In the first in a series of columns during the Ashes, Wisden Cricket Monthly editor in chief Phil Walker previews a series which will decide the legacy of an era which has changed English cricket for good and for the good.
There are Ashes series, and then there’s this one. For the home side, one of the great bowling attacks ever assembled laces up for its last dance. For the other lot, this is it now. The moment of truth.
It feels different this time. There are new players, Ashes debutants coming in on both sides. For once England have a pace attack worthy of the name, which may yet fall over in a heap. Australia’s ageing battery of monumental quicks is unlikely to contest another Ashes together, certainly not at home. Steve Smith is back for the third act, while you may have heard that his opposite number, Joe Root, has never… yeah, you know it.
Even by modern Ashes standards, the pre-show noise has been louder and edgier and more generally humourless this time round, a reflection of the fact that the Australian public are really up for this one. Nothing, after all, brings a nation together like some jumped-up English experiment burning up in the kilns.
Limp England – weak-as-piss England, perpetually ravaged England, lurching from various crises of their own making – they can just about stomach. But cocksure England, with tattoos and mantras, and six-hitting contests and golf clubs and whiffs of cool entitlement, is much less tolerable. This winter, Australia wants to beat more than a cricket team. It wants to destroy an idea.
England, lest we forget, are 0-13 in the last three series in Australia. And that number right there is the essential point of this so-called Bazball/Stokesian thing. It drives the whole movement.
The English have tried all other options in Australia and it’s always come down to the same reality: their hosts have had to be very bad for them to get a look-in, and Australian cricket is too structurally sound and embedded in the culture of everyday life to suffer more than a fleetingly ‘transitional’ blip. (See 2010/11 and… well, that’s it really.)
And thus, out of desperation, England landed on a deeply uncharacteristic idea: they decided, practically overnight, to try and overcome the innate limits of their own fragmented and peripheral cricket culture by becoming the most aggressive batting line-up in the history of the game. (And before any Aussies scoff and roll their eyes, Damien Fleming is one of many who say it all started four years ago, with the original Bazballer, Travis Head. In which case, dear cousins, this is all your fault.)
Initially, it was all straightforwardly outrageous. After 12 matches, Stokes had overseen 10 wins. They were scoring at a tick under five runs-an-over, bullishly bowling first at the toss in order to “have a chase” some four days later.
It couldn’t last, and it didn’t. The inevitable recalibration came in 2023, with a first confrontation with Australia. Stokes’ decision to declare on the first day at Edgbaston came to symbolise the excesses, the death-wish brazenness, of the New Way – while the coldness of Pat Cummins in the final session formed the perfect contrast to all the hoopla. And then when it happened again at Lord’s, England’s happy hookers falling over in a hubristic heap, the matches were seen not just as wins for the grown-ups but as validation for the age-old truisms that undergird Test cricket. The kicker to all that, and what makes the next two months so tantalising, is how deep Australia had to dig just to grab a draw from what remained of that summer. Awkwardly, they have not won an Ashes series in England in a quarter of a century.
The seasickness has yet to subside. England go to New Zealand, win the first two games and lose the third by more than 400 runs. They put up 810 in Multan to win a freak game and then surrender the series to a couple of wondrous middle-aged spinners. They lose a Test match at home to Sri Lanka on account of being bored. And they failed to win both of their big home series, amid claims of a lack of ruthlessness.
On that one, you could argue it cuts both ways. Last summer, for all that Harry Brook’s bat-hurling dismissal against India at The Oval, with the game virtually won, showed an absence of killer instinct at the critical moment, it was only the clarity of his brilliance – 111 from 97 balls, a 10th ton in 30 games – that got his team anywhere close to their latest 370-plus run chase. (Afterwards, incidentally, Brook said he was “devastated” to play that shot at that time. He doesn’t normally talk in such terms.) And on the other side of a distinctly similar looking coin, Ben Duckett’s masterpiece at Leeds earlier in that series, 140 to chase down 373 easily on the final day, felt pretty ruthless at the time.
Test cricket’s rhythms are too complex to admit a rabble of one-note whackers, and they have started to indicate that they can see that now. The rhetoric has shifted a little. They talk more about playing the situation, about absorbing as well as pushing. The bombast has been dialled down. We shall see whether this translates in real time. Against Australia’s beautiful and devastating bowling attack, something will have to give.
Most observers lean to Australia, and how could they not? Of the 13 Ashes series this century, it’s 1-1 in away wins. For England, expectations are unreasonable, as are the consequences for failing to win the hardest series of them all, and that’s just how it goes. If it goes wrong, it doesn’t mean it is wrong. Yet these are the mad finalities of sport.
If Stokes can’t shake off the curse, and his team falls in much the same way as the others, unmanned in the crucibles, then the transformations that he’s brought about, and his legacy of leaving English cricket irrevocably changed for good and for the good, will always be qualified by the point that he couldn’t get it done when it mattered most.
There’s no space left for caveats, valid or otherwise. This is it now. All decisions have led to this. It’s always been about this. What Brendon McCullum calls the biggest series of all our lives.
It’s about the result now. The result. We’re here again. The irrational authority of the Ashes.
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