Ricky Ponting’s Australians came to England in 2009 with a variety of missions. Of these, defending the Ashes they had recaptured at home in 2006–07 was merely the most obvious; there were several subsidiary purposes, including defending their status as the world’s number one Test nation from the rival claim of South Africa, and ratifying the pre-eminence of Test cricket in the face of the resistless tide of Twenty20. This last priority was subtly re-emphasised by the withdrawal of Ponting and his fellows from the Indian Premier League, and the team’s brief and forgettable participation in the World Twenty20: this was a team with eyes on the one prize alone.
Andrew Strauss’s Englishmen hosted with a similar sense of priorities, with the incentive that their opponents were not one of the great Australian teams of yore, and that it was only four years since the nation had been sent into transports of delight by the achievements of Michael Vaughan, Andrew Flintoff and Kevin Pietersen. Since then, however, cricket had vanished from terrestrial free-to-air television. This would be a series for the faithful, needing something extra special to attract converts.
Me, I arrived to do something almost unpardonably luxurious: report a five-Test series. The Ashes was the first of its kind; it is the last one left. It’s a purist’s enchantment and a marketer’s nightmare: twenty-five days of cricket which might, as in 1926 and 1953, feature an actual result on only one. It is still, at least where Australian and English cricketers are concerned, the forum that counts. In the main, anyway; nothing can be taken for granted in this fast-evolving, expanding and fragmenting game.
What did I think in advance? We all tend to overestimate the evidence of our own eyes. I’d watched Australia play one of the best summers of Test cricket I can remember, losing 2–1 at home to South Africa, then reversing that scoreline on the reciprocal visit. They were a weaker team than their countrymen were accustomed to, and terribly ordinary at times, but I liked their spirit, and I admired their captain’s resolve. His first tour, in 1995, had coincided with Australia’s defining recapture of the Worrell Trophy, an initial step in the establishment of their global cricket hegemony; that being so, his whole career had been spent, as it were, on top. He was bearing the setbacks now with humility and dignity, scrapping hard with limited resources.
The English media had watched their team lose narrowly in the Caribbean, then at home beat out of sight a disgruntled and uninterested West Indies. They were optimistic, and not without reason. Dropped into the captaincy, Strauss had fitted like a penny into a slot. In Ravi Bopara, they had a Test batsman of great promise; in Paul Collingwood, they had a tigerish fighter. Pietersen and Flintoff, of course, were 2005 incarnate. Of England’s recent exploits, however, I had merely read reports and seen only highlights. Nor could I imagine Flintoff playing all five Tests, and my recollections of James Anderson, Steve Harmison and Monty Panesar from 2006–07 had left me wondering how much they could conceivably have improved between times.
What transpired over the next two months was an exhaustive and exhausting interrogation of the capabilities of two good, ordinary cricket teams with, I suspect, more violent swings in ascendancy than I can remember in my lifetime’s cricket watching. Total domination and abject submission was the tenor of Ashes cricket during the 1990s, but the roles were fixed. Here the teams took it in turns, partly because of the conditions, a little because of the umpiring, but mainly because of their accumulation of frailties. Occasionally, it was brilliant; once in a while, it was ordinary; usually, it was fascinating. Sometimes I speculated accurately; often I was wrong, as you can here read for yourself. Like Ashes 2005 and Downed Under, this book is a faithful daily record of my impressions of the series, chosen from words I wrote for Business Spectator (Melbourne), The Times (London), The National (Abu Dhabi), a blog and a diary I maintained for Wisden Cricketer, plus some features for Ladbroke’s and columns for The Australian and the Sunday Age. The articles are precisely contemporaneous; on two or three occasions, I have combined two pieces into one. The contents date back to reports I wrote for the Guardian, Wisden and Cricinfo of Australia’s summer, beginning at their lowest ebb, as they lost their first series at home to South Africa, and distant impressions of England’s winter, in particular the ousting as captain of Pietersen and the sacking as coach of Peter Moores. They end on 24 August, the day after England officially regained the Ashes.
The Ashes still feels like a tour rather than a trip, and my wife Charlotte and I were in a constant state of heartfelt gratitude for the hospitality we received from, among others, Stephanie Bunbury, Michael Atherton and Isabella de Caires, Sophie and Arun Matta, Andrew, Heather, Jenny and Lucy Hutchinson, Norm and Adele Geras, Professor Ken Smith, Susan Johnson, Stephen and Prudence Fay, Simon Rae and Ian Smith. To Michael, I feel a special debt, for it was thanks to his good offices that I found a friendly home at The Times. Above all, though, I dedicate this book to Charlotte, who shared her honeymoon with cricket, as she cheerfully shares her life.