Scyld Berry England have nowhere to hide in toughest test
History suggests Joe Root’s side are rank outsiders ahead of the latest chapter in cricket’s longest-running grudge match
It’s almost against all the odds, isn’t it?” This was the rhetorical question which England’s captain Joe Root posed a few days ago in Townsville before his team’s warm-up game ahead of the Ashes. “You’re in their backyard,” Root explained. “Everyone in the ground seems to think that they’re playing for Australia, and they’ll do everything they can to help their side.”
Root is realistic in his assessment of England’s chances over the next two months, and right. It is becoming increasingly rare for England to win an Ashes series in Australia. In English conditions, the two countries have always been well matched; in Australia, the home side have developed an ever-growing superiority, to the point where they have won three times as many Tests as England since 1980: 27 to nine.
England offers hiding places for touring Australian cricketers: rain for a start, so there is always the chance of the respite that is a draw, which is one reason why England have never won more than three Tests in a home Ashes series. Australia offers no escape. Sir Leonard Hutton – one of only two England captains, in effect, who won home and away Ashes series – used to tell me: “In Australia the ball is harder, the pitches are harder – and the people are harder.”
So hard, indeed, that in two of their last three Ashes series here, England have been humiliated 5-0. Every fibre of an England cricketer is examined, any weakness in the make-up of his mind or body or technique exposed. It is make or break – and few make it. The majority are broken.
Those rare successful tours have had features in common. England have had superior fast bowling, perhaps a great match-winner like Harold Larwood on the Bodyline tour of 1932-33 – and he was sharper than anyone Australia possessed when England won in 1928-29.
In 1954-55 Hutton unleashed Frank Tyson, blessed with Brian Statham to bowl opposite him and into the wind; in 1970-71 Ray Illingworth deployed John Snow to bounce the ball at Australian ribs and unhelmeted heads; in 1986-87 it was a collective effort by England’s pace bowlers, and again in 2010-11, although James Anderson – with his 24 wickets – almost ranked alongside Larwood, Tyson and Snow.
There have been other common denominators in these six Asheswinning series – the 1978-79 victory can hardly be counted because Kerry Packer had signed
‘Everyone in the ground thinks that they’re playing for Australia and they’ll do anything to help their side’
all Australia’s main cricketers (when they returned the following winter, the 5-1 win to England was turned into 3-0 to Australia).
In these six triumphs England have always had an accurate if not match-winning spinner: left-armers in Jack White, Hedley Verity, Johnny Wardle, Derek Underwood and Phil Edmonds, off-spinners in John Emburey (his partnership in 1986-87 with Edmonds clamped Australia down to two runs an over) and Graeme Swann. It is asking a lot of the batsman-turned-offspinner Moeen Ali to emulate them.
Other common features of these triumphs have been England’s superior tailend batting, fielding and wicketkeeping. Indeed, England’s wicketkeeper is a most accurate barometer. Since 1983, when England have kept the same wicketkeeper throughout an Ashes series in Australia, they have won.
Whenever they have changed horses in midstream they have lost. It will not be a good sign if, as has been mooted, Jonny Bairstow is made into a specialist batsman in mid-series and Ben Foakes brought in to keep wicket.
Above all, if we subscribe to the version of history that it is fashioned by great men, England have had an outstanding leader to captain these victorious touring parties. Often they have had mild, affable exteriors.
The pre-war amateurs Percy Chapman and Douglas Jardine, the Yorkshiremen Hutton and Illingworth and the Middlesex pair of Mike Gatting and Andrew Strauss – they did not have the physical presence to threaten you in a dark alley on a Saturday night. Yet they had a steely purpose. They knew that winning in Australia would define their lives. They formulated their strategy. They led. They won.
Even then, however, they needed good fortune to favour them. Chapman and Jardine found that Australia’s selectors had clung on too long to the generation that had learnt their cricket before or during the First World War, and had fought in it too: it was understandable that these players, war veterans, should be given back the time they had lost.
Hutton found, again, that Australia’s selectors had been too loyal to men who had fought in the Second World War, at the expense of youth. In the late 1950s and 1960s cricket became dull – the 1962-63 and 1965-66 series brought the Ashes into disrepute for the only time, because Australia were content with retaining them at home by means of boring 1-1 draws, even when Richie Benaud was captain in the former series – and Illingworth profited from Australia’s lack of youth again. Gatting found his hosts divided and weakened because a team of rebels had gone to apartheid South Africa and been banned.
Strauss was the one to win when Australian cricket was institutionally sound. His strategy can be likened to a spear. It was immediately thrust into the Australian side by dominating the warm-up games against strong teams. He never withdrew the spear, never changed strategy, even when England were overwhelmed by Mitchell Johnson in the third Test at Perth, which levelled the series at 1-1 with two to play.
They continued to reel off the centuries – six players made hundreds, with Alastair Cook scoring three – and to bowl unrelentingly accurate fastmedium outside off stump with a bit of lateral movement, and to field their socks off, until England had won 3-1. So had Hutton.
South Africa, using much the same strategy, have subsequently proved that it is not impossible to beat Australia in their own conditions, although they did so (twice) in three not five-test series, so the spear did not have to stay in so long.
Whether Root’s team can do the same is the question of this moment. On the plus side, he could be Hutton’s son, or grandson: quietly spoken, well-mannered, clear-eyed, relatively slim of stature, brought up on best practice in Yorkshire club cricket.
On the other hand, Root’s team do not have a settled batting line-up, or superiority in fast bowling (not least because so many pace bowlers are injured) or in spin, and their catching is far more fallible than Australia’s. The absence of Ben Stokes is injurious. Yes, it would be against the odds.