By Lorenzo Di-Mauro Hayes, ACS Journalism Scholar (mentored by The Footy Almanac‘s John Harms).
It’s been a crazy Ashes series.
Australia has not fielded their best XI in this Ashes campaign. Josh Hazelwood will not play.. Steve Smith captained the side through the first two Tests and then he didn’t even play in the third after suffering from vertigo. Patrick Cummins takes part in that third Test only before Smith takes the reins again. Jake Weatherald is picked to open with Usman Khawaja. We never even saw it. A spot at the top of the order appears for Travis Head after Khawaja spent too long off the field to open the batting. Head then grabs it with both hands. This seems to end Khawaja’s career until he gets a lifeline. Guys like Brendan Doggett and Michael Neser play way more than in the ideal world of the selectors. Eleven days was all it took for Australia to retain the Ashes.
Then we get to that Boxing Day Test. Twenty wickets on the first day, where the batting highlight is Scott Boland surviving one over in the second innings. Harry Brook is charging at the first ball he sees. The English openers have a million chances to catch an edge during the run chase, and it doesn’t happen. No one gets to 50 in Melbourne. Other than brilliance from Head and Carey, basically nothing in this series has made a modicum of sense.
This Ashes hasn’t resembled what was hoped for before the series. At times it hasn’t resembled the sport at all. Example after example of batters throwing their wicket away. Bowlers trying to jump scare the batters instead of putting the ball in good places and waiting for the mistake.
The two-day match in Perth set the tone and summed up the series. It also summed up the so-called Bazball philosophy. England were in a great position at lunch on day two. But the throwing away of wickets swung the momentum back to Australia. Then Travis Head stole the show with one of the great Ashes innings. England has never really recovered. Australia have batted like Bazball at times, because the English bowlers haven’t hit the right line and length often enough. Australia has pitched the ball up and bowled it straighter, while England keep bowling back of a length.
In Brisbane, England basically dropped the entire Australian batting line-up. That was able to get Australia the victory there. In the first innings in Brisbane, for the first time ever, the entire Australian batting XI made double digits. It was Mitch Starc’s 77 which was the top score but there were sizable enough scores that got Australia to 511. The only shame in the stoush between Smith and Archer was that there weren’t enough runs for Australia to chase to keep it going.
It was clear after two Tests Bazball was not getting England the Ashes back. Brendon McCullum’s coaching philosophy since leading England has been undoubtedly impactful. The problems with Bazball is it only really works well on flat pitches. That is what the English curators have prepared at home. But the great beauty of cricket is the sport is played in all sorts of conditions around the globe by all sorts of people. If you want to win and win often, you have to master all conditions. From the bouncy pitches of Australia to the spinning decks of India to the Duke balls of England.
Furthermore, the Bazball approach has an over-emphasis on boundaries. But Australia’s really big grounds made this a tougher chore. What they provide is opportunities to run two or three. But the English don’t want to do that. England have two gears, bottom and top gear when it comes to their batting and intensity. By the time they try to return to a more conventional batting style, as they did in their second innings in Brisbane and Adelaide, the match was already well out of their hands. Ironically, the big indicator to England’s chance is that of Joe Root. Root is not a batter who you think of as being all aboard Bazball, but he is the bellwether for England’s chances. When he plays well, they are a great chance. He got the monkey off his back by finally making three-figures in Brisbane.
Adelaide showed what Test cricket is all about. Five days of play, some really fantastic efforts between bat and ball. Both South Australians stole the show, but it was Carey with bat in hand and behind the stumps. The whole snicko controversy was the only sour point but that seemed down to more human error than anything wrong with the technology. A BBG Sports statement confirmed the snicko operator selected the stump mic from the bowlers end and not the batter end and admitted responsibility. However, UltraEdge might now have a claim as a more reliable technology.
But what was great about Adelaide was left lacking in Melbourne. Bill Woodfull famously said during Bodyline “There are two teams out there. One is playing cricket, and the other is not”. Whatever was played at the MCG, it might have been cricket, but it wasn’t really Test cricket. TikTok cricket is well and truly alive, and it has invaded the red ball game. While the pitch had 3 more millimetres of grass than last year, which was too much and was graded ‘unsatisfactory’ by the ICC, you can’t excuse poor shot selection. It seems so many batters just have a need to get bat on ball on time, like an uneventful maiden in a Test match is a loss for the batting side. Finishing in two days doesn’t help Cricket Australia and doesn’t help the fans who want a good, enticing contest. That being said, two days of drama and highlights everywhere is still probably better than a five-day draw on a pitch offering nothing.
It was England’s first win since the 2011 New Year Test in Sydney and yet it wasn’t exactly convincing. England didn’t bat or bowl that well and had Australia been able to find a couple of early wickets, it might have been a more nervous finish. Maybe even the possibility of a tie would have come into play. England won the Ashes in 2010/11. Since then, Australia have won the series 5-0, 4-0, 4-0 and won the first three matches here. If not for 2017 being the height of MCG pitches offering little for the bowlers and Sydney’s rain in 2022 the last two series could have been 5-0.
The best Australian XI has not seen the light of day in this series and yet the urn remains firmly in Australian hands. Now the last thing to do for this generation is begin the work on how they will go about winning a series outright in England. For many it will be the last chance they get. The least we can hope for is that the 2027 Ashes Series will make a bit more sense.