There was a moment, a week ago, when some of us said this series couldn’t get any weirder. We had already had Australia’s whopping comeback victory at Lord’s, which involved one of the world’s least-convincing-looking batsmen stockpiling 273 runs, and Ben Stokes managing to make both a hero and a prat of himself in 24 hours. Now we had witnessed Steven Finn’s miraculous return/Australia’s incomprehensible collapse – delete as appropriate – and another game had finished before tea on the third day. If this Ashes had any bigger surprises to come, they would probably have to involve extra-terrestrial pitch invasions, or David Warner joining an ashram.
We were wrong. What happened on the first morning at Trent Bridge was so unexpected that I doubt many people actually saw it at all. That evening, bars will have been filled with people telling stories of where they had been when Stuart Broad ripped the innards from Australia’s batting card. In an 11am meeting, scheduled by an unthinking American; scrolling through our phones, convinced, from the score, that our apps were malfunctioning. One friend of mine had invited someone round for coffee; his guest arrived at 11.10am, and left 10 minutes later, when my friend admitted he couldn’t listen to them and the radio at the same time.
The destruction was so swift, so inexorable, that England fans did not even have time to make their usual pessimistic, expectation-dampening jokes about it. Someone did attempt to convince me, on Twitter, of the inevitability of a record tail-end stand, but another Englishman was taking a catch even as his Cassandra-style tweet hit my feed. By the end of Thursday, with a lead of 214, we were in such uncharted territory that no one quite knew how England should proceed. “Let’s declare and claim the extra half-hour,” suggested one of my mates.
If Ashes history has taught us anything, it is that you have to enjoy success while it lasts. Both England and Australia have gone through long periods when it has felt as if the little urn would never again be seen in their country: it took eight years before Australia won their first Ashes series in 1892, and England spent much of the Thirties and Forties without a sniff of it. A generation of English fans who didn’t see a single Ashes win for more than 18 years have now witnessed five of them in a decade.
So there’s almost no point in worrying about the context of a contest as dramatic and bizarre as this one. We have all spent the 10 years since the 2005 contest convincing ourselves that nothing will live up to it. In the series that followed, there has always been something for England fans to cavil at – an immediate reversal of fortune (2006-07, 2013-14), or an insipid style of play – but you sense that this will be the year that sets us free from that particular habit of self-harm.
There may be nothing epic about a sequence of three-day finishes, but the sheer insanity of this series may just have reset our expectations. Sure, the back-to-back farrago of 2013 is not seen as a vintage experience in any England fan’s scrapbook. But it’s good to be reminded that dramatic collapses and violent swings of fortune are not an aberration in Ashes contests – they’re a signifier of their extreme pressure. It’s not so long since England were decapitated and bowled out in 33.5 overs at Headingley in 2009 – in a series they went on to win. In Melbourne two years later, they dismissed Australia for 98 in the win that retained the urn.
Sport is far better for these kind of violent ups and downs. They’re the scars that make it characterful. I don’t remember the presentation of the urn in 2013, the only Ashes I’ve ever watched in which England didn’t lose a single match. I don’t remember it because I didn’t hang around for it. I’ll remember where I was on Thursday – in that meeting, with that American – for years to come.
Emma John hosts Guardian Live’s The Cricket Pitch at The Kia Oval from 7pm on 18 August, with The Last Leg’s Adam Hills, Harry Judd of McBusted, Charlotte Edwards and Gladstone Small. For tickets click here
