Ashes 2011 (25 page)

To the same cameras at the presentation, Ponting anticipated an afternoon of quiet deliberation with the selectors, even if the way Australia's selectors have been going this summer, this sounded more like a threat than a promise. He is not a quitter. His broken finger was X-rayed again this morning as a precaution. There was no need to look inside his head: its attention and focus will be undivided.

Forty years ago, Bill Lawry was sacked as Australian captain under similar circumstances. The difference then was that a vice-captain, Ian Chappell, had been groomed at length, and was ready to oversee the necessary generational change. A greater problem for Australia than even Ponting's form is that his deputy, Michael Clarke, has gone from fours and sixes a year ago to sixes and sevens today. He has even stopped tweeting, a tic of his that had become as ingrained as a stammer. It would not come as a surprise if Clarke gave way at the SCG to 24-year-old Usman Khawaja, his fellow old boy of Westfield Sports High School, who was on stand-by for this Test had Ponting's finger not passed medical inspection. Khawaja will have big shoes to fill, although they are smaller than they were – likewise for others who succeed to this Australian team.

All summer, while watching this Ashes unfold, one has been semi-consciously ticking off mental notes of corresponding dates four years ago. The Gabba Test was shadowed by the memory of Harmison's first-ball wide, the Adelaide Test by Shane Warne's last-day coup, the Perth Test by Gilchrist's riotous hundred. Today in Melbourne, a state of total topsy-turvitude was reached. England retained the Ashes on the fourth anniversary of nothing at all, Andrew Flintoff's team having lost the previous Ashes Test here in three days.

Four years ago, England arrived in Melbourne having already surrendered the Ashes, and amid salaams of praise for the retiring Shane Warne and Glenn McGrath. Their role in the series had contracted to that performed by the Washington Generals in games with the Harlem Globetrotters: human obstacles around whom trick shots were to be executed. Their defeat was similarly foreordained. Andrew Strauss recalled it today as 'the lowest point of my career and a lot of guys felt similarly'.

Four years ago, it was Australia setting the off-field standard too. There was John Buchanan's boot camp. There was Ricky Ponting's drive to win the DLF Cup in Malaysia and the Champions Trophy in India, in order to instil winning habits. There were the roles found for bowling coach Troy Cooley and fielding coach Mike Young, Australia having envied England's backroom staff in 2005.

Flash forward, and the roles have been exactly swapped. The boot camp was on the other foot, as it were, Andy Flower cobbling together his own. England chose a batting coach experienced in Australia, Graham Gooch, and a bowling coach from Australia, David Saker – these offices had been held four years earlier by Matthew Maynard and Kevin Shine, neither of them steeped in conditions down under.

In 2006, Duncan Fletcher was content with one drawn first-class game before the First Test. 'My philosophy was always that I did not want players tiring themselves out before the series started,' he argued in
Behind the Shades.
'I preferred them slightly underdone as opposed to overdone.' Arriving at the Gabba raw, England left it cooked. Landing this time two weeks earlier, a month before the First Test, England played full-dress sides in three full-scale matches, two of which they won.

A certain scepticism is advisable where such comparisons are concerned. Preparation is often a phenomenon glimpsed in hindsight. Wellington didn't ask for the 'playing fields of Eton' to be prepared
in case of
a Battle of Waterloo; he sensed their significance afterwards. A boot camp, three first-class games and the coaching services of Vince Lombardi would not have prevented Flintoff's team losing 5–0.

But what has been important about the preparation of this England team has been the sense it has instilled and conveyed of common purpose. In particular, you could not get a cigarette paper between Andrews Flower and Strauss – they seem capable of finishing one another's sentences. In the November edition of
Wisden Cricketer,
they were asked to delineate their leadership philosophies: their answers could have been transposed without difficulty, especially those stressing the need for players' self-reliance and self-direction.

The team both carries their stamp, and does not. Perhaps only Javed Miandad in history has mastered the reverse sweep more completely than Flower, but none of England's batsmen have relied on the stroke this summer. Although Strauss is an avowed non-reader of media lest he encounter anything 'too complimentary or too critical', he seems comfortable with all Graeme Swann's video japes, and even to enjoy them. Where Australian players talk always of their 'plan', their English counterparts are prepared to exercise judgement themselves. When Alastair Cook batted for two days in Brisbane, you can be pretty sure he did not prepare for it by PowerPoint.

In instituting Flower's tough physical regime, too, Strauss enjoys a great advantage. Where bowler Flintoff towards the end of his career was barely capable of playing let alone training, batsman Strauss can tackle all the off-the-field work. Had Flintoff undertaken one of the 'pressurisation' routines in which England's players now practise while also exhausting themselves through boxing, sit-ups, press-ups et al. in order to learn to play tired, his recovery session might have put
I'affaire Fredalo
in the shade.

The most visible manifestation of England's esprit de corps, thanks to Richard Halsall and his bowling machines, has been in the field. Not since Mike Brearley's team of 1978–79 has an England side so eclipsed Australia in catching, throwing, intercepting and retrieving. Part of this was in specific contemplation of the flat pitches of Australia, on which twenty wickets can be elusive, and where thrift in the field is paramount. But it has also contributed to what might be called – hesitantly, because the word was last year used to death – England's 'aura'. Slick fielding doesn't just exploit doubt; it induces it.

The MCG's surface area often sorts visiting teams out. Thanks to the Australian rules football played here, the outfield is slow, so everything must be chased, and big, requiring powerful throwing arms. Yet it was noticeable throughout this game how superior England's outcricket was. Where Australia's returns from the deep were arriving on the bounce and landing at Haddin's feet, England's kept rocketing over the stumps. As at Adelaide, Jonathan Trott broke the Australian opening partnership with a quicksilver pick-up and flick-in.

Above all, perhaps, English preparation has conquered Australia's local knowledge. It has traditionally been far harder for English players to come to Australia than vice versa, because of our variety of cricket microclimates: if anything, the venues this season have been more various than for some time, after criticism of their growing uniformity.

Yet it has been Australia who have looked more often like the visiting team. In Melbourne, for instance, England had Tim Bresnan to take advantage of the abrasive square and bowl reverse swing; Australia had nobody. What a difference, then, four years can make. Such a difference, in fact, that the visitors can at last cease brooding on the events of four years ago.

After all the presentation ceremonies and sprinkler dances concluded at the MCG on Wednesday, the show had to go on. The Ashes might have been decided and the ground might have been largely empty, but on trooped hundreds of lookalike tinies for their lunchtime display of Milo in2Cricket.

Such scenes normally have an appealing gaiety. But in the aftermath of the towelling inflicted on the home side, there was an undertone of desperation. These are the hearts and minds Cricket Australia will have to win in order to compete in future, with England, and with rival sports. Quick, sign them before the AFL does!

The Ashes provokes soul-searching as no other cricket event. Two summers ago, Australia were soundly beaten by South Africa. Nobody then was plunged into self-doubt or self-recrimination. We were 'rebuilding'. We were 'in transition'. We had lost a generation of fine cricketers. Patience was required.

But England is Australia's eternal benchmark – as Australia is England's. Nobody in either country is any the less exercised by England's retention of the Ashes for the fact that the series has pitted fourth in the world against fifth according to the International Cricket Council rankings. 'Do anything you like,' was Ian Chappell's famous advice when Allan Border became Australian captain in the mid-1980s. 'Just don't lose to the poms.' Australian cricket has failed in its prime directive.

Nor will the euphemisms about transition suffice any longer. England have had to rebuild too. The First Tests of 2005 and 2010 had three players in common on both sides: Ricky Ponting, Michael Clarke and Simon Katich for Australia; Andrew Strauss, Ian Bell and Kevin Pietersen for England.

From England's much-maligned county system has since emerged an opening batsman with fifteen Test hundreds while he was still twenty-five, Alastair Cook, and the world's best slow bowler, Graeme Swann. In the same period, Australia's widely envied domestic competition and expensive Centre of Excellence have produced heavily hyped colts like Phil Hughes and David Warner, and psychiatric case studies in Mitchell Johnson and Shaun Tait.

Hughes holds down a position as a Test opener after a summer containing one half-century in thirteen first-class innings. Warner has one half-century to show for his season of flitting between games for Australia, New South Wales and New Zealand's Northern Districts. His big day out in Perth aside, Johnson's wickets in his last three series have cost 60 each. Tait looks like spending the rest of his career bowling spells no longer than four overs.

Here is a conundrum. In the last decade, Australian cricketers have become the best paid in the world, even interstate players earning six-figure salaries as a matter of course. It has become possible for an Australian cricketer to make a tidy income on the basis of quite ordinary performances.

Worse, players are surrounded now by a complicated superstructure of overlapping programmes, checks and balances, regulating their workloads, monitoring their progress, making their decisions. Johnson is an outcome of this culture, a cricketer of great raw talent who now seems incapable of doing anything for himself, a Frankenstein's monster put together from a thousand different modifications and adjustments.

It is no wonder that when they talk today, Australian cricketers sound like mid-level bureaucrats, evading accountability, doing as they are told. Everyone has 'plans'. Everyone has 'skill sets'. Nobody seems to do anything individually. When Shane Watson bowled poorly in Brisbane, for example, he explained that it was because 'all of us as a bowling group weren't able to consistently execute to build the pressure that was needed'.

Of course, every cricketer tends to sound like a drone in press conferences. If the Australians this summer have sounded like bureaucrats, the Englishmen have sounded like politicians, earnestly avoiding the saying of anything at all. Behind the scenes, however, there is a strong sense of England doing what Australia used to be renowned for: grooming strong-willed, self-directed cricketers.

The worrying observable reality for Australia is that the three most impressive Australians this summer, Michael Hussey, Brad Haddin and Ryan Harris, are all in their thirties, all the products of an earlier, hungrier culture. This raises disturbing questions about the effectiveness both of the Centre of Excellence, the Australian cricket incubator in operation since January 2004, and of Tim Nielsen, who ran it in its first three years before succeeding John Buchanan as national coach – not to mention the judgement of those at Cricket Australia who before the Ashes extended Nielsen's contract for three years.

Judges as sound as Steve Waugh and Peter Roebuck have expressed concern about the accent in Australian senior coaching on shorter forms of the game. 'You have to have the basics and good foundation that you know will hold up under pressure and right now I don't think some (players) have done the hard work,' said Waugh last week. 'They are opening their front leg up and playing a lot of shots front-on to the bowler. I think in a tough situation you have to be side-on, leave the ball and play with soft hands, and they are not really doing it.'

Inauspicious, too, is that Australian cricket actually seems in the process of weakening rather than strengthening its centre, while quietly giving five-day cricket up for lost. Although the total crowd for the Boxing Day Test reached a quarter of a million, CA's public affairs manager Peter Young insists on describing Test matches as 'a bit like reading Shakespeare or listening to Beethoven' – a sentiment straight from his marketing department that manages to be both pretentious
and
condescending.

Enormous resources and manpower are being dedicated at present to the expansion of Australia's interstate domestic Twenty20 competition, which will from next year become the Big Bash League, involving some of the features of the multi-billion-dollar Indian Premier League: franchise teams, private ownership and hopefully big television bucks to boot.

Cricket Australia presents it as a bold response to its generational malaise, to engage parents and ten-year-olds that market research suggests are latching instead on to the various football codes, and to develop 'new markets' – an expression administrators now use as heavily as cricketers use 'skill sets'. But because the Big Bash League can never seriously rival the IPL, the risk is that Cricket Australia is simply rolling out a 'me-too' product in a format that will be passé in ten years. And that they are doing so because the federal structure of Australian cricket encourages the state associations to act chiefly in their own interests, in order to perpetuate the sizeable secretariats they have come to employ.