Dexter offered the deathless: “Venus may be in the wrong juxtaposition to somewhere else.”

Dexter had a rare flair for the form, though. These days (if not always) a lot of the explanations, excuses, and arguments about what went wrong are starting to sound tired and familiar. As if English cricket was turning circles while it tries to find the way ahead. On the one hand there are the pundits offering old bromides about a weak county game that fails to produce the particular cricketers the national team needs, and on the other, there are county fans who bounce the blame back on to the ECB’s mismanagement of the sport and their coaching set-up at junior and elite levels.

This winter the focus is on fast bowlers, because England’s batsmen have been skinned by three of them. Steve Finn touched on the issues when he was doing some charity work for Chance to Shine last week. He picked out the pitches, which are “a bit of a pancake because people are scared of losing games”, and the workload, “when you play 12 months a year it can suck the pace out of you”, but defended the ECB’s national performance centre in Loughborough, where the coaches cannot seem to decide whether they should be teaching quick bowlers to stay fit or get fast.

The telling detail was what Finn had to say about the ECB’s recent changes to the playing conditions. Last winter it was not the lack of quick bowlers everyone was worrying about but the shortage of spinners, because England had been thrashed in India. The ECB had taken a step to fix exactly that problem earlier in the year, when they decided that in the championship visiting captains would have the choice of whether or not to bowl first. This was supposed to encourage counties to produce pitches that would bring spinners into the game as it wore on. And it worked.

The flip side, Finn explained, is that “we are trying to develop spinners in this country with the toss rules and not making pitches biased towards fast bowlers but I do think the slowness of the wickets discourages people from bowling fast.” Point being that in the attempt to fix one problem, the ECB has exacerbated another. Which is a pattern it is repeating on a larger scale. 

The last big ballyhoo in English cricket was after the team’s abject 2015 World Cup. Paul Downton lost his job as the managing director and Andrew Strauss took over with instructions to improve England’s limited-overs cricket before the 2019 tournament. Concurrently, the board was concocting plans to bring in a new T20 league. It’s been designed to address two other long-standing criticisms of the way it has run the sport, which were that having invented T20, the ECB’s version of it had long since been overtaken by others around the world and that youth interest and participation in the sport had dropped off a cliff while it was stuck behind Sky’s paywall.

Most of the key decisions since have been made to serve those ends. Trevor Bayliss was hired, in the large part, because he had such a strong record as a limited-overs coach. Then, the number of County Championship matches was cut and the schedules rearranged so teams could play limited-overs cricket on hard, fresh pitches at the height of summer, the one-day final could take centre stage again, and the players would have to do less chopping and changing between formats.

Problem being that when the ECB shifted one piece of this jigsaw into place it left a muddle in the other corner. The championship has been marginalised, shunted into the far ends of the season, when conditions are more likely to suit the very kind of bowling that suffered in Australia, and at domestic level, the counties and their players are being encouraged to prioritise limited-overs cricket.

So the ECB have over-corrected, and ended up off course in the other direction. But then, you would need to be a hell of a plate spinner to come up with a system that serves the national team in all three formats, keeps the counties solvent, satisfies diehard fans and seduces a new audience too. The ECB would do well to find a chaplain to blame.

England's Ashes Win - Despite, not Because

Maxie Allen in The Full Toss

England would not have won the Ashes had Kevin Pietersen not been sacked without explanation. Alastair Cook is the greatest captain in test history. Paul Downton is a national hero of rare prescience and foresight.

I need exaggerate only a little to make the point. History is being re-written. Scores are being settled. A sickly river of errant and retaliatory bilge is slithering its way through the media crickosphere.

Why does it matter? At the risk of coming over all Ed Smith, allow me to quote George Orwell:

He who controls the past controls the future. He who controls the present controls the past.

Newspapers write contemporary history. They set the agenda and become the accepted version of events. The press influence people whose opinions affect cricket followers – from the wider public, to politicians, sponsors, and sports administrators.

Who is the head of UK Sport more likely to read? Mike Selvey, or Being Outside Cricket?

The hacks have power, but some of them are distorting reality to serve a bizarre agenda.

Let’s get one thing straight. England did not win the Ashes because a masterplan came gloriously to fruition. England’s triumph over Australia did not reveal the decision-making of February 2014 to be an act of visionary, methodical genius.

England won despite what happened, not because of it.

Let’s remember the precise sequence of events. First, Peter Moores was hired with a mandate to re-build the England side. He was chosen even though he was the only candidate who’d already failed in the role, and to almost universal opposition. He promised more of the same micro-managing, data-driven, strait-jacket approach which by then had already been discredited under Andy Flower.

How did he get on? Moores took England backwards, not forwards: losing to Sri Lanka, crashing out of the World Cup at the group stage, and drawing with West Indies, a record only offset by the series win over a woeful India.

It was meant to have been Peter Moores who masterminded England’s Ashes campaign. At the last minute the ECB had no choice but bow to the inevitable, prompting a panicked sacking and replacement process. In dismissing Moores, Andrew Strauss managed to avoid doing the really stupid thing – not sacking him – but it was hardly act of remarkably prescient cricketing genius.

And what of the new materials around whom the side was re fabricated? Sam Robson and Gary Ballance have both since been dropped, as have Chris Jordan and Liam Plunkett. Chris Woakes, for reasons both of form and injury, has also fallen off the radar. Jos Buttler has yet to make a century and has scored only 79 runs at 13 in this Ashes series.

The ECB’s stated plan, eighteen months ago, was to build the New England around Alastair Cook. Since then he has scored two centuries in seventeen tests, the output of a supporting actor, not the lead. In the 2015 Ashes so far, Cook has made 223 runs in seven innings, at 31.85. In terms of England averages for the series, he stands sixth.

Has Cook’s captaincy improved England’s form? He’s now more prepared to try quirky tactics – if England are on top. He will declare, nine down, shortly before lunch – if England are already leading by more than 300. As Unhappy Hippy remarked on Twitter, “Cook’s captaincy capably managed matches we should win”.

If Cook has changed his approach, he waited until at least a year after the tour of Australia to do it. If Cook is made of the right stuff, why has he progressed at barely a glacial pace? In nearly three years at the helm, Cook has now led England captain in 37 tests. Only five men have ever captained England on more occasions.

Would England not have beaten Australia without Cook’s captaincy? What did he do in this series which turned sessions in England’s favour? Was this a case of his intrinsic virtues carrying the day, as they were inevitably destined to? Or an extension of the Collingwood Principle – that if anyone captains long enough, refusing to resign, they will eventually enjoy a series when things go their way?

The jury remains out on the most important dimension of Cook’s captaincy. He has always been prepared to rotate the bowlers – any idiot can do that – and try an offbeat field placing. Cook’s real weakness is his impotence in the face of adversity. When the batsmen are on top – as Australia’s were at Lord’s, or when England lose control in the field – as they did last year against Sri Lanka at Headingley and India – Cook retreats into his shell instead of taking the game by the scruff of the neck. These situations are the true test of a captain’s mettle, and Cook invariably fails – shrugging his shoulders at slip and ceding control to Anderson and Broad.

By retaining Cook as captain, were the ECB sagacious and far-sighted, or did they just get lucky? When they reaffirmed him, time and again, after each disappointing result, what were the qualities they saw in him which have now become evident this summer? And how did they influence the result?

Have England been better off without Kevin Pietersen? His replacements – in this series, Ballance and Bairstow (it is telling that a change was needed) – have scored 177 runs in six innings. Would Pietersen have scored fewer?

It is impossible to say with any confidence whether his absence helped foster a better team spirit, and if so, whether this atmosphere contributed significantly to England’s Ashes victory. Any assertion on this front is pure guesswork.

But no evidence has ever been presented that, when he played for England, Pietersen’s involvement proved detrimental to the team’s output. He was a member of England sides which won four Ashes series, beat India away, became world number one, and won the World T20. There is also ample testimony from younger players about Pietersen’s provision to them of support, advice, and help in the nets.

So if you return to England’s 2014 masterplan, and trace the narrative threads through to their victory at Trent Bridge, what do you end up with?

And why regard this Ashes series as the ‘end of history’? It is an arbitrary choice, which insults England’s other opponents. Why not draw the line at the West Indies tour in April, and take final conclusions from that result? Or extend the story to include the upcoming visits to UAE and South Africa. If England fare badly overseas this winter, where does that leave the narrative?

In beating Australia, England bowled extremely well, and batted well enough. Joe Root’s runs and Stuart Broad’s wickets were by far the most important individual contributions. Of the other players who materially affected the outcome, only Moeen Ali was an addition to the team since the Difficult Winter. You could add Mark Wood, at a push. Steve Finn, Ben Stokes, and Jonny Bairstow, all pre-date Paul Downton’s Brave New World.

England benefited greatly both from Australia’s appalling batting, and home advantage. All but one of the last eight Ashes series have been won by the hosts.

Another factor was England’s fresher and more liberated approach – their cricketers seemingly encouraged to play their natural games, on instinct, without hindrance from laptops and hypotheses. This cultural change is probably attributable to the influence of Paul Farbrace, acting coach during the New Zealand series, and Trevor Bayliss. Yet it had not been the advance plan for either man to take charge of the team. Had Peter Moores remained in post, as the ECB had intended, what would have happened?

None of this devalues the performance of the England players who scored the runs and took the wickets which beat Australia. Quite the opposite. They defied expectations. They outplayed their rivals. They won the Ashes. To those players – and to a minor extent their new coaches – is the credit due. To lay it at anyone else’s door is to denigrate their achievement.

Try telling that to what Mike Selvey might call the “vocal minority” of professional cricket writers hellbent on distorting reality to settle scores. Some are motivated by the redemption of their friends. What was regarded ‘below the line’ as the legitimate holding to account of people in power, they saw as the vulgar abuse of “good men”.

More acutely, for some, this their opportunity for revenge on what Ed Smith calls ‘the mob’. We had the temerity to challenge their judgment. We had the impudence to suggest that people who had neither played three test matches, nor once sat next to Kevin Pietersen on a plane, but had spent their whole lives following England, might still be able to form a valid opinion on cricket.

In both cases, we neglected to respect our elders and betters. And this is payback time. In yet another journalistic first for the English cricket media, this is a cue for an attack on their own readers.

If some in the press are exploiting the Ashes result to vindicate their actions, this is small fry compared to what the ECB will do, and what their supporters will say. In theory, everything the board has done, and everything the board will go on to do, can be justified by what happened this summer. The reclamation of the urn proves the soundness of their rationale, the goodness of their governance, and the righteousness of their moral code.

As Dave Ticker put it, on Twitter: "Giles Clarke selling out to Stanford doesn't look so silly now England have won the Ashes, does it."

Persecute, bully and betray England’s highest ever run-scorer? We won the Ashes. Extort spectators and test-hosting counties? We won the Ashes. Lock cricket behind a TV paywall? We won the Ashes. Hand the Sky windfall to the counties and bill Sport England for the grass-roots funding? We won the Ashes. Ruin the World Cup? We won the Ashes. Turn international cricket into a protection racket for the Big Three? We won the Ashes.

Dare not question our judgement. We know what’s best for you. Please move along.

Ashes 2013: England's spin king Graeme Swann makes all the difference

Transpose the seamers and the story would probably be the same. Do so with the spinners and Australia might well be in the ascendant – Graeme Swann is that influential

• 
• • Mike Selvey
  • The Guardian, Tuesday 6 August 2013 16.50 BST

Graeme Swann is on track to be not just England’s, but one of the game’s, greatest ever spin bowlers. Photograph: Stu Forster/Getty Images

Spin them how you like, twist them until they look like a DNA double helix but in the end statistics can tell a story. In this series, after three Tests, they are revealing both similarities and differences between the sides.

Ian Bell, for instance, stands head and shoulders above any other batsman, with the possible exception of Michael Clarke, and is unmatched for consistency. Closest for England is Joe Root and 180 of his 242 runs have come in a single knock, while Stuart Broad has more runs than Alastair Cook and Jonathan Trott, and averages more than any other England batsman beyond Bell and Root.

Of the seam bowlers, Ryan Harris and Peter Siddle have outbowled their England counterparts significantly. Harris, brilliant, has 11 wickets from two Tests at 18 runs apiece and Siddle, an industry all on his own, has 16 at 21.68. Only Jimmy Anderson comes close for England, with 15 wickets at 26, but he had one of his least productive games for England at Old Trafford, where both Australian seamers excelled.

England's three other seamers in this series – Steve Finn, Tim Bresnan, and Broad – have only as many wickets as Anderson between them, and at a cost that might put them on the shelves in Harrods rather than Lidl. There has been a great deal of mediocrity from both sides in this series.

If England have the upper hand in any area, though, it is with their use of and success with spin. Here the differential is huge.

Australia's spinners have taken seven wickets for 442 runs, four of those going to the occasional legspinner Steve Smith who got lucky once. It means that the two front-line spinners, Ashton Agar and Nathan Lyon, have three wickets between them, costing 111 runs each.

On the same pitches Graeme Swann and, briefly, Root have managed 22 at 23.4 each, 19 of them to Swann.

Only in the maiden-overs column, where the Australia spinners have sent down 30 to England's 29, and from 43 fewer overs, do they have the upper hand – and that most likely is a function of the fields that have been set. Swann is the single player who is making a difference. Transpose the seamers and the story would be the same, probably more so. Do so with the spinners and Australia might well be in the ascendent – he is that influential.

Perhaps it is unfair to compare his figures with those of a teenager elevated to the heights with the rapidity of an ejector seat (although Dan Vettori, for example, managed well enough) or someone whose perceived weakness, despite a perfectly credible career, meant that no Australian had played as many Tests as Lyon had before Old Trafford without one against England. But Swann has moved beyond the stage of being merely a phenomenon and is on track to be not only England's greatest spin bowler, but one of the game's greatest.

At the moment he has 241 wickets from 55 matches, which places him 11th in a list of wicket-taking spinners, headed of course by Muttiah Muralitharan, with 800, then Shane Warne, 708, and Anil Kumble (619).

These are players surely out of reach for all time and perhaps, for Swann, Harbhajan Singh, 413, too. But the rest – from Vettori (360) down to Bhagwat Chandrasekhar (242), are within range. More pertinently, he is closing in on Derek Underwood's England record of 297 wickets as a spinner.

What is surprising is that of those 10 spinners with more wickets than he, his career average of 28.41 is bettered only by Murali (22.72), Warne (25.41) and Underwood (25.83), and this playing half his cricket on generally seam-orientated English pitches.

Indeed sometimes it is hard to understand quite what it is that elevates Swann above other bowlers. There is no mystery to him, no doosra or carrom ball. He is an orthodox finger spinner, not back of the hand like Warne, Kumble, Danish Kaneria or Chandra; or a double-jointed physical freak of nature as Murali has been.

He spins the ball hugely for a finger spinner – about 2,500 revs, according to the TV spinometer – but then Lyon gets close to that, too.

With the spin comes drift away from the direction of turn (physicists can explain that one) and thus he can beat the outside of the bat as well as inside. This, despite his late entry into the Test arena (which given what has happened is as baffling as anything else about him) is a thoroughly modern DRS savvy bowler, whose enviable record against left-handers owes as much to him hitting the pads as beating or taking the outside edge.

Yet even this aspect seems to have tailed off, with batsmen now making sure they keep their pads out of the way.

In the end, it must simply come down to nous. He has supreme confidence in his ability, is unflappable under fire (an interesting contrast to how Lyon reacted when first Pietersen and then Bell got stuck into him in a calculated manner in England's first innings at Old Trafford), can pick holes in a batsman's technique, and varies his pace and trajectory according to conditions and circumstance. There is a tantalising line that he bowls to right-handers too. England offspinners of yore, helped by a lack of fielding restrictions on the leg-side, tended to bowl a straighter line than their overseas counterparts but Swann operates outside the off-stump, inviting the drive through that side. No off-spinner likes being hit through extra cover off the front foot but none mind seeing a batsman try.

Perhaps Swann does have a little magic to him. When, from round the wicket, he proceeded to bowl the left-hander Usman Khawaja behind his legs with an off-break that turned significantly, he celebrated with the sort of joy that only comes when something is pre-planned, or at least signalled beforehand as an act of bravado.

It looked for all the world as if he meant it: he probably did.