Haigh - The Ashes 2009

GOOD ENOUGH

GOOD ENOUGH

GIDEON HAIGH

Ricky Pontings Australians came to England in 2009 with a variety of missions. Of these, defending the Ashes they had recaptured at home in 200607 was merely the most obvious; there were several subsidiary purposes, including defending their status as the worlds number one Test nation from the rival claim of South Africa, and ratifying the pre-eminence of Test cricket in the face of the resistless tide of Twenty20. This last priority was subtly re-emphasised by the withdrawal of Ponting and his fellows from the Indian Premier League, and the teams brief and forgettable participation in the World Twenty20: this was a team with eyes on the one prize alone.

Andrew Strausss Englishmen hosted with a similar sense of priorities, with the incentive that their opponents were not one of the great Australian teams of yore, and that it was only four years since the nation had been sent into transports of delight by the achievements of Michael Vaughan, Andrew Flintoff and Kevin Pietersen. Since then, however, cricket had vanished from terrestrial free-to-air television. This would be a series for the faithful, needing something extra special to attract converts.

Me, I arrived to do something almost unpardonably luxurious: report a five-Test series. The Ashes was the first of its kind; it is the last one left. Its a purists enchantment and a marketers nightmare: twenty-five days of cricket which might, as in 1926 and 1953, feature an actual result on only one. It is still, at least where Australian and English cricketers are concerned, the forum that counts. In the main, anyway; nothing can be taken for granted in this fast-evolving, expanding and fragmenting game.

What did I think in advance? We all tend to overestimate the evidence of our own eyes. Id watched Australia play one of the best summers of Test cricket I can remember, losing 21 at home to South Africa, then reversing that scoreline on the reciprocal visit. They were a weaker team than their countrymen were accustomed to, and terribly ordinary at times, but I liked their spirit, and I admired their captains resolve. His first tour, in 1995, had coincided with Australias defining recapture of the Worrell Trophy, an initial step in the establishment of their global cricket hegemony; that being so, his whole career had been spent, as it were, on top. He was bearing the setbacks now with humility and dignity, scrapping hard with limited resources.

The English media had watched their team lose narrowly in the Caribbean, then at home beat out of sight a disgruntled and uninterested West Indies. They were optimistic, and not without reason. Dropped into the captaincy, Strauss had fitted like a penny into a slot. In Ravi Bopara, they had a Test batsman of great promise; in Paul Collingwood, they had a tigerish fighter. Pietersen and Flintoff, of course, were 2005 incarnate. Of Englands recent exploits, however, I had merely read reports and seen only highlights. Nor could I imagine Flintoff playing all five Tests, and my recollections of James Anderson, Steve Harmison and Monty Panesar from 200607 had left me wondering how much they could conceivably have improved between times.

What transpired over the next two months was an exhaustive and exhausting interrogation of the capabilities of two good, ordinary cricket teams with, I suspect, more violent swings in ascendancy than I can remember in my lifetimes cricket watching. Total domination and abject submission was the tenor of Ashes cricket during the 1990s, but the roles were fixed. Here the teams took it in turns, partly because of the conditions, a little because of the umpiring, but mainly because of their accumulation of frailties. Occasionally, it was brilliant; once in a while, it was ordinary; usually, it was fascinating. Sometimes I speculated accurately; often I was wrong, as you can here read for yourself. Like Ashes 2005 and Downed Under, this book is a faithful daily record of my impressions of the series, chosen from words I wrote for Business Spectator (Melbourne), The Times (London), The National (Abu Dhabi), a blog and a diary I maintained for Wisden Cricketer, plus some features for Ladbrokes and columns for The Australian and the Sunday Age. The articles are precisely contemporaneous; on two or three occasions, I have combined two pieces into one. The contents date back to reports I wrote for the Guardian, Wisden and Cricinfo of Australias summer, beginning at their lowest ebb, as they lost their first series at home to South Africa, and distant impressions of Englands winter, in particular the ousting as captain of Pietersen and the sacking as coach of Peter Moores. They end on 24 August, the day after England officially regained the Ashes.

The Ashes still feels like a tour rather than a trip, and my wife Charlotte and I were in a constant state of heartfelt gratitude for the hospitality we received from, among others, Stephanie Bunbury, Michael Atherton and Isabella de Caires, Sophie and Arun Matta, Andrew, Heather, Jenny and Lucy Hutchinson, Norm and Adele Geras, Professor Ken Smith, Susan Johnson, Stephen and Prudence Fay, Simon Rae and Ian Smith. To Michael, I feel a special debt, for it was thanks to his good offices that I found a friendly home at The Times. Above all, though, I dedicate this book to Charlotte, who shared her honeymoon with cricket, as she cheerfully shares her life.

At intervals during the Second Test, the Melbourne Cricket Ground public address system carried a soothing message: In the unlikely event of an emergency, the emergency management plan will swing into action. As South Africa cruised to its first series victory in Australia, fans waited in vain for similar reassurance from their exalted cricket team.

The expectation was pardonable. Since Test crickets inception at this ground 131 years ago, Australia had only lost home series to England, the West Indies and once to New Zealand. Now they have been beaten out of sight in two Test matches they had the winning of, just a month after their trouncing in Indiaenough to jeopardise their mantle as the worlds number one, and to warm the Ashes just a little.

Australias defeats in Perth and Melbourne have been two of their gravest, as notable for their manner as their margins. The Australian team of two years ago would have won the Test at the WACA by 200 runs, but South Africa cruised to the fourth-innings target of 414 at a smooth-sailing 3.5 runs an over.

At times in Melbourne, in fact, Ricky Pontings men played as other countries used to play against them, with a kind of grim, orderly, persevering mediocrity. It wasnt merely because the great man died on its eve that the drama seemed Pinteresquenothing was quite as it seemed, you spent a lot of time wondering what on earth was going on, and the third day featured a pause in the Australian effort that was no less pregnant for lasting virtually two sessions. The plot, meanwhile, turned expectation on its head. At stumps on day two, South Africa were less than halfway to first-innings parity with Australia, holding just three insecure wickets in reserve. Then a tail that had self-destructed in barely an hour in Perth clung for more than 100 overs. Ricky Ponting, apparently waiting for the innings to perish of natural causes, watched JP Duminy and Dale Steyn preserve their vital spark for 180 runs. Bowlers went through the motions to defensive fields, while catches were spilled and overthrows and penalty runs casually conceded.