Sport | 16 December 2006

Ashes to ashes. Oh, England our England! First the football, then the rugby …and now the prettiest balloon of them all has been well and truly pricked so soon after its jingo-jangled and so jauntily buoyant launch. I sense blame about to be heaped on the wives and girlfriends, the dreaded Wags. Cricket’s lot have been landing in Australia all month. Comfort and compassion are suddenly the priority, not, as they’d thought, the top-up of their tans. At least cricket’s Wags seem less brazen and more softly simpatico than football’s slebby femmes fatales in Germany last summer. After his heroic bowling was so wantonly squandered in the debacle at Adelaide, Matthew Hoggard sighed to his Times ghostwriter that at least his disappointment ensured ‘a  cuddle from wife Sarah’ when she arrived in Perth. The kids have piled in too: in his Sunday Telegraph diary, batsman Andrew Strauss admitted he’d spent the eve of the opening catastrophe in Brisbane looking after baby son Sam, ‘playing with toys, changing nappies, and guarding against dangerous objects — the perfect foil for all the intensity of morning practice’.

Once wives were solely the captain’s perk. W.G. Grace and his Agnes used the 1873-74 Australian tour as a honeymoon, Archie MacLaren married his Maud during the 1901-02 tour, and Ted Dexter took along Susan for the 1962-63 Ashes series. Wags first descended in uxorial mass for Melbourne’s Christmas Test of 1974, and I can still vividly picture the horrified face of man’s-man Keith Miller at the door of the breakfast-room at the Windsor Hotel on the first morning of the match. At least it gave him on a plate his front-page column for next day’s Daily Express: ‘The dining-room is littered with high-chairs, with England’s so-called heroes popping cornflakes into their youngsters’ mouths. Test cricketers? These men are weak-kneed imposters.