No doubt even the cricket averse among you will be aware at some level that the England team is currently undergoing its traditional four yearly mauling at the hands of gleeful Australians under unforgiving, sun-drenched skies Down Under. Fans back home are enduring miserable nights, pock-marked by false hope, fever dreams and regret for engaging in the whole inevitable business of sporting despair but with added insomnia thrown in for good measure.
Failure in Australia means that really it doesn’t matter what England do until they win
The results on the pitch have once again been dismal, but in fairness to this team, they are simply following a trend that has seen England go winless for 17 consecutive matches in Australia stretching back to 2011. It’s their longest winless streak anywhere in the world since the whole business of test cricket began in 1877.
What is different this time is the framing of England’s failure by the Aussie media. In years gone by England have generally been typecast as effete milquetoasts, unable to hack the heat, the hard grounds and the aggressive ‘banter’ of the crowds. Australians by comparison are real men, hewn from granite, suckled on raw meat and happy to run a thousand miles across The Nullabor Plain, nonchalantly beating off crocodiles, venomous snakes and angry kangaroos along the way. The fact their army officially lost The Great Emu War of 1932 to a bunch of flightless birds is a conveniently forgotten memory. (No seriously, look it up. Their army lost. To emus.)
For sure there have been the usual laboured pre match headlines in the tabloid press. (No one does a lengthy headline like Aussie tabloids, except maybe the Daily Mail.) Starting in Perth we got a picture of Ben Stokes wheeling his bags across the airport with The West Australian newspaper screaming ‘BAZ BAWL: England’s Cocky Captain Complainer, still smarting from ‘crease-gate’, lands in Perth early thinking dopey ‘BazBall’ can take the Ashes‘. Now you could be forgiven for not being able to make sense of a single nugget of that inexcusable word salad. Unfortunately for me, I am able to deconstruct all of it, letter by letter, but it basically amounts to ‘this bunch of whingeing Poms are thick as well as useless’.
We shall return to this theme but let’s look at exhibit B from the same paper featuring a picture of Joe Root, the second most prolific test match run scorer of all time, also wheeling bags at the airport with this headline: ‘AVERAGE JOE. Dud Root Down Under: Hero in the homeland, pretender in Australia. The stats that haunt England’s greatest batter ahead of Ashes showdown.’
Couple of puns here, one of which, if you know what the word ‘root’ means to your average Australian, would appear to be questioning our ‘hero’s’ sexual prowess. This is more in the traditional vein of Aussie taunting where failure to score a hundred Down Under and only Down Under invalidates the other 39 hundreds that he’s previously scored. (At the second test, Root put the record straight with an unbeaten 138 but the rest of the team’s abject failure meant this hundred didn’t really count, apparently.)
So far this seems par for the course, but the eagle eyed will have spotted ‘dopey BazBall’. For the uninitiated ‘Bazball’ is a term coined by ESPN Cricinfo’s editor Andrew Miller to describe the style of play that England has adopted under its current coach Brendan McCullum (nicknamed Baz). It is aggressive, great fun to watch and for the most part transformed England’s turgid fortunes three years ago by releasing their players from the paralysing fear of failure. It has its flaws and everyone has a strong opinion about it because when it goes wrong it looks awful (test cricket has a habit of amplifying opprobrium if someone gets out attacking the ball rather than defending. There are reasons but this is not the time for me to explain them).
Australians though are particularly offended by it. For them it disgraces the traditions of test cricket. It’s flippant. It’s ‘disrespectful’ (whatever the hell that means), and when it goes wrong, as it has done quite spectacularly over the last few weeks, it’s stupid.
Veteran Australian commentator Jim Maxwell on BBC’s Test Match Special even went so far as to drip contempt in his bass-baritone as he described it, to the immediate terror of his producer, as ‘Bazbollocks’. (There followed an amusing scurry through the list of banned BBC words to see what we commentators actually could get away with. It turns out ‘bloody’ is actually pretty much OK now but ‘beaver’ is very much not, which came as something of a blow to lead commentator Jonathan Agnew who lives in and frequently refers to The (Vale Of) Belvoir, pronounced beaver.)
What Bazball appears to have ignited is a full blown culture war. The standard stereotype of aggressive, intellectually limited large Aussies coming hard at slender, calculating but defensive English traditionalists has been turned on its head. It is England which has a battery of large, fast bowlers trying to knock Aussie heads off (which in fairness they successfully did in the first innings at Perth) and smash the cover off the ball when batting, while Australia has called up some distinctly English style medium pacers to bowl physically unthreatening lines and lengths. Unfortunately for England, even in this Bizarro world, the results have remained the same as ever.
Amidst all this gloom I come at you, though, armed with hope
In part this is because the charge of stupidity laid at England’s door cannot entirely be gainsaid. Their most talented batsman, Harry Brook, played a shot of such overwhelming stupidity at Brisbane that if you were minded to open a Museum Of Stupid you could do a lot worse than have a giant screen playing his dismissal on a loop in a turbine hall while an AI generated Orson Welles voice portentously explained the precise circumstances that preceded this epic brain fade. The fact that his team mate Gus Atkinson then attempted to boot him off top spot with an almost equally dim-witted entry in to the annals of stupid 72 hours later just emboldens the case for the prosecution.
In response to the latest failure, England’s coach has insisted that despite his players only playing eight days of cricket in the last four weeks, the side has, if anything, ‘over-prepared’, while the captain Ben Stokes has gnomically growled that his ‘team is no place for weak men’.
Failure in Australia means that really it doesn’t matter what England do until they win. The Courier Mail in Brisbane lambasted them for not wearing helmets while riding a scooter (because in the land of rock hard Aussie larrikins you should always obey the laws, even when travelling at 7 mph on an empty road, unless you happen to be Ned Kelly, in which case helmet wearing carries the death penalty), and have now copped a mouthful for being pictured putting sun screen on each other’s backs on a beach in Queensland. This is the country that invented the ‘slip-slop-slap’ public health campaign, warning of the dangers of skin cancer. And a very good campaign it was too. But if England cricketers are heeding it, or perhaps being photographed having a coffee outside, they are accused of ‘not even trying anymore’.
Amidst all this gloom I come at you, though, armed with hope. Although no England side has ever overturned a 2-0 deficit to win a five match series, and despite the imminent return of Australia’s captain and champion bowler Pat Cummins there remain grounds for optimism. The last three matches are all on pitches where England won handsomely the last time they held the Ashes in Australia. And if England lacked match fitness going into this series, then they have at least now played two games, unlike Australia’s captain. But perhaps most encouraging is that in this Age Of Stupid, England are leaning into the zeitgeist while Australia may have chosen just the wrong time to find their brains.
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