Although England made a fight of the fifth and final match of the Ashes series they were never close to altering the result that had looked likely for some time. They reduced the margin to five wickets, but that was all.
‘BAZBALL’ HAS RUN ITS COURSE
When Brendon McCullum and Ben Stokes took up their respective positions England had recorded one victory in their previous 17 matches, and their approach had little entertainment. They came into this series with hopes high, especially with Australia’s bowling unit weakened at the start of the series. In the first two matches, when they should have been capitalising on this, and trying to force some serious miles into Mitchell Starc’s legs their batting collapsed three times in four innings, resulting in two heavy defeats. While there was some excuse in Perth where conditions were difficult for batting there was none in Brisbane. There England’s second innings began with the side considerably in deficit and having to bat under the lights early on, but with the knowledge that making it to the close without too much damage would enable them to enjoy the better daytime batting conditions on the morrow. They surrendered six wickets in that session of batting, five of them definitely batter error, and with it virtually guaranteed themselves an 0-2 deficit heading to Adelaide. In Adelaide the loss of both Ashes and series was confirmed. England went into the final innings needing 435 to win, and managed to score 352 of them. The Melbourne match saw England win by four wickets in a match that occupied less than two full days, as neither side managed to bat decently on a difficult track. In Sydney England were second best all the way, though Root in the first innings and Bethell in the second each scored big hundreds batting in traditional test match fashion to provide some comfort for their side. Bethell was only playing because Ollie Pope had fared so badly that England felt it necessary to drop him. Jamie Smith, who is a high class batter when his mind is focussed, had a very poor series, and his two dismissals at Sydney, holing out to deep cover off Marnus Labuschagne, walking into a very obvious trap, and then dozily run out in the second were illustrative of the malaise the gripped England’s batting other than Root and Bethell. Crawley’s returns were pretty much entirely typical of that worthy – some way short of what is required at the highest level, but about what he usually delivers. Ben Duckett had a horror series. It was not so much the four complete failures which made it so – most openers are sometimes dismissed very early, and four such instances out of 10 is not very surprising. The problem was that in the other six innings, in which he got as far as 20 his best effort was a mere 42. To have had an acceptable series as opener he would have needed four of those six starts to become fifties, and two of those four 50+ scores to become hundreds. Brook showed more inclination to dig in once the series was lost, but his early series efforts smacked of both arrogance and laziness.
LACK OF PREPARATION
England came into the first match of the series without having played a genuine match – their ‘warm up’ consisted of a game between themselves and The Lions as England call their reserve squad, in which both sides used more than 11 players. Then, although the Prime Minister’s XI match, a feature of every tour of Australia, was specifically arranged as a pink ball match in the run up to Brisbane England arrogantly refused to have anyone from the main squad play in that game. Several of the England XI who arrived in Brisbane had never played even a first class match using a pink ball. Matthew Potts had bowled well in the Prime Minister’s XI match, but when he next featured, in the final match at Sydney he had done no further bowling in match conditions, and he bowled very poorly, and frankly deserved his first innings figures (25-1-141-0). He was not called on in the second innings. England need to get their heads out of the sand on this one and acknowledge that they need to play more proper matches.
PHOTOGRAPHS
My usual sign off…
aspiblog 