Australians under voting age woke to a new, unfamiliar experience and older generations were reacquainted with an unsettling feeling: England have won the Ashes.
To clarify — in case the millions of children and teenagers on or preparing for spring vacation somehow missed it — England beat Australia for cricket’s most storied international prize late on Monday at The Oval in south London, where the Ashes were created in 1882.
For the first time in their lives, young Australians will have to learn how to live without their national cricket team holding supremacy over ”the old enemy”.
Regardless of outcomes in other sports or solid diplomatic ties between England and its former Antipodean penal colony, Australians love nothing more in a sporting context than thrashing the English at cricket.
Many probably took winning the Ashes for granted, with Australia having won eight consecutive series since 1989 leading into the 2005 contest.
So there’s bound to be backlash at home for the ageing national line-up, despite Australia hanging on to number-one place in the Test rankings. The fifth Test finished in a draw — giving England a 2-1 series win — soon after 3am on Australia’s east coast, too late for newspaper deadlines.
Headline writers and columnists will have all day to analyse the loss and dissect the series for the next editions, which will almost certainly forecast gloom for Australian cricket. Television and radio broadcasts have been laden with news of the Ashes.
Australian Prime Minister John Howard, a self-described ”cricket tragic”, was in the United States for a United Nations summit when the series ended.
Howard, who reportedly had a special TV feed of the Ashes Test to his hotel room in New York, said while the loss hurt, it was probably good for cricket.
”It’s been an amazing series, a wonderful series for the game of cricket, and the true victor in this series has been this wonderful game that so many of us love,” Howard told reporters. ”I do congratulate England, I commiserate with [Australian captain] Ricky Ponting and the Australian team.
”There’s natural disappointment, but it’s a situation where you give credit to the team that won. They will no doubt celebrate and that will be difficult for some, but that’s the nature of these contests and we should not take anything away from England.”
England hadn’t won an Ashes series since 1986/87 and lost the first Test this time by 239 runs at the Lord’s, prompting speculation of a 5-0 series sweep by Australia.
But having spent several years adopting Australian practices and training methods and employing Australian help to prepare for the Ashes, England put it all to work in the second, third and fourth Test matches and rallied for a 2-1 lead ahead of the final match.
Australia needed to win at The Oval to level the series and hold on to the Ashes.
And despite leaving it until the last day of the series, the Australian public remained quietly hopeful that their bowlers could take nine wickets and their batsmen could wipe off the required runs in the last three sessions to save the Ashes.
Two dropped catches were costly on the final morning, with South African-born Kevin Pietersen getting reprieves on 0 and 15 and then blazing a match-saving 158 for England.
The Oval burst into spontaneous celebration, spreading across England from the capital. Australians went to sleep, no doubt fitfully.
Veteran leg-spinner Shane Warne took 40 wickets in the series — his last Ashes campaign in England ending a day before his 36th birthday — and was magnanimous in defeat.
”It was an amazing series … my best-ever series,” said Warne, who holds the Test record with 623 wickets. ”England were just too good for us.”
Australia are scheduled to play a combined World XI in three limited-overs internationals in Melbourne and a six-day super Test in Sydney next month. — Sapa-AP