Tremlett: It all looks a bit too familiar to four years ago
ONCE you hit the skids in an Ashes series there’s only usually one winner. And it’s rarely England.
It’s a fact that Chris Tremlett is painfully aware of having been part of the England side that came horribly unstuck in 2013/14, just three years after playing a key role in a team that made Ashes history.
At the start of this Ashes series, Nathan Lyon said that he hoped to end a few careers – a statement that created fury in the England camp but doubtless brought back a few painful memories for those players who never played for their country again following a pasting at the hands of Mitchell Johnson.
Trevor Bayliss has already made it clear that some international futures are on the line following events off the pitch in Perth at the start and middle of the tour.
And Tremlett believes that getting out of a situation very much of their own making is going to be as tough an assignment as any of these players have faced before.
“The Bairstow story cropped up almost six weeks after it had happened but those sort of things can happen when you get on a losing streak,” he says.
“When the media are looking for a story – particularly the Aussie media – they just want to bring up any dirt they can.
“Trevor Bayliss is a pretty relaxed kind of coach but having put his trust in the players, I think a few of them probably need to take a long hard look at themselves.
“There will be huge frustration (at the latest bar incident) because it just takes the attention away from what the guys are doing on the pitch.
“It winds the management up and takes away all the focus. Guys don’t want to walk into Press conferences and be asked about night time activities, they want to be going in talking about how we’re going to beat Australia in the next Test.
“All in all it’s shaping up to be a very similar experience to what we went through in 2013/14.”
By the time England arrived in Perth four years ago, their self-belief had already been severely shaken by Johnson, Peter Siddle and Ryan Harris.
In retrospect the performance at the WACA was probably the most complete that England managed throughout the series but everything is relative given that it still ended in a comfortable 150run win for the Aussies.
That proved to be Graeme Swann’s last match for England and by the time they arrived in Melbourne for the Boxing Day Test, Matt Prior had also been replaced behind the stumps by Jonny Bairstow.
An injury-hit Prior would only win four more England caps. Kevin Pietersen’s appearance in Sydney in a truly dismal series finale would, of course, prove to be the last of his tumultuous international career.
With many commentators ruminating over Alastair Cook’s Test future, there could be similarly seismic changes to England’s makeup by the time the first match of the summer rolls around in May.
First up, though, England need to ensure that the tour ends far better than it has begun and the only way to do that, Tremlett believes, is to bring the focus back to events on the pitch.
“There were stories that kept cropping up on the last tour, too,” says Tremlett. “We had Joe Root going to an Adelaide nightclub, Swanny then went home, Jonathan Trott had already left, things just kept happening and everything spiralled.
“Once that happens in Australia then it’s very hard to get control again. As soon as there’s an outside focus from the media then that focuses the attention away from the playing – and that’s the last thing you want in your set-up. You need to be 100 per cent focused on beating Australia, which we had been in 2010/11.”