Nobody talks about the last ball of the Ashes. It’s the first that’s famous. That wide that flies to slip, that cover drive for four, that wicket, bowled him! Last balls? I had to look them up. Moeen Ali slicing a drive behind to finish an innings defeat in a dead rubber in 2015; Boyd Rankin being taken at slip off Ryan Harris, Rankin playing in his one and only Test at the fag-end of a 30-over collapse in a 5-0 whitewash that’s been full of them in 2014; a Steve Harmison bouncer ricocheting away off Justin Langer’s shoulder for four leg byes, the only four Australia score in a run chase they’ll never get to make in 2005.
It’s the difference between wondering how things will go, and knowing how they do. One thing’s certain, there’s no guarantee there will be a happy ending. For the last decade, England’s Australian tours have ended in ashes, instead of with them. Andy Flower lost his job as head coach after one humiliating defeat, in 2013-14, Chris Silverwood lost his after another, in 2021-22. You can make a pair of XIs out of England players who played their last Test match at the back end of an Australian tour during the past 25 years, and still have a couple of men over to carry the drinks for either side.
This England team have never claimed to care too much about consequences. Ben Stokes, like Eoin Morgan with the one-day side before him, always says that whether or not a lofted drive is caught on the boundary isn’t as important as whether or not it was the right decision to play it in the first place, and in the field he’s happy to clap a bowler who gives away boundaries so long as they bringing the team nearer to taking that next wicket. But then the very reason Stokes tried to teach his team to play this way was so they would be in a better position to deliver the kind of cricket he thinks will do well for them in Australia.
This Ashes series, for which they have been preparing for so long, already feels like the outcome they can’t get away from. It is Bazball’s make or break moment. And there are too many “I told you so’s” in English cricket for the team to get away with it if they do suffer another bad defeat in the next few weeks. Stokes’s approach has been predicated on proving everyone wrong, and the flipside is it feels as if there are plenty of people who would be delighted to be shown right.
Given that, it’s a good moment to point out that the important question isn’t just where this all ends up, but whether or not we enjoyed it along the way. Four years ago, England were an utterly abject cricket team. They had been beaten in four consecutive series and were trailing in the fifth, against India, when it was suspended because of Covid. They had won exactly one Test match out of 17, and lost 12 of them by embarrassing margins. Eight wickets to New Zealand at Edgbaston, 157 runs to India at the Oval, an innings and 14 runs to Australia at Melbourne, 10 wickets to West Indies in Grenada.
By the end, after all those months of nasal swabs and social distancing and biosecure bubbles and endless beatings at the hands of everyone they played, they were just about the most miserable and careworn Test team England had ever put on to a cricket field. So much of what Stokes and Brendon McCullum have done in the years since was in reaction to all that, as well as the former’s experiences during his five-month break from the game in 2021 when he had suffered a series of panic attacks. It was designed to remind everyone that it was meant to be fun, if it was meant to be anything at all.
It still is now. Even when the Ashes is on the line, and even if the team have eventually come to agree that they need to be a little more flexible in the way they go about playing the game. Everyday life has a way of crowding in, it can be hard to hold on to the lessons we learn in our lowest moments.
This is the England team that peeled off successive fourth-innings chases of 277, 299, and 296 in one summer against New Zealand; that made 378 to beat India that same summer; that became the first touring team to win a clean sweep in Pakistan; that fought back to a draw after going 2-0 down in the Ashes; that beat India in Hyderabad off the back of one of the greatest innings ever played in the subcontinent, and then beat Pakistan in Multan off the back of another.
It is the England team, too, that managed to end up losing a Test by an innings even though the opposition made only 326; who fetched up losing one of the better Tests ever played after making a cocksure declaration in the first innings against New Zealand, and then did the same thing against Australia; who were routed by 434 runs in Rajkot, and who were on the wrong end of one of Sri Lanka’s greatest victories. Between them, they have recorded some of the unlikeliest wins, suffered some of the ugliest dismissals, scored some of the most improbable centuries, and taken some of the most startling five-fers in the history of English cricket.
However this Ashes series shakes out, they have been, in turn, astonishing, preposterous, absurd, infuriating, and entirely, unrepentantly, unapologetically entertaining.
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