Recent Australian teams sometimes seem to have no more summits to scale, and to breathe permanently rarefied air. The Australian vintage of 2006/07 has routed England in all five Tests of an Ashes series, a feat which stood previously to the credit of only Warwick Armstrong’s Australians of 1920/21.
Australian Tests in those far-off days were played to a finish, and with eight-ball overs: at present over rates, only two of the Tests of 1920/21 would have finished within five days. The third involved 4 248 deliveries, 1 753 runs and six hundreds, but was played out to the crack of England’s doom.
The circumstances of the Ashes of 1920/21 were also very different to the present day. Thanks to the Great War, Australians had gone almost nine years without seeing a Test match. Their victory had a martial flavour, and English praise was more indulgent.
”It must always remain a great feat when one of the Dominions defeats the Mother Country,” wrote the Times. ”But if we did not know it before, the war showed us how it is they do it. They are a magnificent fighting stock, these brothers of ours beyond the seas, and they play, as they fought in France and Gallipoli, to win — but to win like gentlemen.”
While modern cricketers are often called ”warriors” for reasons of hype, eight of Armstrong’s team had been seeing active service in the Australian Imperial Force.
In certain qualities and characteristics, however, past and present Australians are comparable. There was exciting fast bowling from the first great antipodean partnership of Jack Gregory and Ted McDonald. Arthur Mailey’s leg-breaks were purveyed with less accuracy but greater variety than Shane Warne’s, while both men kept similar hours.
Both teams drew on strength in depth, featuring a free-swinging left-hander in the lower middle order: it was Gregory’s Australian record of a hundred in 67 deliveries that Gilchrist broke at Perth.
Captain Armstrong, the unsinkable ”Big Ship”, was in his 42nd year, staring down from 6ft 3in and still a formidable all-rounder, aggregating 2 282 runs at 56 and 117 wickets at 15,47 from 5 420 deliveries, in what proved his last year of first-class cricket. And while the boyish Ricky Ponting bears him no physical resemblance, their captaincy is of a similar regimented and remorseless kind.
England’s Cec Parkin thought that Armstrong ”never dazzled you with a flash of strategy”, but that ”his captaincy was all the better for his safety-first methods”. Ponting’s decision to harry England into error by containment on the last morning at Adelaide could have been a leaf from Armstrong’s own manual.
Armstrong’s rival in 1920/21 bears little immediate similarity to Andrew Flintoff. Johnny Douglas, with his glistening, centre-parted hair, was an acerbic martinet, informing his all-rounder, Percy Fender, en route to Australia: ”You know, Fender, there is no man in England whose bowling I would rather bat against than yours; and there is no batsman in England I would rather bowl against either.”
Again, though, they have certain common qualities. Douglas was hugely strong, with an Olympic gold medal for boxing, and absolutely fearless. He later drowned while trying to save his father in a shipwreck. He also courted criticism by bringing his wife and his parents on the tour.
As with Flintoff, this would probably not have mattered but for his being so utterly unimaginative as a leader. ”From Douglas’s captaincy,” complained CB Fry, ”no idea ever emerged”. At Melbourne, his tendency to bowl himself endlessly drove Parkin to distraction. ”Mr Douglas!” he finally exploded. ”If you won’t stop bowling, put yourself on at the other end where you can read your analysis!”
Australians rejoiced in their team’s accomplishments. The dramatist Louis Esson wrote to the critic Vance Palmer full of enthusiasm for the Australia they embodied: ”They are not pleasant players. A good English journalist described them as ‘hard-bitten’, ‘grim’ and ‘pitiless’. We shouldn’t be a soft, mushy, maudlin race. In politics, we’re a shingle short, a nation of grinning village idiots. The cricketers fill me with great enthusiasm. They can lose, for there is luck in the game, but they’ll never crack up like the English.”
The figure they most famously inspired was a 12-year-old who watched the completion of the baggy-green-and-gold-wash at the Sydney Cricket Ground. Excited by the batting brio of Charlie Macartney and outfielding prowess of Johnny Taylor, he told his father he would never be satisfied until he had played there himself. And Don Bradman was not satisfied, even when he did. — Â