Late on the second day of the Fourth Test at Headingley, the odds on an England victory officially hit 500 to 1. Such is the English affinity for nostalgia, one half expected a Headingley ’81 battle cry: ‘C’mon, let’s give it some humpty.’ But no, even the reserves of nostalgia had been exhausted. There truly was nothing to be extracted from this ruinous rout.
So what happened? The truth is that this Test was perfectly foreseeable as a continuation of broad-based Australian improvement since the first innings at Lord’s, broken by a single poor day at Edgbaston, against a steadily weakening England, with home observers blind-sided by their obsessive preoccupation with Andrew Flintoff and all his works.
Australia finally fielded a formation optimal for the conditions, and when Strauss perished prematurely … well … dominoes have offered sterner resistance. England’s attack then looked weary and woebegone, partly from the endeavours at Edgbaston, partly from the paltry total they were defending, and, if you believe Justin Langer, partly from le vice anglais of chucking in the towel, bucket and sponge when things go wrong.
The Sunday Telegraph chose a cruelly apposite day to publish a ‘dossier’ written by Langer and circulated among his former teammates and successors before the First Test. Judgements that might have jarred a little after Lord’s seemed to fit very exactly in the circumstances of an innings-and-80-run defeat:
They [England] are the best in the world at tapering off quickly when things go a bit flat for them. This is also a time when most of them make all sorts of excuses and start looking around to point the finger at everyone else. It is a classic English trait. They love being comfortable. Take them out of their comfort zone and they don’t like it for a second.
It was difficult, for instance, to dispute Langer’s pithy assessment of Jimmy Anderson, so penetrative when skies are overcast, but revealed at Headingley to have a vampirelike susceptibility to sunlight: ‘Can swing the ball well but again can be a bit of a pussy if he is worn down. His body language could be detrimental to them if we get on top of him early.’ Certainly, Michael Vaughan’s defence of Anderson didn’t exactly sound like a resounding endorsement: ‘I think describing James Anderson as a “pussy” is very harsh but it goes to show that there are no secrets in international cricket.’ Cheers Vaughany.
Whether Langer is right or wrong in his views, the leaking of the dossier to an English media reverting to its default masochism setting is probably more significant than the contents. In 2001, a dossier prepared for the Australians by their coach John Buchanan found its way into the papers, where it was pored over like the plans of a top-secret superweapon, when all it revealed was Buchanan’s flair for pop philosophy.
At the post-match press conference, Ponting took particular pleasure in the story on the Telegraph’s facing page calling for the rehabilitation of 39-year-old Mark Ramprakash for the Oval Test: he thought it betrayed panic. It may well be a sensible expedient, given Ramprakash’s records against Australia and on his home ground, but Australians thrive on what they perceive as signs of panic, and weakness in general. They have had a rich variety to savour here.
In this respect, too, Australians are made of sterner stuff. If a former English player vouchsafed in a dossier then made public that Australia were ‘best in the world at tapering off quickly’, the headlines in newspapers down under would be: ‘Pom admits: Aussies “best in the world”.’ Where cricket is concerned, Australians haven’t been ones for nostalgia— and, frankly, they haven’t had to be.