There is always something special about an Ashes summer. The summer of 2009 was so special as to be disturbing. The Ashes introduced to cricket the concept of the five-Test series; it has become the final fastness against its phasing out. England have not played a country over five Tests apart from Australia since 2004– 05; Australia have not played a country over five Tests apart from England since 2000–01. Thus were two teams stretched in ways quite unfamiliar to them, like teenagers being expected to graduate from SMS to iambic pentameters—and it showed.
The wins were conquests. The losses were capitulations. The bating collapses were ruinous and utter. The bowling collapses—see Johnson at Lord’s, Panesar at Cardiff—were complete. Have teams played more contrasting consecutive Tests than Headingley and the Oval? Have teams struggled as much with putting consecutive deliveries in the same place?
One phenomenon that received a long-overdue debunking was the ever-popular concept of ‘momentum’: the notion that success inevitably begets further success. Australia had all the momentum coming into the Second and Fifth Tests, and it availed them nought. England mowed Australia down in the Third Test, then were mown down in two and a half days in the Fourth. Momentum is classically defined as the product of mass times velocity; in 2009, it was revealed in cricket to be the sum of the past plus cliché.
Stretched over two and a half months, the effect was of the slow unfolding of very abrupt events, like an Ingmar Bergman film remade in the style of The West Wing. It was often fascinating; it was also, sometimes, not very good, or of a particularly high standard. It revealed, too, just how much cricket has lost in the gradual eclipse of the five-Test format. You genuinely did see teams and individuals in every circumstance, lifted by luck, taxed by trials, and feel as though you came to know them better—that, indeed, they also came to know themselves more completely.
For the Australians, even though they held the trophy, the series presented perhaps the greater demands, not merely in adapting to England’s unfamiliar conditions, but also to the Ashes’ unique duration. They arrived off the back of one-day series in South Africa and in Abu Dhabi; they played some bad Twenty20 cricket, then had two weeks in the nets in Leicester. How often do cricketers have no games for a fortnight? How often do they spend that fortnight in the home of Showaddywaddy and Gaye Bykers on Acid? How many interviews and press conferences can they give explaining that they are ‘looking forward to the challenge’? The Australians were forced to find out.
‘We were really happy with the way the people in Leicester looked after us’, says Ricky Ponting in his Captain’s Diary 2009, and … errr … that’s it for the Australians’ longest stay in any city during the year. Not that one was expecting an account of a visit to the Abbey Pumping Station or a salute to the excellence of Walker’s crisps, but it is a kind of comment: the modern cricketer is fully alive only when playing. And the longer the tour, the more broadly spaced the games, the greater the need for self-regulation, for self-direction, for the individual to find a balance between discipline and relaxation, exertion and rest.
The Australians did not make the same mistake as in 2005, in programming games outside the Tests of a derisory two days—no more than glorified net sessions. Again, though, there was a sense of time killed rather than used to advantage between the big events. The old-fashioned tour involving proper first-class matches against states, counties and provinces is a thing of the past, we are told, for economic reasons. Yet the ideal structure to succeed it, ensuring competition for places among players, providing an opportunity to retrieve form and confidence and to rehearse match conditions, has never really been found. On this longest of tours, the effect was even more pronounced than usual: the gaps between Tests were first and foremost about rest for those not playing, and then and only then for giving Andrew McDonald something to write about on his postcards home.
Like an army campaigning far from home, its supply lines stretched, Australia also had multiple centres of authority. There was a captain and a vice-captain. There was a coach and his staff. There was a duty selector, liaising with colleagues back in Australia. Only the last had a vote in choosing the teams. This is a recent arrangement and so far, as sportsmen these days are wont to mangle the expression, the proof is in the pudding. It is not at all clear how individuals 17 000 kilometres away and at least thirteen years out of international cricket are better equipped to choose teams than those on the spot.
Not that Australian players can complain overmuch; it was they who traded involvement in selection on tour away, thanks to the residue of Steve Waugh’s decisions to exclude Shane Warne from the St John’s Test of 1999 and Michael Slater from the Oval Test of 2001. Waugh and Warne in particular were never on quite the same terms thereafter. To borrow William Safire’s description of Richard Nixon and George Meany, they were ‘diametrically allied’: ‘That is, they respected and admired each other and did not like or trust each other’.
Quite how the decisions of the selectors from their far remove to exclude Phillip Hughes at Edgbaston and Nathan Hauritz at the Oval inflected the series can only be conjectural. But Ponting’s matter-of-fact comment in mid-November that he should be a selector, and that he had told Cricket Australia just that, suggested misgivings about the process that had grown rather than diminished since the Ashes.
When Australia plunged into the series at Cardiff, there seemed no holding them. The spirit they had bottled recently in South Africa was obvious. It was startling, however, with memories of the constant pressure and events of 2005 still fresh, to watch international cricket of such low intensity as on the fourth day, as Australia coasted towards a declaration against bowlers and fielders so devoid of energy and ambition. All teams look shabby under the cosh, of course, but some look shabbier than others: England here looked a great deal poorer than Australia in similar circumstances, awaiting a declaration, as at Lord’s. Marcus North was there capable of a brilliant direct hit run out, to dismiss Matt Prior, almost from the backward point boundary; England awaited Ponting’s move at Sophia Gardens like fidgety boys sent to the headmaster’s office hearing the swish of a cane.
Then, on the last afternoon, Australia faltered, as both sides would throughout the series, releasing the pressure so assiduously built. Ponting had come to the series excited by his team’s feat in overcoming South Africa on their home pitches; he owed loyalty, he felt, to the players who had delivered for him there. He relied on two in the game’s closing stages: Johnson and North. Neither broke through, nor looked like doing so. Hilfenhaus, despite five top order wickets, was granted just thirteen of the last day’s ninety-eight overs.
If this was a glimpse of Australia’s limitations, the first session at Lord’s revealed them in stark relief. In his book, Ponting paints a dainty but disturbing picture of his young players’ preparation: ‘I could hear the excitement in their voices and see an almost glazed look in their eyes when they first looked out over the ground they’ve dreamt about playing a Test on since they first thought about playing for Australia’. Australian eyes at Lord’s are meant to be gimlet not glazed; on the other hand, perhaps the only way to watch was between one’s fingers, as Andrew Strauss and Alastair Cook hit twenty-two boundaries before lunch.
When a team has played so badly, there is always the nagging sense, among themselves and their opponents, that a repeat is possible, maybe even probable, especially over cricket’s maximum course. It was Australia’s batsmen rather than their bowlers that plumbed the depths from then on, but in hindsight it was the first two hours of the Second Test that was a touchstone for England over the long, ensuing summer.
The institution of the five-Test series is due its next revival at the end of 2010 when England trip to Australia, and it is hard to know what to expect after the English prodigies of 2005, the Australian pageant of 2006–07 and the alternating predicaments of 2009. Which is, of course, exactly as one would wish it.