Sydney Cricket Ground
3–7 January 2011
England won by an innings and 83 runs
The email distributed in early afternoon by Cricket Australia slightly boggled the mind. There would be a press conference at the Sydney Cricket Ground at 5.30 p.m. Present would be chief executive James Sutherland 'and two Australian cricketers'. Australia's team for the Fifth Test had not yet been announced: could it be that they were scrounging to gather an XI?
As it turned out, TBA and A.N. Other were Michael Clarke and Usman Khawaja, replacements for Ricky Ponting as captain and as batsman. And funnily enough, although Clarke has played sixty-eight Tests and Khawaja none, more questions surrounded the former than the latter.
Clarke is twenty-nine. He has made 4,697 Test runs at 46.97, with fourteen hundreds. Although he still wears the nickname he was given as a prodigy, Pup, he has been captain-in-waiting to Ponting for two years. But he is Australian cricket's Dr Fell, whom the fans do not like, why they cannot tell.
It may be his self-conscious metrosexual airs and graces. It may be his habit of appearing on billboards advertising this, that and himself. It may be the tattoos, of which Clarke has ten, including one on his right shoulder that celebrates his bikini-model ex Lara Bingle. But this I know, to sum it up: they do not like him, that man Pup. The same day of his appointment as Australia's forty-third captain, a tabloid in Clarke's Sydney home town had reported the results of a poll giving him a 15 per cent approval rating.
Of course, this is cricket, not Australia's Got Talent. And Cricket Australia have really invested too much in Clarke for them to back out now. Given that Ponting is still deemed the man in possession, and Clarke is depicting himself as a locum, more unrest would be sown by the latter's non-appointment.
Clarke has the confidence, having looked born to the job since his debut six years ago. Clarke has the experience, having led Australia in thirty-six short-form internationals. And whatever the ink on his arms and torso, he has kept his nose clean: since their very public bust-up in March, he has treated La Bingle as just another bit of body art.
What Clarke does not have is the necessary form, with just 322 runs at 21.46 in his last eight Tests since accepting a promotion to number four, or the fitness, suffering as he does from a long-term disc problem. His decision to persevere in all three formats of the game has made a rod for a back that does not need it. Bowlers have been hemming him in on the back foot: he does not pull with any fluidity, and has as a result been playing at deliveries wider and wider in search of scoring opportunities. Pace and bounce have worried him. He batted at Adelaide Oval wearing a chest guard, which seemed as incongruous on him as flares and a feather boa.
While Clarke led Australia to the final of the World Twenty20 earlier this year, his strike rate in the format is a slowcoach 103 per hundred balls. He shows, moreover, no deep love of the format, eschewing the Indian Premier League, perhaps because of the likelihood that his valuation there would not match his self-estimation.
Then there is the perennial conjecture about Clarke's status in his own dressing room. Will the team pull for him as they did for Punter? Given the Australians' recent record, this hardly seems relevant. If all that pulling for Punter has failed to prevent the team sustaining two innings defeats, then it's arguably time for push to come to shove. Those who purport to have the skinny on the team dynamic usually turn out to be working on second-hand or external impressions. What is said of Clarke is that he is a nervous waiter, and that he has a propensity for showering because of a tendency to perspire; apparently he also likes to clean his teeth. Sounds like a dental role model in the making at least.
Clarke is known to have had an altercation with Simon Katich after a Test at the SCG two years ago, Clarke's eagerness to get away after the game to meet Bingle irking the traditionalist Katich. But people keeping harking back to that cherchez la femme story because there has been so little to go on since. In fact, Clarke probably suits the team chosen for Sydney as well as he has for a while, containing as it does Phil Hughes, with whom Clarke shares a coach in Neil d'Costa, and Steve Smith, with whom Clarke shares regular mutually admiring tweets. The elevation of New South Wales's captain Haddin as Clarke's as well as his team's backstop will be a reassurance too. They have shared thirteen Test partnerships at an average of 82.5.
While it has long been expected that Clarke would captain Australia, what was not expected was he would take over under these circumstances: one anticipated deep deliberation, orderly succession and elaborate ceremony, as was the case with Mark Taylor, Steve Waugh and Ponting, rather than a hurried email not even stating his name. He has in a sense been given two messages: both that the job is his, and also that it is his to lose.
New Year's Resolutions? For 2011, Australian cricket has a few. They want to retain the World Cup. They hanker to beat India here, which will be tough, and to see off Sri Lanka there, which won't be much easier. The most important resolution is one with which they began 2010 and which they are now in no position to renew: regain the Ashes. But they can make a start on it.
A little and a lot ride on the Sydney Test. The result cannot affect custody of the urn, as the Barmy Army will ensure nobody forgets over the next five days. Yet Michael Clarke's appointment as Ricky Ponting's proxy has added spice to the contest. The 29-year-old batsman comes into the job as to an ancient but decaying ancestral seat, occupying a great mansion in which all the family silver has been melted down – in a state, moreover, of what a youthful heir would describe as 'temporary embarassment' while trying to cadge a fiver from the footman. Two half-centuries in his last fifteen Test innings is a performance record as embarrassing to recount as it has been to watch.
At least things can hardly get worse. If Australia survive the Test match without anyone slipping over in the shower or scalding themselves at the tea urn, they will feel a sense of quiet vindication. Nor can Clarke complain about his charges, six of whom will be fellow New South Welshmen playing on their home ground.
Australia will nominally be weaker than in Melbourne, even if Ponting has not been his inspirational self at number three this summer. Ryan Harris, with the thrust of a muscle car but the chassis of a tenth-hand VW combi, is a grave loss. Although Bollinger took three wickets in each innings of the recent Sheffield Shield match, they were from Queensland's dysfunctional order, and the memory of his performance at Adelaide Oval, breathless for all the wrong reasons, remains fresh.
The elevation of Usman Khawaja, however, is a progressive step, and not simply because he is the first Australian Muslim cricketer and a multicultural posterchild in the making. He is one of those batsmen whose quality stands out even in the nets – strong off the back foot, prolific through point, composed against the short stuff – and should arguably have been phased in during Australia's benighted northern campaign in July and August.
What's more, Khawaja has earned his place by weight of runs: 2,068 of them at 51.7 with six hundreds from 27 first-class games. It is difficult to examine the statistics of some of the others mooted for national selection, like Callum Ferguson (first-class average of 35 with four hundreds from 47 games) and Shaun Marsh (first-class average of 36.3 and five hundreds from 56 games), without beginning to wonder if national honours haven't become rather cheap in this day and age.
Khawaja sets his captain an interesting poser. He bats number three for his state, having opened for much of his career, and is thus a like-for-like swap with Ponting. It makes sense, in fact, to separate the left-handers in Australia's top order. But an Australian batsman has not debuted at first-wicket down for eighteen years, and Clarke might feel the pressure, especially given the perception of him as rather too rapt in his personal performances, to shield Khawaja. There are risks to either approach. Uneasy is the head that wears the number one helmet.
Having spent a few days on furlough, England will want their wits about them here. They have not played at the SCG on this tour. Their Sydney record is not the worst: they took a dead Test off Australia here in 2003, had the better of draws in 1991 and 1995. It is also, nonetheless, where they lost the only big game of their 1986–87 pageant of success, and a repeat here would travesty the difference between the sides, making for the first two-all that has ever felt like a four-nil.
Andrew Strauss's climatic luck, at least, looks to be persisting. The English have been blessed this summer by unseasonally mild weather, sparing their four-man attack the heavy labour in heat that might have exhausted it sooner, and providing periods of cloud cover for the delectation of James Anderson. Rain is forecast for Sydney on all five days, and it is only a year since Australia capitulated on the first day to Pakistan in conditions conducive to swing and seam after a delayed start. England will fancy themselves in similar circumstances. For Australia, 2011 might have to get worse before it gets better.
Weather maps were studied as avidly as pitch maps at the Sydney Cricket Ground today, as rain loomed and finally fell in copious quantities at 5 p.m., by which stage Australia were glad of it. They made a useful start to this Fifth Test and ushered in a promising debutant, but England kept them on a tight leash: twice they choked and gagged as wickets fell on the brink of interruptions.
It was always going to be one of those days, and stand-in skipper Michael Clarke took the initiative of batting when Andrew Strauss called incorrectly in what England's Tim Bresnan called 'very English conditions'. Clarke's enthusiasm was palpable: he arrived at the toss nine minutes early, and pored over England's team sheet as though he wanted to catch a spelling error. The visitors were happy to go along with it: Strauss would also have offered Australia first innings.
Still, there was more to the atmosphere than cumulus. There were also two Australian debutants, welcomed to the fold with a restoration of the ritual that had fallen into disuse under Ricky Ponting, with two past masters doing the honours. Mark Taylor presented a baggy green to Usman Khawaja and none other than Shane Warne anointed Michael Beer. So, no pressure there, then …
Australia's openers also took up the cudgels with some conviction. Watson got moving with a lazy overthrow, Hughes with a feisty punch down the ground in Chris Tremlett's second over. But generally this was a morning for patience and self-denial. The default position was bat to the sky, front pad thrust out – a pose which would have been handy in Melbourne, and here had an edge of atonement to it. A superior short leg to the faute de mieux Alastair Cook might have caught Watson (6) off Tremlett; otherwise, the bowlers fell somewhat short, of length and expectations.
When Anderson came off after five overs with a pedantic warning from Billy Bowden for running on the wicket, Hughes hit his replacement Bresnan through mid-off and cover for consecutive boundaries to round the hour out cheerfully, at 31 for nought. Swann came on just before noon from the Randwick End, and Hughes cut his second ball for four to raise the fifty partnership in a painstaking 123 balls.
Hughes came into Test cricket with a back foot that edged towards square leg, locking himself up and limiting his access to the ball. He has reduced this, very gradually, to a twitch of his left foot, but still comes forward reluctantly, as though being asked to volunteer for a dangerous mission in occupied territory, and is apt to jab at the ball away from his body – as today. With lunch looming, England blocked the game up, bowling twenty-eight deliveries without conceding a run off the bat, whereupon a short delivery from Tremlett drew from Hughes a fatal defensive spasm.
This stuck Khawaja with an anxious wait through lunch, part of which he apparently filled by napping for twenty minutes. Certainly he betrayed no nerves as he tucked Tremlett's loosener away for two, then nailed a pull shot that crossed the square leg boundary before most had an opportunity to look around. In Tremlett's next over, he clipped crisply to the same boundary. The camera located his parents Tariq and Fozia in the crowd, his mother's hands clasped as though in prayer, although he hardly looked in need of that sort of help. For those who had not seen him previously, he cut a strikingly serene figure; for those who had, it was confirmation of their high opinions.
Just when Australia might have been considering theirs a good day's work, Watson lunged at Bresnan to squander another start: this time a rather anonymous 45 in just over three hours, and 127 balls. At the moment he is like the self-improving reader who makes an annual promise to get through War and Peace, only to lose track of all the Rostovs and give up at about page 100 each time. The light, too, was now so poor as to make Clarke's pink bat grip look luminous, and when rain sent the players from the field for the second time, only the ground's impressive drainage kept the break as short as an hour and a half.
After resumption at 4.05 p.m., the crowd of 43,561 was lucky to see another hour's play – Australia were not. Clarke wafted to gully, and Khawaja top-edged a sweep at Swann, when he was just a ball away from a tidy overnight not-out. It made for a faintly bedraggled scoreline after the earlier possibilities, even if batting does not look like it will ever be easy here – always assuming there will be all that much of it. The ground presented an unpromising sight in the gloaming, and there will be more weather-map watching tomorrow.
Over the years, making your debut for Australia has been a pretty cushy deal. Nice cap. Nice little earner. Above all, lots of protection, like having your own personal posse of bodyguards. The arrival of Usman Khawaja today told you something of changed times locally even before he had faced a ball.
Test batsmen seldom play their debut innings at number three. Don Bradman, Ian Chappell, David Boon, Ricky Ponting: all achieved greatness in the role rather than having greatness thrust upon them. The last Australian to be baptised in a Test match at first-wicket-down is the current batting coach, Justin Langer, who in the absence of a queue to face Curtly Ambrose and Courtney Walsh almost twenty years ago stepped cheerfully forward. But the baggy green was stuck faster to Langer's head than Doug Bollinger's rug to his, and most teams prefer bedding young players down a little more gently. The partner Khawaja joined after lunch today, Shane Watson, began his maiden Test innings here six years ago with the score 471 for five.
Khawaja was, of course, joining a team already beaten soundly in this series, and whose out-of-form proxy captain Michael Clarke was in no real position to act as bulwark, even if he was so disposed. On the contrary, the 24-year-old was there partly to act as protection for his team's most experienced player – a peculiar turnabout in responsibilities.
Not that any of this obviously fazed the preternaturally composed Khawaja, whether it was appearing in the stead of Ricky Ponting, being presented with his cap by Mark Taylor, or being watched by his hero Steve Waugh. He wore his pads to the national anthem, oblivious to any message this might convey about lack of faith in his openers, and through the first session, where the camera found him once or twice, giving a convincing impression of relaxation. It followed him into the middle immediately after lunch, when he whirled his second ball through square leg for four – a pull shot as good as any played by the player he has replaced.
How a batsman meets his first few balls in Test cricket is seldom indicative of all that much. David Gower famously pulled his first ball for four; Marcus Trescothick waited three-quarters of an hour to get off the mark. This was rousing stuff nonetheless: what used to be thought of as characteristically Australian batting, treating each ball on its merits, and its demerits. Thereafter, he performed as instructed, approaching the innings as he would any on his home ground. Khawaja has good soft hands, pleasingly simple footwork, the appearance of time to play his shots as a result, and an impressively unflustered air at the crease. He didn't score a run in front of point, and on a quicker pitch than this might have been squared up more often, but he looks to have the nous to adapt.
As impressive as his enterprise was how he dealt with inactivity. When after a few overs Strauss and Anderson met to intrigue at the end of the bowler's run, Khawaja withdrew a few steps towards square leg and waited patiently while they machinated, then was ready in his stance by the time Strauss had jogged back to slip. Fifteen from his first eight balls, he located only a single from his next twenty deliveries, and only two singles in the twenty before tea, but never seemed agitated. 'I had a ball out there,' he said afterwards – it looked like it.
In mental approach, if not in style, his cricket bears the stamp of his mentor with New South Wales and also Randwick Petersham Cricket Club, Simon Katich, and recalls that straightforward principle of batting once enunciated by Graeme Pollock. Irrespective of the quality of the attack, Pollock argued, a batsman could expect at least four or five bad balls an hour without needing to force the issue. Hit each of these for four, and two sessions was all you should need to be approaching a hundred. It's a philosophy unconsciously imbibed by Pollock's quondam countryman Jonathan Trott, and conspicuously lacking among Australians this summer. Among those most out of touch with this principle of Test match batting, in fact, is Australia's newest captain, whose overeagerness this summer has gradually become overanxiety. To see Strauss post two gullies as soon as he came in this afternoon, and watch him cut firmly but straight to the finer of them, was to feel tangled in a tape loop.
Khawaja continued after tea with a front-foot pull and a square drive from Bresnan that made batting look simple, and dealt coolly with balls that, in seaming past the outside edge, reminded us it wasn't. But just when he should have been hunkering down, he tried for the first time to manufacture a shot, a sweep against Swann's spin before he had quite judged the bounce or deviation. And that put him in the same category as many an Australian batsman this summer: a waster. Since Brisbane, only Hussey has contributed a century to the local cause. Khawaja's was the eighteenth score of 35 or more in that time not prolonged to three figures. If it seems harsh to hold Khawaja in his first Test to account for such an error of judgement, that is the fate of players joining weak teams: they experience pressure to perform at once.
In addition to being a distinctly handy player, Khawaja is, of course, a Muslim – the first of that faith to play cricket for Australia. This seems as unimportant to him as it seems important to many others, and the novelty is showing signs of wearing off quite quickly: in the media area, Australian journalists already refer to him familiarly as Uzzi, in the same nickname tradition that gave us Hughesy, Smithy, Warnie etc. They have been teasing their visitors all summer with the proposition that South Africa's best batsman plays for England; how long before Pakistan's best batsman is said to play for Australia?
Khawaja marks a new Australia, however, in a more conventional cricket sense, by being a young player with an already man-size task. One would prefer not to burden him with great expectations. But it may not be that easy.
'Come on Aussies show your spirit' read a deathless tweet flashed on the Sydney Cricket Groud replay screen this morning to show how in touch Cricket Australia is with the ways of young folk. Another reference to Johnnie Walker, perhaps. Under their new captain, nonetheless, Australia did exhibit some extra spunk, in a well-contested second day of the Fifth Test.
After England's domination of their first hours in the field and with the bat, one would hardly have rated Australia's chances of coming third in this match. Yet were it not for the no-ball that prolonged Alastair Cook's crucial innings, they might well be slightly ahead: as it is, England remain 113 runs in arrears with seven wickets remaining. Again, a replay shaped events. Cricket is fast becoming two games: one in real time, the other in slow motion.
The day's opening stanzas were summed up in the moue of appreciation formed by Michael Hussey as a ball from Tim Bresnan pitched leg and missed off stump by two feet. Probing bowling in helpful overhead conditions was matched by sublime fielding, and there was a whiff of demoralisation when a flat-footed Haddin flailed at Anderson in the day's fourth over.
Hussey and Steve Smith joined forces without ever appearing a happy or complementary partnership – just two batsmen thrown together, doing their best but somehow out of kilter, Hussey dour to the point of inertia, Smith fighting against his kid-on-red-cordial excitability, Hussey fussing around his crease as if in need of a dustpan and broom, Smith waving his bat around like a feather duster. They seemed to have just come out the other side when a nagging spell of medium pace from Collingwood parted them.
With the memory of his second-innings dismissal in Melbourne fresh, Hussey fell into a lulling routine of crisp drives to short and extra cover. But just when a comfortable détente seemed to have been achieved, Collingwood zipped one back to bowl him off a mix of inner edge and outer thigh. It was almost as though Hussey had so drilled himself not to be dismissed in one fashion that he overlooked all other possibilities: he had the minor consolation of joining a useful list of batsmen defeated by Collingwood's pawky variations, Tendulkar, Dravid, Ganguly and Sangakkara among them.
The new ball was taken with immediate effect, Collingwood now at third slip when Smith wasted an hour and a half's application with a wild drive at Anderson, who dismissed Siddle in his next over. But forty minutes before lunch, England got a little ahead of themselves. Pietersen could be seen essaying phantom shots at mid-off, while Strauss pushed the field back to give singles to both Johnson and Hilfenhaus in order to maximise the latter's strike.
When Hilfenhaus played and missed long enough to get a sighter, Australia's ninth wicket added 76 from 89 balls in sixty-four minutes of uncomplicated clumping either side of the intermission. Hilfenhaus, having incurred an inert pair in Melbourne, strolled into a six off Bresnan that landed among laughing members. From the next two balls, Johnson swept Swann for four and six into the terraces in front of the Brewongle Stand, and after a parodic block raised his 63-ball half-century with a single to square leg. Australia's 280 was beyond their overnight expectations, and well beyond those that would have been nurtured after their batsmen's early eclipse.
When England commenced their reply, Michael Clarke entrusted Hilfenhaus and Johnson with the new ball – not a bad shaft of captaincy, as it was hardly what England would have expected. Australia's new captain also had his first experience of what is known to befall best-laid plans, when Hilfenhaus and Johnson opened with several overs of weary dross.
Strauss has perhaps never played with greater freedom in Australia. He hooked Hilfenhaus twice for four, then massively into the members for six, a shot the more impressive for its almost nonexistent backlift and bravura follow-through. When he drove Siddle down the ground and through cover for four, England's captain flashed his partner a smile as broad as after retaining the Ashes.
Under the circumstances, the Australians did well to regroup. Hilfenhaus resumed after tea from round the wicket and swung one in that held its line to hit Strauss's off stump, and Johnson coaxed Trott into playing on a delivery as nondescript as many of his successful deliveries: for all the dreck he has served up, he is Australia's highest wicket taker this series.
Had a thick inside edge from Pietersen (8) gone onto the stumps, or had he on 26 connected with a glorious off drive whose breeze could be felt in the Noble Stand, England's chase might have faltered. As it was, the crucial reprieve was given by Michael Beer's fourteenth delivery in Test cricket. At 137 for two, Cook (46) forgot himself so completely as to shovel down the ground, where mid-on Hilfenhaus caught the ball amid much rejoicing, only for umpire Billy Bowden to call for a foot-fault referral which revealed the bowler to be pirouetting beyond the front line.
You can tell how gruelling a series this has been from the fact that lines such as 'bitter Beer', 'frothing Beer' and 'flat Beer' immediately sprang to mind, then 'welcome Beer', 'well-earned Beer' and 'Beer o'clock' when he took a nicely judged catch at deep fine leg to catch Pietersen's top edge from Johnson just before nightfall. But Cook, having quietly left 5,000 Test runs behind him, remained encamped at stumps, bending low over his defensive bat, and leaving night watchman Anderson to face the greater proportion of the day's last few overs, intent on the morrow. If the third day fluctuates as the second, and the weather continues staying away, this could be a better game than it initially promised.
Among the many prohibitions blazoned all over the rule-ridden Sydney Cricket Ground is one above eyelevel on the glass of the media area which reads: 'Any disturbance affecting the enjoyment of spectators should be reported to SCG staff.' In the hour before tea today, the phone in the administrative office should have been ringing off the hook.
Out in the middle, with an Ashes Test on the line, Australia's attack was bowling as badly as it has all summer – halfway down the pitch, despite its slowness, and without pace or shape. The fielding was flat. The effort was directionless. Captain Michael Clarke bore the expression of a second-hand-car buyer on the point of realising that the most reliable component of his newly acquired automobile was the ashtray.
For much of the summer, critics have homed in on Australia's batting as the root of all their misfortunes. The bowlers by comparison have gotten off fairly lightly. In fact, while they have had their moments, these have seldom been in combination: Siddle succeeded at Brisbane and Melbourne, Johnson and Harris at Perth, and Hilfenhaus … well, nowhere really. Now they had all taken the day off. At tea, England were 73 for nought in sixteen overs, an unheard-of rate of progress for Strauss and Cook, this summer or any.
How do teams bowl as badly as this? It cannot have been as though the bowlers were unfamiliar with the conditions. Johnson and Hilfenhaus had earlier made merry with the bat for an hour, and thereby acquired a thorough acquaintance of the wicket.
Nor can the Australians have been unprepared. Between innings, there was the now familiar sight of the team about to bowl going through token preliminaries. Tim Nielsen and Justin Langer led a slips catching drill. Bowlers ran round cones and heaved medicine balls. Orange fielding mats were deployed, isotonic drinks consumed, and a last few rousing injunctions issued to 'execute skill sets'.
And then … everyone bowled rubbish, on a pitch without the lift to bang the ball in, and in environs that, thanks to the arena shape the ground has developed so as best to host Australian football, now lack the ground-level breezes that used to abet swing. The third ball of Hilfenhaus's fourth over disappeared over square leg for a contemptuous six, while Johnson's sixth over was his worst since Brisbane – that it cost only seven runs was a tribute to some agile wicketkeeping by Haddin, who to Australia's quickest bowler must sometimes be tempted to take up his stance at short fine leg. Meanwhile, in the equipment driveway beneath the Bradman Stand, the best bowler at the ground was rolling his arm over to the star of, among other things, Nick Fury: Agent of S. H. I. E. L. D. and Shaka Zulu: The Citadel. Shane Warne to David Hasselhoff: this is the stuff of which Big Bash dreams are made.
In fact, just as the game was disappearing, the Australians did remarkably well to retard England's progress in the extended session after tea. Siddle ran in hard, Hilfenhaus bowled a patient spell from round the wicket, and Johnson claimed a couple of his trademark lightning wickets – he never strikes twice in the same place. The fielding also improved, Usman Khawaja, one of three fielders chasing back to third man, diving headlong to save a boundary. And Clarke captained thoughtfully, chivvying his men along, setting some imaginative fields that took advantage of the slow outfield, and backing his intuitions.
The choice of Johnson to share the new ball with Hilfenhaus was a sound one, even though it didn't come off, while the introduction of Beer just as the run rate was decelerating was nicely timed, and very nearly brought Australia a seminal wicket. As it was, Beer's bowling of Australia's nineteenth no-ball of the series cost his team a breakthrough for the second time, one that might prove even more crucial than the reprieve that Johnson granted Matt Prior in Melbourne.
England, who have trespassed not half as often, and who bowled only one no-ball in each of the Tests at the Gabba and Adelaide Oval, have here perhaps stolen another small march on Australia. Their practice sessions are informally umpired, compelling bowlers to pay attention to their front-foot transgressions. Australians in training, as Johnson conceded after play, are not so zealous. 'I still bowl half a foot over in the nets but I don't know how we're going to fix that.' Again with the 'we': what is it with this team's aversity to individual responsibility?
The recent empowering of umpires to check on the fairness of deliveries even after wickets fall has made no-balls a subtly more culpable offence. A game of inches is turning into a game of centimetres before our eyes – or, to be more exact, before the inhuman eye of the replay. It was enough to cause a 'disturbance affecting the enjoyment of spectators' – if they were Australian, anyway. The roar that followed, however, was a reminder that no error accrues without bestowing benefit elsewhere.
A running gag in the popular video diaries posted by Graeme Swann on the England Cricket Board website is the resemblance of Alastair Cook to Sheriff Woody from Toy Story. Skinny? Check. Well groomed? Check. String coming out of his back. Well … Anyway, the likeness is deepening: Cook keeps starring in sequels.
Today, too, may have been a rare case of the sequel outdoing the original. Having taken his first guard an hour before tea yesterday, Cook more than batted the clock around, finally falling after tea for 189 in 488 minutes and 342 deliveries, an innings containing 55 singles, 26 twos, 16 fours and judicious leaves outside the off stump beyond number. Cook's Brisbane original was to keep the series alive; this follow-up has killed it, and England's opponents, stone dead. Cook's sixth-wicket partnership of 154 from 282 balls with Ian Bell ensured that only one team can win this Fifth Test, and that the series result will fairly reflect the disparity between the teams.
When at last Cook was caught in the gully, Watson celebrated by hollering at the heavens, as old-time actors used to shout into the Sydney breakers to improve their vocal projection. It was meant to evoke triumph; it savoured simply of desperation. England a hundred in the lead, Australia being carved up like a Christmas turkey, and he's roaring? Hmmm … perhaps he had just executed his skill set. By the time dim light ended the day at 5.30 p.m., England's lead had more than doubled, and Watson probably had no puff left.
The day dawned overcast, too, though not perhaps quite so overcast as Australia would have wished. Anderson punched a cover drive for four from Hilfenhaus, then after twenty minutes played down the wrong line at Siddle. England were still a hundred runs in the red, further breaches could have hurt, and, again, little things meant a lot. In Watson's first over and the last ball before drinks, Cook (87) nicked just short of Clarke at second slip. A run shy of his third century for the series, he also turned Beer to Hughes at short leg where he was exonerated by electronic examination – to be fair to the Australians, neither the fielder nor Haddin looked convinced the catch had carried.
With a flick through mid-wicket and a jogged single in Beer's next over, Cook cantered to three figures, and statisticians enjoyed a beanfeast. He had, for example, now emulated David Gower, John Edrich and Chris Broad, all top-order left-handers coincidentally, in achieving a Test hundred at four Australian venues.
Particularly sharp eyes noted that he passed 1,000 first-class runs for the tour, a delightfully old-fashioned record for a delightfully old-fashioned cricketer. Above all, perhaps, stattos will have to look hard for a more epic form turnaround. In his first eight innings of last summer in England, Cook eked out 106 runs at an average of 13; in nine innings since, he has made 886 runs at 111.
Forty-five minutes from lunch, Beer finally obtained his maiden Test wicket, fifty-five deliveries after it first felt within his grasp, when Collingwood holed out down the ground and Hilfenhaus took the catch – this time legitimately. Beer, who goes through his repertoire as mechanically as a cuckoo clock, has failed to convince anyone here that he is a superior spinner to Nathan Hauritz, who continues languishing in internal exile. But at least he was now on the board.
In his beginning, Beer probably also marked an end for Collingwood: the 34-year-old's foray down the wicket was premeditated; the shot was essayed two metres short of the pitch of the ball; it was a raging against the dying of the light. Collingwood has been a brave, defiant cricketer. Four years ago, he was the one Englishman who consistently gave as good as he got verbally, his coach Duncan Fletcher complaining that team-mates had left Collingwood to 'take on the whole Australian team'. That role has been made redundant. With 119 in his last ten Test innings, he has become a memento of a kind that a good team, as England deserve to be considered, should be capable of leaving behind.
As Bell settled in smoothly with Cook, in fact, Australia's effort began to fray. Having bowled only the first three overs of the morning from the Paddington End, Johnson started his second spell from the Randwick End with a ball that barely landed on the cut strip. The frisson he caused at Perth is a distant memory. When he might at a pinch have run Cook (129) out fielding off his own bowling and throwing blind at the non-striker's end, a droll press-box colleague commented that he got closer to the stumps when throwing than bowling. The joke lingered. His arm now looks more suited to throwing a Frisbee, or a plate at a Greek wedding, than to bowling a cricket ball, and the Barmy Army regard him simply as a pretext for their favourite song: 'He bowls to the left/He bowls to the right/That Mitchell Johnson/His bowling is shite.'
Bell took advantage by finally producing the innings of which he has seemed capable all summer, but for the frailties of England's tail, and his role in ministering to it. From a personal point of view, Bell's was a critical knock. Failure here would have taken the gloss off all his contributions so far: in a year or two, most people would have forgotten that he has looked, day-in, day-out, England's most fluent and attractive batsman. He again looked a treat, driving like a Rolls-Royce, and cutting like a sushi chef. But it was intent that oozed out of him, as well as style. So much intent that he featured in an interlude as peculiar as any in this series – and there have been some peculiar ones.
When the fourth ball of Watson's seventeenth over passed between Bell's bat and pad, the game dissolved into a now-regrettably familiar tableau. Aleem Dar gave Bell (70) out. Bell walked down the wicket and consulted Prior. Time passed – long enough to wonder how a batsman can not know if he has hit the ball. Finally, Bell requested a referral. Oh well, here we go again …
The fielders waited. The umpires waited. The batsmen had a drink. The replays rolled, and the Hot Spot revealed … nothing. There was surely an irony here, given the weight Ricky Ponting attached to the Hot Spot in Melbourne: he that lives by the Hot Spot shall die by it also. Then, just as Bell was resuming his innings, the television turned as a deus ex machina to the snickometer, which revealed … a sound. Make of that what you will – many journalists at stumps clearly intended to. In the interim, please enjoy the law of unforeseen consequences: a good umpire in Dar made what was almost certainly a correct decision, only to be undermined by a system intended to improve accuracy in umpiring.
As it was, Bell officially survived only one chance, a hot caught-and-bowled dropped by Steve Smith, whom Clarke finally remembered was playing in time for him to bowl the 102nd over. Just before 5 p.m., Bell punched the same bowler through cover and gave a skip of delight in completing his first Ashes hundred. That skip became a trampling as Prior, who compiled a brassy 100-minute fifty, helped him add 107 at almost four and a half runs an over. By day's end, the cricket had acquired a dimension not unknown where sequels are concerned: the feeling that one has seen this story before.
Before Australia's second innings in Melbourne, Shane Watson was asked what would be his approach to his team's huge first-innings arrears. Without a second thought, Watson revealed his 'plan': he would bat for two and a half days. Never mind that his limit in this series has been about two and a half hours. Later that afternoon, another start was duly wasted.
Nobody has asked Alastair Cook for his 'plan' this summer. He says 'obviously' a lot in press conferences, but so does everybody else, and in his case it's almost apologetic. The way he plays, batting is obvious, containing no obscurities or hidden subtleties. He is like a skilled expositor with a gift for making complicated ideas sound simple. 'I don't really know what else to say,' he confessed to a television questioner at day's end. His batting this summer has already spoken volumes.
Of today's 189, it suffices to comment that it broke Australia's spirit, glimpses of which Michael Clarke's team had shown on the second day. It felt like a part of the single continuous innings Cook has played all summer, during which he has batted as though involved in the painting of the Sydney Harbour Bridge, no sooner finishing at one end than starting at the other.
The SCG in the morning was an uncommonly cheerful sight, awash in pink in aid of the McGrath Foundation and its good works in the raising of funds for breast cancer research. Even the statue of Steve Waugh unveiled before play was adorned in a fuschia neckerchief, so that Australia's great champion resembled a Mardi Gras cowboy. For a moment it appeared that Cook would be expected to recommence batting in a pink helmet. In fact, Cook even eschewed the popular pink grip, settling instead for being in the pink of form – and if you were hitting the ball like Cook at the moment, you'd be careful about altering what you had for breakfast every morning lest somehow it interfere with your luck.
Four years ago on this ground, Cook recalled that comment of Douglas Jardine's about batting against Bill O'Reilly: 'I cut out every shot that got me out and found that I didn't have a shot left.' It was hard to see how he would ever score a run, and precious few of them did he obtain. Now his leaving is part of a bigger, wider, more complete game. 'Knowing where your off stump is' is one of those cricket expressions that sounds perennially mysterious to the uninitiated. After all, doesn't it just sit there alongside the other two?
Cook the expositor unravels its meaning: by letting balls go that compel no stroke, he draws bowlers into his pads, coaxes them to pitch the ball further up for driving, and generally tires them, little by little, minute by minute. He makes the non-stroke into a kind of stroke, silence into a sort of statement.
Cook has also turned the press box into a fastness of anorakism. All day could be heard whispered exchanges: 'most runs since'; 'most by a left-hander since'; 'between Sutcliffe and Hammond'; 'just like Gavaskar'; 'level with Lara'. Behind every hard-bitten cricket hack lurks a boy with pencil, a scorebook and a Wisden or two.
The most flavoursome record of all was the one concerning the length of time that Cook has batted this summer. Read it and reel: with potentially an innings still to go, he has been at the crease for thirty-six hours and eleven minutes, breaking a record of delicious obscurity set forty years ago by John Edrich.
Tennis has its records of epic five-setters, but only cricket keeps such close tabs on durations, and on hours of occupation, because in order to score one must first survive. In its way, Cook's batting harkens to the origins of cricket, when the roughness of pitches first compelled batsmen to work out ways to defend themselves, and its place in nature, when the format was set by the passage of the day.
In recent times, Twenty20 has chewed away at that essence of batting, utterly skewing the dynamics of risk and reward. The abbreviated game marches to the drumbeat of the strike rate, which makes a celebrity of Keiron Pollard, and a slowcoach of Michael Clarke. But while the strike rate sounds somehow more scientific, it's a reductive precision, for it pretends that batsmen are only active when actually facing the bowling. In fact, you don't cease to be part of the game at the non-striker's end; you aren't absolved from responsibility, excused from concentration or invulnerable to dismissal. In addition to the 242 scoreless deliveries of Cook's innings, he was a faithful back-up through 351 as a partner. On the measure of a strike rate, these did not exist. Minutes, by contrast, are immediately suggestive. On the rule of thumb that there are 360 in a day's play, you can tell at a glance that Cook has been at the crease for roughly six entire days in this series – almost a third of the total play. In his own self-effacing way, he has utterly hogged the centre.
Fifteen years ago, The Times' chief cricket correspondent saved a Test match for England against South Africa. Mike Atherton faced 492 balls, although what did this imply other than a lot? Far more evocative is it to recall that he endured for 643 minutes. The image of Atherton's innings that most people recall is not of any shot or even milestone, but the one of him looking up from his haunches and giving his partner Jack Russell a smile – weary, wary but game. Cook, then, has done still more than be the fulcrum of England's exertions in this Ashes series. He has given us a little instruction in cricket – by his deeds, of course, rather than his words.
The final day's play in the Ashes of 2010–11 will commence at 10.03 a.m. The reason: a complex recalculation based on residual time lost to rain on the first day which it would be pointless to explain. The same was very nearly true of play on the fourth day of this Fifth Test, where England outclassed Australia in ways it feels tedious and repetitive to enumerate.
At the close, Australia were set to lose three Tests in a series by an innings for the first time since … well, ever. In the day's first half, their listless attack was relieved of 156 runs in 36.5 overs by England's last three wickets; in the second, they lost seven batsmen in 44 overs either side of tea. Steve Smith and Peter Siddle negotiated an extra half-hour that Andrew Strauss requested, but Australia remain 151 runs short of making their opponents bat again, and England stand on the brink of a 3–1 victory.
Today's should actually have been the best batting conditions of the match – almost of the series. The SCG pitch had flattened right out, the sky was nearly cloudless, the outfield had quickened, both attacks were weary from five weeks' hard graft, and a crowd of 35,622 was in high humour. England certainly revelled. Having taken toll of some tired Australian bowling late on the third day, Matt Prior positively scampered to the fastest English hundred of the series in 109 balls – the fastest by an Englishman against Australia, in fact, for nearly thirty years.
'Crikey,' said an Australian colleague behind me after tea yesterday. 'I've looked up and Prior's forty already. How did that happen?' This is Prior's chief faculty, for surprising opponents with instant aggression, sucking bowlers into his off-stump slot by hanging slightly back, then veritably pelting between wickets. Not even Pietersen in this England line-up scores more quickly than Prior's 62.92 per hundred balls.
Of all England's cricketers this summer, Prior has probably occasioned the fewest words – no bad thing, given that wicketkeepers become most obtrusive by their errors. He has taken twenty-two catches with scarcely a murmur of praise or blame, the best haul in forty years.
Over the years, Australia has not been a happy hunting ground for English glovemen. Alec Stewart never managed a full series here. Geraint Jones and Jack Russell lost places mid-series, Jack Richards and Steve Rhodes post-series. Not since Alan Knott's two tours, furthermore, has a visiting keeper consistently made Ashes runs in Australia. Four years ago, Jones and Chris Read scraped together 98 runs in ten innings.
Prior, by contrast, is that rare English player who looks born for Australian climes, in his keeping and batting enjoying the bounce, the carry and the minimal sideways movement. As he has assimilated these conditions this summer, he has proved more and more effective, helped by some opposition bowling and captaincy that might be politely described as thought-free. As is usually the case, fully 96 of his 118 runs were scored on the off side, including a six down the ground and all eleven of his boundaries. Clarke finally set an off-side sweeper when the quicker bowlers operated, but the simpler expedient of bowling straight and attacking the stumps was somehow thought either too obvious or too subtle. Prior took particular toll of the third new ball, which neither swung nor seamed for the Australian quicks, instead leaving the bat with a crack.
Thanks to some sensible defence and bottom-handed hoicking from Bresnan, England's eighth pair added 102, as its seventh pair had added 107, its sixth pair 154 and … well, you get the picture. England's last pair, Graeme Swann and Chris Tremlett, then purloined another 35 in seven overs to add irritation to insult to injury, and extend England's lead to 364.
As he has been inclined to do all summer, Watson set off as though planning to erase this deficit by stumps on his own, driving, cutting and pulling seven boundaries in forty balls. Hughes all but disappeared from view, only to re-emerge when both batsmen ended up at the non-striker's end having turned an easy two into their second run-out in three starts. Watson, of course, turns up at run-outs like Lara Bingle turns up at openings, but here he could at least share the blame: both batsmen cantered the first casually; both were ball-watching; neither appeared to call decisively. Perhaps still brooding, Hughes fenced at Bresnan six runs later.
Captain Clarke and Usman Khawaja endured through to tea, and the latter had just begun asserting himself, with a reverberating pull shot from Anderson, when he followed one from the same bowler that swung away like a Roberto Carlos free kick. Clarke, who recovered something like freedom in his foot movement against Swann, had struck six affirming fours when he too misread Anderson's trajectories.
Had Bell caught Haddin (7) diving to his right at short cover and reduced Australia to 139 for five, there might have been no reason to return tomorrow. As it was, England shortened their work when Pietersen caught Hussey in the gully. With shadows lengthening across the ground, the man with the longest shadow of all bowled his quickest spell of the match from the Randwick End, Tremlett beating Haddin's pull and Johnson's prod for pace with consecutive deliveries; Siddle just ensured that his would be the only hat-trick of the series by digging out a yorker.
About half an hour after play, the ground was finally swept by a drenching rain, the results of which were left glistening on the covers beneath its floodlights. So it turns out that there was one new development today: Australia, it seems, can no longer even do rain properly.
Shane Watson will end this Ashes series with an average of nearly 50. In a team as thoroughly beaten as Australia, such a statistical achievement would normally attract such adjectives as 'honourable', 'laudable', maybe even 'valiant'. Regard this as an exhibit in the case against interpreting a series from the average tables.
Even before he concluded his Test summer today with a run-out of comical awfulness, Australia's Allan Border Medallist had been an underachiever. On seven occasions he has batted for more than 100 minutes; only once has he gone beyond three hours. Even leaving aside the argument that, thanks to flat wickets and fat bats, 50 is the new 40, Watson has achieved a conversion rate uglier than that between sterling and the Australian dollar.
His bowling, a useful adjunct for Ricky Ponting over the last eighteen months, has also faded. Although he has probably bowled a little better than his three wickets at 74 would suggest, you would be hard pressed to bowl worse. His fielding, too, has remained clumsy, and he occupies first slip with as much animation as a waxworks dummy. For all that, a big innings today, as it has for Ian Bell and Matt Prior, might have put an attractive gloss on Watson's season. And the way it did not eventuate arguably explains quite a lot about the Ashes of 2010–11.
The chemistry of some opening combinations produces spontaneous energy; in the case of Shane Watson and Phil Hughes, it is more like gradual decomposition. They cut a curious sight simply in walking out. Where Cook and Strauss walk side by side, parting after a final glove-touch, Watson and Hughes could be playing different sports. While Watson approaches the crease at a deliberate plod, Hughes runs out like an Australian rules footballer plunging through his team's crepe-paper banner.
Nor do they exude permanence and cohesion in the middle. They have the potential advantage of being a left-hander and a right-hander, but neither the alertness nor the fleetness of foot to take advantage of it. Watson is a ponderous runner, and an apparently quiet caller, who had been involved in six Test run-outs before today. He is now in harness with a lazy runner in Hughes. To call them 'partners', in fact, is more a polite convention than a description; at the moment, they are simply two men who, for convenience's sake, happen to put the pads on at the same time. If they were in relationship therapy, the counsellor would tell them that they are 'bad for each other'.
Today's mishap would have made club cricketers blush. Hughes turned Swann to mid-wicket, and both batsmen set off, albeit at no great rate. Michael Hussey, for example, would never have taken the first run so gently; he would have had his head down checking his partner's cues for interest in a second, in doing so increasing the pressure on the fielder. So slowly did Watson and Hughes chug, it was like Sky had gone to the slow-motion replay early.
To the reason for this lack of urgency, one needed to cast one's mind back ten days, to when a hasty call from Watson and a tardy response from Hughes nipped their partnership in the bud. You imagined them between times discussing the importance of not being run out with the same emphasis as Basil Fawlty gave to not mentioning the war. The result was similar, although as funny only if you were English.
Hughes, ball watching, turned and came back without pausing – without obviously calling either. Watson responded to Hughes's advance, set off for a second run, then turned to watching the ball too. In doing so, he missed that Hughes had pulled up, apparently transfixed by Pietersen's fielding. Soon enough, the pair were transfixed by one another – because of their close proximity. It was the sixth run-out in Australia's last seven Test matches, of which Watson has been involved in three, each ending an Australian opening partnership. England, by contrast, have sustained not one such casualty; Trott's at Melbourne is the only close call that comes to mind.
Effective running between wickets is one of the most elusive cricket skills, and also one of the least practised. But it basically comes down to one thing: an understanding of, and a trust in, your team-mates. When you respond to a comrade's call, you are putting yourself in his hands as completely as at any time in the game. That is why good teams invariably run well, and why run-outs always seem to beget other run-outs. When understanding and trust break down in any community, the effect is contagious; a cricket team is no different.
It is a truism to say that England have retained the Ashes this summer because they have been the more skilful side. It is more illuminating to refine that statement by concentrating on the broader aspects of the visitors' superiority, which involve those that bind eleven cricketers into an XI, and make cricket into a game rather than simply a collection of biomechanical processes.
Bowl ten half-volleys to Watson and he would welly all ten through the covers for four – which looks good, is measurable, reproducible, and might lead to a defensible average, but is hardly the end of a cricketer's responsibilities to his team. When it comes to forming part of a unit that punches above its collective weight, Watson exhibits no extra dimension, none of the qualities that galvanise team-mates, light up a game or lift a crowd. He is about as good a cricketer as Australia has put in the field this summer – and he is still not very good.
As the morning waned, and the strains of 'The Last Post' reverberated again from Billy Cooper's trumpet, a disturbance of stumps at the Sydney Cricket Ground ended Australia's on-field agonies in the Ashes of 2010–11. The off-field agonies have barely begun.
At nearly two hours, the fifth day took a little longer than expected, but new balls have been England's sphere of influence this summer, and twenty-eight deliveries with a new one sufficed to see off the last vestiges of Australia's tail, and conclude a victory by an innings and 83 runs. When Michael Beer was the last wicket to fall, it was possible we had seen the last of him in Test cricket. Australia are not scheduled to play a Test match until August in Sri Lanka – there will be a lot of brooding between now and then.
Despite the overnight rain, Steve Smith and Peter Siddle resumed their overnight resistance on time, and brought up their 50 partnership after twenty minutes, whereupon one of the promised 'isolated showers' eventuated and the players dashed for the shelter of the pavilion – all save Tremlett, who allows nothing to disturb his steady, measured tread, and who wandered in some way after the umpires.
Tom Parker's groundstaff did well to limit the interruption to three-quarters of an hour, the ground announcer rather less well when he decided to reintroduce all the players by reference to their images and stats on the big screen. There truly is no limit to the insults heaped on the intelligence of spectators inside Australian Test grounds. Gosh, here's a picture of Alastair Cook with his arms crossed. After all, he's only batted thirty-six hours this summer so you might have forgotten him. The Barmy Army responded as if on cue to mention of Mitchell Johnson's name by launching into another of its growing repertoire of tributes to Super Mitch, then continuing as a kind of human karaoke machine, rifling through its songbook at random.
Finally they exulted in unison when Siddle holed out to Anderson off Swann in front of their lower terrace in the Trumper Stand. For those who enjoy such statistical curios, Siddle, by adding 86 in 131 balls with Smith, had participated in Australia's best partnership in consecutive Tests – which tells you as much as you need to know about Australia's ineffectual top order.
Smith pressed on to Australia's highest score, showing some of his much-lauded spark, while not quite dispelling the image one has of him of a boy waving around a bat too big for him. Tremlett took the new ball at 261 for eight, and Anderson promptly removed Hilfenhaus to give Prior his twenty-third catch of the summer. Within a blink of Beer's stumps being rattled, four of them were souvenired, the two containing stump cams being left behind – even in their ecstasy, the players never forget their debt to television.
Afterwards, Andrew Strauss looked as relaxed as he had with the bat on the second day, and was rather more expansive than usual, as befits the captain of what today became officially the world's third-ranked Test team. When discussing the task of managing off-field as distinct from captaining on, he sounded almost Obama-esque: 'People want to buy into something. People want to buy into the idea that we're going somewhere as a unit and we're not going to leave anyone behind.' You could not miss the allusion here to Paul Collingwood, to whom England gave every opportunity to succeed, and who has now repaid them by retiring with dignity. While his 83 runs in six innings do not suggest a player with much still to offer, England will miss his sticky palms at slip, responsible for nine catches, and demeanour in the dressing room, which caused his captain to describe him as 'very much the soul of English cricket'.
To Michael Clarke then fell the job of defending the indefensible, admitting that this was 'as close to the bottom as it gets', while adamantly dismissing talk of a 'crisis in Australian cricket', and claiming that this was 'as gifted as any team I have been a part of' – a rather remarkable assertion given that his era overlaps with those of Shane Warne, Glenn McGrath, Adam Gilchrist, Matthew Hayden and others too numerous to mention. But then, perhaps a deeper point lurked here, that these Australians have been gifted quite a lot, and were strangers to struggle when they found themselves involved in one. It is a condition that they may well have a chance to get used to.
When Cricket Australia's sloganeers prophesied that 'History Will Be Made' this summer, it's fair to say that they wouldn't have had this history in mind – history involving Australia as loser of three of their last four Ashes series, and of six of their last eight Tests.
But what does the history made here mean for England? For history's power is great. At the victory ceremony following events today, it was fascinating to note how reverently Andrew Strauss and his players treated the tiny replica urn that looked like it was worth all of $5, even bestowing gentle kisses on it, while swinging around the far more expensive Waterford Crystal trophy inaugurated by the Marylebone Cricket Club like a jerry can.
History tells us that since the routine of deciding the Ashes over five Tests was established in the 1890s, England have only defended the Ashes successfully in Australia on four occasions: 1928–29, 1954–55, 1978–79 and 1986–87. In both the latter two cases, Australian cricket was weakened and divided, by Kerry Packer and Ali Bacher respectively. Mike Gatting's wins here twenty-four years ago were his only ones as a Test captain.
Percy Chapman's tourists of 1928–29 rank among the very best in history: Hobbs, Sutcliffe, Hammond, Jardine, Larwood, Tate and the inexhaustible left-armer Farmer White, who ploughed through 3,252 deliveries in those five Tests, compared to the 1,315 bowled by Graeme Swann in these. But the margin of the supremacy of that team, 4–1, is exaggerated by the fact that Australian Tests were then played to a finish. Strauss's team blew their opponents away innings after innings. Today was the first time Australia's batting had lasted longer than 100 overs since Brisbane, and then only just: 106.1.
The fairest, simplest and most illuminating comparison is with the team led by Len Hutton here fifty-six years ago. Like Strauss's men, they had beaten Australia by the odd Test with a win at the Oval fourteen months earlier.
Like Hutton, Strauss is a seasoned opening batsman. Like Hutton, Strauss arrived with the prior experience of being towelled up in Australia. Like Hutton, Strauss learned from that misfortune. Perhaps because they were accustomed to bearing its brunt at the top of the order, both saw the solution to Australian conditions as pace bowling.
Hutton's solution was Frank Tyson, who took 28 wickets at 21 on his tour of a lifetime. The 24 wickets at 26 taken by Strauss's solution, James Anderson, are actually the best in Australia by an England bowler since, even if Anderson is closer in method to Tyson's great partner Brian Statham: slim, whippy, untiring, unyielding.
Since Hutton's era, the effect of raw pace has been somewhat mitigated by the advent of the helmet and improved protective gear. It is swing that confounds modern batsmen, with their techniques built around a forward press, and addicted to the sensations of bat on ball. The relative success of the bowlers finding edges in this series is evinced by Matt Prior's twenty-three catches to Brad Haddin's eight.
What both Hutton's and Strauss's attacks also have in common is an orientation to economy, an end Hutton achieved both through the accuracy of his auxiliaries Trevor Bailey, Bob Appleyard and Johnny Wardle, and through slowing his over rate to a soporific degree. As The Times' venerable cricket correspondent John Woodcock has explained it, Hutton 'planned to keep Australia waiting, to make them fret, to get up their noses'.
While the expedient of deliberate tardiness and nasal insinuation was not open to Strauss, the latter's conviction that 'strangling your opponent' was a key to success down under contains an echo of the former's approach. So where Australia's most penetrative bowler Mitchell Johnson leaked runs at more than 4 an over, Anderson grudged less than 3. Where Australia's spinners took only five wickets and gave up 3.65 an over, Swann and Collingwood as England's relief bowlers claimed seventeen wickets and gave up a run an over less. Among Australian batsmen lacking patience and touch, inclined to go hard at the ball and to trust in their powerful bats to get them out of trouble, the effect was regular self-immolation.
The other advantage England have enjoyed this series has been their noisy, visible support. When Percy Chapman's team came here eighty-two years ago, they arrived with only a handful of wealthy camp-followers, who were treated almost as extensions of the touring team. These included the playwright Ben Travers, who, expecting that Chapman would be swamped by messages of support and patriotic injunction before the series, was amazed to find that the only message received by England's captain from HM Government was a tax demand from the Inland Revenue. 'England expects each man to pay his duty,' Travers told Chapman consolingly.
The staunchest group of supporters for Hutton's Englishmen was then their nineteen-strong press corps, one of whose number, Alf Gover of the Sunday Mirror, acted as the David Saker of his time by helping Tyson shorten his run, sharpen his pace and improve his stamina.
In days of yore, however, it could be a lonely life inside Australian cricket grounds for visiting cricketers. So the significance of the armies of spectators who have followed England this summer, Barmy and otherwise, cannot be underestimated. They have made Australia a home away from home for their team, as was recognised today when Strauss's men made a beeline for the serried ranks of red and white on the lower deck of the Trumper Stand as soon as the presentation was over.
It wasn't a spontaneous gesture, for Andrew Flintoff's team did the same here four years ago – deserving no more, frankly, than a massed raspberry in return. But it was a heartfelt one. Not every day is history made, and it is an experience to be shared when it is.
Did the Australian public turn on their cricketers during this Ashes series? You would be forgiven for thinking so, if you took the increasingly florid tabloid newspaper headlines to be an accurate reflection of public opinion. The truth of this annus horribilis is probably subtler: that Australians never believed their cricketers were in with a chance in the first place.
The tradition, of course, is that England cricketers arrive to a chorus of detraction, following in the hallowed memories of the wharfies at Fremantle Gages in the 1930s who welcomed the ships carrying Marylebone teams by reminding them whose side Bradman was on with choruses of 'You'll never geddim out!'
Not this summer. Australian cricket's fall from its lofty estate since the Oval Test of 2009 might have been swift, but it has registered. Almost three weeks before this Ashes series commenced, a big nationwide online survey in News Ltd papers concluded that the home side had no chance of regaining the Ashes, that coach Tim Nielsen was a failure, and that heir apparent Michael Clarke was the wrong choice to succeed Ricky Ponting.
When Michael Atherton arrived in Hobart to report on the tourists' game against Australia A, he was shocked by the degree of local pessimism, at a stage on tours when Australians were normally at least rehearsing their Schadenfreude. And it seemed to communicate itself to Ponting's team early on, when Mitchell Johnson mumbled a complaint after the Gabba Test that most of the fans seemed to be English. The fans' retort seemed to be that Australia's cricketers should not expect support they had not earned.
Quite what engendered this fatalism? The simplest answer is realism. The cycle of retirements in the four years since the last Ashes here has rendered Australian cricket a succession of curtain calls, to the extent that there now seems a good deal more talent in the commentary box than on the field.
These characters have not been replaced, and their continuing visibility in various guises, from charity worker (Glenn McGrath) to human headline (Shane Warne), offers a ready basis for unflattering comparison. It was the dearth of salty humanity in current Australian ranks that led to Doug Bollinger's brief cult-hero status last summer, which soon petered out when he lacked the game to go with it.
Certainly, this current team is one to which locals find it difficult to warm. Wild vauntings of Phil Hughes or Steve Smith have convinced nobody, while reservations remain about Clarke, thought a little too self-regarding and self-involved for high office, and also Shane Watson and Mitchell Johnson, imagined to be principally concerned with hair and tattoos respectively. Cricket Australia are encouraging their players to use social media in communicating with fans, but what it shows more faithfully is how superficial is the acquaintance of the team and its public.
Only Michael Hussey, Brad Haddin and Peter Siddle of the current XI are genuinely thought to be made of the right stuff. Administrators would kill for their own Graeme Swann – quick, gregarious, worldly and naturally funny.
The press, meanwhile, has actually been less capricious than usual. On the eve of the Perth Test, I had a conversation with a senior tabloid journalist, who admitted that he was under immense pressure from his office to condemn Ponting and his players in the most astringent terms, but that he was doing his best to resist. 'I don't know how much longer I can hold out,' he confided. 'They want names and they want faces. They want to know who to blame.'
When Australia capitulated on the first day of that Perth Test, the coverage was wickedly cutting. It wasn't 'Swedes 1 Turnips 0', but in years to come the back page of that day's West Australian may become a collector's piece. There they were, on the back page of the paper, the heads of Australia's selectors, bespattered with egg. The headline explained it all just in case: 'Egg On Their Faces'.
There was a little more egg to go round that evening after Johnson and Ryan Harris rock'n'rolled the visitors on a sporting wicket, but as a headline it has looked better by the day. For those who did in anticipation sense the weakness of the Australian team this summer, in fact, there is a perverse satisfaction to be derived from having seen it coming.
In their green and golden age, Australian cricketers were apt to complain of never receiving the credit they deserved, results being customarily explained by reference to the weaknesses of opponents. Something similar may befall England's team in the Ashes of 2010–11 – think of it as the last of those reversals of traditional roles on which we have been musing all summer.
England seemed, after all, to do nothing spectacular. No batsman shredded an attack outright; of the mere three five-fors obtained, only one, Graeme Swann's in Adelaide, was in a winning cause. If anything, the high-explosive efforts were Australian, such as Peter Siddle's in Brisbane, Mitchell Johnson's in Perth. With the possible exception of the first day in Melbourne, England's cricket was like a series of controlled detonations at strategic intervals and locations.
So future generations may miss the overwhelming authority achieved by English individuals in this series; partly, too, because the players themselves were apt to underplay them. Alastair Cook's response to an interlocutor at Adelaide about the sweat of his long toil there was a kind of tour motif: 'I'm quite lucky - I don't really sweat that much.' Thanks for the ready-made headline, Cooky: England retain Ashes without breaking sweat.
Before the tour, Cook was an England player whose measure the Australians would have felt they had. In a gloating overview of the visiting team for the Sydney Morning Herald published on the eve of the Gabba Test, Stuart Clark dismissed him airily: 'Opponents around the world have realised he is predominantly a square-of-the-wicket player, and now bowl full and outside off stump as there is a question about his ability to leave the ball.'
Question answered, methinks: it was in the neglected art of leaving the ball that Cook gave his bat-on-ball-happy opponents a lesson. That flowed, however, from a confidence in his repertoire of strokes, and ability to dispose of the bad ball. It's when you're worried where your next run will come from that you play shots you shouldn't. Cook could be Sir Leavealot because he had the swordplay to go with it.
No other England player fits so seamlessly into the team's coaching structure. Andy Flower is a former close Essex teammate; Graham Gooch is a former county coach. They have modified his technique, but in such a way that it remains his, and that he now understands his game more completely. They backed him through thin times, so that they have seen his character in adversity. These factors make a powerful combination.
Jonathan Trott began the Ashes of 2010–11 as the only member of England's top six without prior Australian experience. On the odd occasion, too, he looked overeager to play the pull shot, which thrice cost him his wicket on tour. Otherwise, he was the complete number three, despite having first been drafted into the position for the want of something better. He and Cook were the kind of batting combination that bring to a camp calm and order. The middle order could relax, bowlers put their feet up.
His outward phlegmatism notwithstanding, a passion seems to lurk deep in Trott. When he was left out of the Headingley Test of 2009, Andrew Strauss described his look as that of someone 'genuinely distraught'. He was the one England player who gave a hint of his team's latent rage at home last year by having a crack at Wahab Riaz. But in the main, that passion smoulders, summed up somehow in his technique: with his trigger movement forward, he always seems in danger of launching at the ball, yet somehow ends up playing exquisitely late, right beneath his nose. It is force under control. During his critical 168 not out at Melbourne, he never lost momentum despite the acutest self-denial.
What England's successes this summer have in common is that they were not players Australia would have spent much time worrying about in advance. Cook had had no impact on two prior Ashes series; Trott had struggled on bouncy wickets a year earlier. James Anderson? Before the tour, Australians remembered him mostly as the cannon fodder of four years ago, and a threat in the Ashes of 2009 only when clouds rolled in. Under cloudless Australian skies, Shane Watson and his top-order colleagues quite fancied their chances against him. Ahead of the series, Watson talked up Anderson's down-under record as a point in his team's favour: 'If he doesn't start out the way he wants to, those wounds can open up straight away.'
Watson's punditry proved as speculative as his calling. One of the most impressive features of Anderson's bowling in 2010–11 was his willingness to be struck for early boundaries in search of swing – he was like the proverbial spinner prepared to keep tossing it up even under attack. Anderson had some expensive opening spells among his successful ones, but he never lost faith in his ability to beat the bat with sideways movement, or his stomach for the contest. Even when Watson had another piece of him after Perth, chirping that Anderson's failure there as night watchman to protect Paul Collingwood had been 'one of my best moments on a cricket field', England's number one quick never stopped coming. Anderson's contribution as straight man to Graeme Swann's video diaries also made them among the tour's most successful partnerships. His deadpan retort to Swann in Adelaide – 'Excuse me, there's nothing wrong with being both informative and interesting, Graeme' – was perhaps the best line of the trip.
On preparing to face Chris Tremlett, meanwhile, Australia appeared to spend no time at all: indeed, the one aspect of Australia's preparation that Michael Clarke was later prepared to concede was deficient was the failure to train against 'tall fast bowlers', and they come no taller than Tremlett.
The reason, one fancies, was Tremlett's prior reputation for reticence, for temperament and body language that Shane Warne described as 'just a bit soft' and 'awful' respectively. Here, perhaps, we learned more about Warne than Tremlett, the Australian's deportment ideal being David Hasselhoff. From his first ball in Perth, Tremlett looked the part as a bowler, while remaining utterly impassive, even placid, between times.
Tremlett, in fact, might have been devised with batsmen accustomed to propping on the front foot and hitting happily through the line in mind. His ball to begin Australia's rout in Melbourne, forcing a skittish Watson on to the back foot and taking the shoulder of the bat, was the kind that sends a tremor through the dressing room – the hunters of Perth, it said, were now the hunted. Mind you, it was almost comical to contrast the consternation Tremlett induced in his own slips cordon with the total equanimity he exhibited himself, and the physical difference he opened up between the visitors and hosts. When 6ft 7in Tremlett walked past 5ft 7in Phil Hughes at the non-striker's end in Melbourne and Sydney, they seemed involved in different games, not just different teams.
England came to Australia shadowed by doubts about the efficacy of a four-man attack. They got a little lucky. Thanks to the unseasonally mild summer, fast bowling was not so physically extentuating as usual; the speed with which the tourists grew accustomed to rolling Australia over helped too, of course. Above all, though, it was thanks to Tremlett and also to Tim Bresnan that England were able to absorb the loss to attrition of Stuart Broad and Steve Finn: statistically at least, they were actually almost twice as effective, turning over 28 wickets at 21, versus 16 wickets at 39.
Yet in concentrating on the four statistical standouts of this England team, one is at risk of ignoring their most impressive quality, which was their strength-through-joy unity. After a rocky start at the Gabba, they caught superbly. Their ground fielding was electric, inflicting four damaging run-outs, while their own running between wickets was judicious, incurring not a single casualty themselves. Above all, they radiated confidence and pleasure in the contest.
This is not something for which England has been known down under. In a memorable passage in his autobiography, Adam Gilchrist described the air around Alec Stewart's team twelve years ago as 'the epitome of everything wrong with English professionalism', resembling 'office workers turning up for a dreary day behind the desk'. Thus it was not a spacefilling sound bite when Flower said on England's departure that there was 'nothing to be afraid of in Australia', that it was 'one of the best places to go' and 'should be a lot of fun'. It meant also that when the Australians tried something similar before the Third Test, with Steve Smith describing his mission as being to 'come into the side and be fun', 'making sure I'm having fun and making sure everyone else around is having fun', it sounded as if the locals had simply exhausted other possibilities. A winning team will always be the happier one, but in this case happiness also seemed to beget success. For this, England deserve most credit of all.