In the southern summer of 2010–11, England retained the Ashes in Australia 3–1. The novelty hasn't yet worn off that statement, and it might be a while before it does. Had you envisaged such a prospect this time four years ago, you would have been laughed out of whatever hostelry you proposed it in – because you would have needed a few drinks to work up the bravado to say it. At the time, England had been on the receiving end of the most thorough defeat in Test history. Australia faced a wave of retirements, but they had regenerated before, and were backing themselves to do so again.
The Ashes of 2009 were then played out by two battling, middling, sometimes shambling teams. But for the improbable resilience with the bat of James Anderson and Monty Panesar at Cardiff, Australia might have retained the trophy; as it is, an unlucky coin toss and poor selection cost them dearly at the Oval. In their summer of 2009–10, however, Australia won five of six Tests, a good summer's work even by the standards of their primrose path of the late nineties and early noughties. There was much talk of new fighting spirit, new talent like Steve Smith and Phil Hughes, new characters like Doug Bollinger and Ryan Harris. If not the magnificos of yesteryear, the Australia team still had a winning feeling about it, consolidated when they comfortably bested New Zealand in that country at summer's end.
What Masaryk said of dictators, then, can also be said to apply to cricket dynasties: they always look good until the last minutes. Because cracks appeared when Australia went to England in the middle of 2010 to play Tests against Pakistan and one-day internationals against England; these were then widened by Tests in India and finally by one-day internationals against Sri Lanka at home. On the first day of the Ashes, an Australian bowler took a hat-trick; by the end, Australia had for the first time in the country's cricket history lost three Test matches by an innings. Had I not been there as eyewitness, I'd hardly have believed it; but I was, and the result is in your hands.
This book is a collection of my despatches. It interleaves the daily match reports I wrote for Business Spectator, and the daily columns I composed for The Times. They are unaltered from the form in which they were sent, so you can see when my forecasts were awry, often enough, as well as right, just occasionally, albeit probably by accident. Players don't have the luck of magisterial hindsight, rewriting events to leave out the bad shots they played, the long-hops they served up, the catches they dropped; it's fairest to be read in parallel. And let's face it: if you were right all along, where would be the point in watching?
One observation, however, may be pertinent. Reporting and analysing Test matches is both satisfying and deeply challenging, rather like trying to review a play at the end of each act, except from a distance of maybe a hundred metres, with little idea how the characters will appear and reappear, and no notion how the plot will unfold. With the online news environment having created a demand for round-the-clock content, both my report and my columns had to be filed within an hour of stumps, barely time to squeeze in the nightly press conference where a player from each side said not much about very little. I enjoy deadlines, and seeing something I have written posted within minutes of my completing it retains for me a heady novelty. Yet so heavily does the accent now fall on instantaneous judgement that the scope for considered journalism cannot but dwindle, with an impact on the way that cricket is perceived, understood and interpreted. Caveat lector.
This was a tough tour from a personal point of view also, given the separations from my wife Charlotte and one-year-old daughter Cecilia, for which even the wonders of Skype could not make up. I finally had them with me in Sydney, which meant that I ended the Test with my head ringing from both Barmy Army chants and songs from In The Night Garden, idly transposing Mitchell Johnson and Makka Pakka. In doing so I obtained a better understanding of what it takes for a cricketer to leave home and hearth for a foreign clime. If Andrew Strauss's tourists missed their loved ones half as much as I missed mine, they have my deepest sympathy.
It remains for me to thank my editors, Tim Hallissey at The Times and James Kirby at Business Spectator, for the opportunity to cover this constantly fun and fascinating series. I'd also like to acknowledge my estimable colleagues at The Times – Simon Barnes, Richard Hobson, Geoffrey Dean and especially the chief cricket correspondent Michael Atherton – for being a team scarcely less cohesive than England. I look forward to working with them all again.
GIDEON HAIGH
January 2011