‘Reckon me Mum and Dad’ll still talk to me. And me wife. But who else?’ Thus Kim Hughes in 1981 after Ian Botham had prised the Ashes from Australia’s grasp—and he was right, being never quite forgiven. ‘Whatever you do,’ Ian Chappell told Hughes’s successor Allan Border, expressing a time-honoured prime directive of Australian cricket, ‘don’t lose to the Poms.’
Now that Ricky Ponting has done it twice, he is clearly expecting a warm reception. Australians will have woken to the news that not only are they no longer custodians of the Ashes, but they are now supporters of the world’s fourth-ranked Test team. Awakenings don’t come ruder.
Yet Ponting, the scars of his fielding misadventures carefully dressed, was also putting the best face on his team’s performance, saying that he was ‘very proud of the whole group’—and in this he was not wrong to be. Of the team chosen, only Mitchell Johnson and Phillip Hughes have performed stubbornly below expectations, and even Johnson gave glimmers of his talent.
A bowling attack without a single Test match in England between them has kept the home side to just two centuries. A batting line-up in which only the captain had made a Test century in this country generated eight, and will be much better for the challenges tackled. An inexperienced team, moreover, has learned a lot about the essence of team success, and how it differs from individual accomplishment. For there are lies, damned lies and then there are the batting and bowling averages of the 2009 Ashes, which show Australia to have had the top three wicket-takers and six of the top seven runscorers.
For Ponting the individual, the series will also have been formative. One suspects that, as it did for Warne, McGrath and Gilchrist in 2005, defeat will probably prolong his career. It was striking last night to hear him speak so emphatically about his desire to play on, without obfuscating or pleading for time to reflect, into the Ashes of 2010–11, and perhaps even further. To make such a statement so unequivocally in the shadow of defeat bespeaks considerable determination. Ponting may have in mind the experience of Border, the husk of whose defeated team in 1986–87 became the nucleus of the side he led to a huge Ashes win twenty years ago.
Whatever the case, and whatever the reception, the reality is that the captaincy is his for as long as Ponting deigns it. For all his merits, Michael Clarke cannot captain Australia from number five; no other batsman remotely fits the bill at number three. The difference between Kim Hughes and Ponting is that the cap on Hughes never quite fitted, whereas the cap on Ponting’s head is faded, battered, very proudly sported and universally respected.