Australia reach goal, yet it could have been more
A drawn Test series was mission accomplished but reliance on Smith in Ashes was disappointing
If for England it has been the longest summer, for Australia it has been the longest winter. On May 17, Australia arrived to confront the twin obstacles of playing both the World Cup and the Ashes away: exactly the same schedule, indeed, that England had rejigged the Ashes cycle to avoid.
Privately, Australia were unambiguous about their priority. Lifting the World Cup had become devalued by its frequency – they had won four of the previous five. All the while, they had lost every Ashes series in England since 2001.
As Tim Paine proudly held the urn aloft at the Oval as his side embarked upon a celebratory lap of honour, it confirmed that Australia had made good on their primary target.
“Who did we beat? England.” “How did we do it? Easy.” So sang Australia’s players after victory at Old Trafford. Yet now, whether they really did so is a matter of interpretation. This was victory without victory – but the urn was the thing, of course.
“Overall, had you said we’d have taken the urn, we’d have jumped at it,” Paine said, agreeing that a 2-2 tied series still represented mission accomplished. “When you put into perspective what we’ve done over the past 12 months, had you said we’d have retained the Ashes, I
think we’d have taken it, and most Australians would have.”
That is surely right, but it cannot obscure how Australia’s failure to win the series revealed a team with “parts that we need to improve”, as Paine admitted. Having prepared better than England, outperformed them for swathes of the first four Tests and been buttressed both by one of the greatest individual batting displays in a Test series and a phenomenal new-ball pair, Australia may be left wondering how exactly they failed to win.
This ultimate lack of outright victory betrayed Australia’s extraordinary overdependence on Steve Smith, who scored 30 per cent of all their runs this series – even Don Bradman only managed 25 per cent – despite missing three innings.
Their next two highest runscorers were Marnus Labuschagne and Matthew Wade, who ended the series with a century. These were two players who fulfilled Justin Langer’s dictum of “character over
Australia looked, more than anything, like a team who simply wanted to go home
cover drives”. Both arrived for the Test series well acquainted with scoring runs in English conditions; Labuschagne for Glamorgan, Wade for Australia A.
For the rest, the unforgiving cocktail of five Tests in six weeks, with only a couple of tour games in between, and the difficulties of batting – especially opening – in England acted as a roadblock against finding form. So Australia ditched Test batsmen as if they were Tinder dates: Cameron Bancroft, Usman Khawaja and Travis Head were all discarded over the campaign. Were there a sixth Test, both Marcus Harris and David Warner – averaging 9.66 and 9.50 – would risk the same fate.
These difficulties are a window into deeper questions in Australian cricket, many of which are simply England’s problems with an Antipodean tint. The Big Bash has shunted the Sheffield Shield, the nursery for Test cricketers, to the margins and incentivised players to focus on Twenty20 lucre. That Harris was comfortably the top run-scorer in last year’s Shield is hardly an endorsement.
At the Oval, before what Paine had described as the team’s grand final – even if the Old Trafford celebrations suggested otherwise