After awful Ashes defeat, will England ever be good at Test cricket again?-by
Jonathan Liew
Jimmy Anderson sees a Cameron Green delivery clatter his stumps as England’s second innings ends on 68 to complete their innings defeat. Photograph: Darrian Traynor/Cricket Australia/Getty Images
Source:Theguardian
It’s vaguely amusing to recall now that for much of the year, the very existence of this Ashes series was the subject of fraught, board-level speculation. Tense negotiations were conducted between Cricket Australia and their counterparts in England. State governments, federal government, public health experts and players all had to bestow their approval. Would the 2021-22 Ashes happen at all?
Well, as it turned out, not really. Around 850 overs separated the dismissal of Rory Burns on the first morning in Brisbane and the dismissal of Jimmy Anderson on the third morning in Melbourne: the series decided in a little over nine days of cricket. And so as the victorious Australians celebrated wildly on the MCG outfield, it was possible to wonder whether they were overdoing things a touch. Was there any real satisfaction to be taken in despatching an opponent this easily? Did it not all feel a little hollow? A little comfortable? A little embarrassing?
But then perhaps we are guilty here of reducing the contest as a whole to England’s desiccated level. After all, to play Test cricket for Australia in 2021 still essentially means something. Winning Test matches for Australia still means something. The Ashes still means something, and not just as a rivalry or as a commercial concern but as a basic test of sporting ultimacy, a seeker of truth, a gauge of character.
Nobody exemplified this better than Scott Boland, the country’s newest cricketing hero after taking six for seven on debut. Boland is a fine bowler and a lovely story to boot, but he will be the first to admit that none of this really made sense. Never again will he enjoy the serendipity of being able to face this opposition, on this ground, at this point in their sporting trajectory. All he really had to do was turn up on time, put his socks on and not get no-balled for throwing. And yet in running in hard and doing his best, Boland accorded this contest a measure of respect that England had long since mislaid.
Ashes ‘not over yet’ maintains Joe Root after Australia secure series victory – video
What does it mean to play Test cricket for England in 2021? This is a more contested question. England have issued caps to 25 players this calendar year, from Jofra Archer to James Bracey, Dan Lawrence to Dom Bess, and it has long become impossible to discern who deserves what. Somewhere amid the bubbles and the brain-fades, the revamps and the rotations, the very point of the England Test team has become somehow blunted, dissolved, obscured. None of this makes it inevitable that you will get rolled over for 68 in bright sunshine. But it certainly doesn’t help.
A thought exercise: if you had to reselect an England squad for this Ashes tour, knowing what we do now, would it have been possible to do anything differently? Maybe you send out a distress flare to Dom Sibley or Liam Livingstone or even Darren Stevens. Maybe you decide not to rush a half-paced Ben Stokes back from injury. But the raw materials of this team do not fundamentally change. This is what there is. Instinctively, we want to believe that there are 11 cricketers in England capable of collectively scoring more than 68 in a completed Test innings. But maybe there aren’t.
