/ 8 December 2006

Natural-born losers return to their roots

Reading through the heap of post-mortems performed on their cricket team by English journalists this week, the overwhelming impression was that the shock and palpitations being expressed were almost totally contrived.

The analyses, though tending towards hyperbole, were fair and eloquent, and the outrage and frustrations well directed at those responsible for England’s latest brush with infamy. And yet there was an overly polished lustre to the reportage, a deadness of tone and a fuzziness of intention, as if a large selection of dryly disparaging sentences, written years ago and kept on ice, had been assembled and reheated for the occasion.

While it would be difficult to argue that England’s court scribes were expecting catastrophe, it does seem to suggest that, for English cricket, despite their recent Ashes glory, there exists a psychological and emotional default setting, lurking somewhere between mournful contemplation and jaded irritation.

No nation writes defeat better than the English. No captains look less interested in the game while being handed the wooden spoon than do English ones. They handle victory with all the grace and maturity of a toddler at its own birthday party, a fish-paste cracker glued to its cheek as it rubs cream into the hair of its purported best friend.

Recall the wide-eyed, hungover ticker-tape parade through London last year, the heroes of the Ashes transformed into a squad of leering, slack-jawed schoolboys in ill-fitting blazers, out on a crawl and being adored for their slovenliness. In defeat, however, England are elegance incarnate.

Some teams are good at winning, others are good at losing. And when they meet, they produce Test matches like that at Adelaide.

Adelaide was a disaster, but disasters happen. And usually they happen to England. This doesn’t preclude them from being one of the top three Tests teams in the world. It just makes things interesting.

The Guardian’s correspondent summed it up with a sentimental appeal: ”For their part,” he wrote, ”England have found a way of cancelling out their chief good recent memory of Ashes cricket. They will always have Edgbaston ’05, but they will now also have Adelaide ’06.”

The problem with statements like this is that in cricket, ”always” tends to be about five years. It’s possible that the eternal trauma, never to be erased, of being shot out for 79 at Brisbane in 2002 is being suppressed by the England squad, buried under many layers of hurt and denial; but it’s more likely that they haven’t given it a thought.

Indeed, some younger players might not even know it ever happened, being on the piss that night back in London and not near a telly at the time.

No, if always meant forever and memory meant more than a highlights package with a shelf-life of a year, Andrew Flintoff would have fought to the last, inspired by the example of his predecessor, Arthur Shrewsbury, whose England team were dismissed for 45 at the Sydney Cricket Ground in January of 1887, and went on to win that Test by 13 runs. Forget Edgbaston ’05: Sydney ’87 is a rallying-cry of an entirely different order.

The implications for the game of this sudden (though secretly expected) turn in the Ashes mostly involve personal glory: Shane Warne’s legend will be burnished even brighter, and Ricky Ponting will move a step closer to being given his dues, outside Australia at least, as the most destructive batsman of the past generation.

Nobody since Bradman has scored so many runs for such a long time at so high an average and, while he will never rival Brian Lara for majesty or Sachin Tendulkar for efficiency, Ponting’s sheer weight of runs will, eventually, cave in the roof of the pantheon.

The implication of Adelaide for batsmen the world over could be more dramatic and considerably grimmer. Indeed, by playing the gimp to Australia’s dominatrix, England may have done the rest of us an extreme disservice.

Had they fought, instead of kicking balls away and blocking half-volleys, Australia would have gone to Perth 1-0 up, with attrition and control still crucial to their strategy for the rest of the series. Glenn McGrath and Stuart Clarke would have shared the duties of being a nasty metronome, and England’s patience, if not their chest-guards, would have been tested once more.

But against this England, 2-0 now means 3-0, which ultimately means 4-0, given some rain or a Kevin Pietersen double-hundred somewhere down the line. The Ashes are going home, and, with havoc having been cried, the Australian selectors might now be free to let slip the dogs of war.

Of course, tearaway quickies Shaun Tait and Mitchell Johnson might have to wait until after Perth to be unleashed. The Waca, once the sort of place where one found bits of nose cartilage at short leg, has had its teeth pulled in the past decade, and today Warne is far more likely to hit the splice of English bats than either youngster.

There’s also the issue of their age: at 23 and 25 respectively, they might be considered too green by Australia’s selectors, who tend to be hesitant about handing out Baggy Greens to anyone born in the 1980s.

But with nothing to lose, and a 21st-century reincarnation of Lillee and Thomson to gain, it couldn’t hurt to give the young pair their head. At least, it couldn’t hurt Australians: the pain would be 22 yards away, the blood left to other teams’ physios to staunch. Ashes to ashes, dust to dust; if Johno don’t get you, then Taity must …