No foregone conclusions for upcoming Ashes series
“Shame!” the headlines have screamed for weeks now. Australia are “grovelling”.
There’s been fisticuffs, arguments over dressing room homework – players sent home from tour. Just 16 days before the Ashes – the coach was sacked.
Never, it would seem, have an Australian team been worse prepared for cricket’s oldest prize. Or are they?
It’s tempting for us armchairs dwellers to predict the outcome of this summer’s five test series is a foregone conclusion. But complacency in the past has been a path to disappointment and ruin.
English paceman Steve Finn, fighting for his place on a teamsheet that will be revealed on Saturday afternoon, warned me this morning not to be too hasty. Because “it’s easy to believe they are in disarray”.
So let us not be too hasty. As we know those Aussies are a wily old lot – which is the reason, Finn says, England are “very focused on whats happening in the four walls of our [own] dressing room”.
24-years-young but he’s clearly learnt a very English lesson – that history tells us far too much to take current form as a guide to future success. Even if the Ashes are but a fortnight away.
Recall 2005, when a rather well oiled Freddie Flintoff celebrated recapture of the urn after a desolate 18 years? That was an era when Australia were meant to be invincible, so let us not forget – beware the underdog.
Damian Martyn still bears the scars of being part of the “unbeatable” Australia that overstretched.
An Australia team featuring the likes of Shane Warne, Brett Lee, and Ricky Ponting – yet in trying to conquer India, Sri Lanka, and then Ashes – they crashed and burned.
“It doesn’t matter”, Martyn warns, “how many greats you have in your side, or how many champions – you can get beaten any day”.
And this year’s Wimbledon, he suggests, is a rather obvious case in point.
“Yes,” he says – “we’re underdogs. But there’s a chance – I mean, there has to be a chance!”
Sadly for England this is no wishful thinking.
In ’89 Allan Border’s team arrived to be told they were the worst Australian team ever. Sound familiar? They were supposedly no hopers. They won the series 4-nil.
Unsurprisingly Oz batsman Tom Moody has very fond memories of that tour to England.
“you get the bit between the teeth”, he smiled down at me from 6ft 7″ up, adding that it helped “galvanise us as a group”.
And what unites – indeed galvanises – these two teams, is the shared history. The shared passion. The shared heroes.
On his day Stuart Broad bowls like a demon. He too knows the feeling of Ashes success. He was in both the 2009 and 2011 winning England sides that have tipped the momentum back in England’s favour.
But Broad spent his teenage years “watching Mcgrath and Warne just bowl us out, watching Australia beat us – so actually a lot of my cricketing heroes are Australian”.
England might be current guardians of the legendary little urn – but over the years, how that privilege has swung like a worn old ball.
England wins – 30. Australia wins 31. The 2013 ashes start next Wednesday.
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