In the aftermath of England's drubbing in Perth, Wisden Cricket Monthly editor in chief Phil Walker laments the wider resentments in English cricket which Ashes series reveal like nothing else can.
Sleep-deprived, globules of scotch seeping through blotchy shirts, sidemouthing to no one in particular about how the lights went out on all good things around 1979, Jackson Lamb is as much a died-in-the-Woolloongabba cricket fan as it’s possible to be. No matter that he’s not a real person, nor that the show he fronts ever touches on cricket (save for that scene at The Oval in season one); from the mouths of TV-friendly caricatures come truths to cleave to in these mesmerisingly weird times.
The clincher comes at the end of series four, when our wearied hero looks right through his boss/adversary/sparring partner – let’s call her Kristin Scott Thomas – to directly address every last one of us. “God, you really care about them, don’t you?” she’s just suggested, referring superficially to the shambolic department he runs as the chief slow horse of a stray of misfits. “Nah,” he says. “I think they’re a bunch of fucking losers. But they’re my losers.”
I heard that line the evening after the collapse before. Clearly I was susceptible, trying to work out where I sat on the fury spectrum, and Gary Oldman’s alter ego was going to tell me. (And it doesn’t stop there. Next day I’m listening to the radio when Treat Me Like Your Mother comes on by The Dead Weather and for the rest of the day I’m singing “Play dumb, play dead, play straight” to myself.)
ALSO READ: Stokes era has changed English cricket for good – but the Ashes doesn’t care about that
This series does peculiar things to people. In 2023, after watching the rain for two days at Manchester, I went to see Oppenheimer on my own just to cheer myself up. It’s expected that we all lose our minds at some stage or other. And yet, for all that, it still required a hefty scramble to grasp how two nocturnal nights of strangeness could blur the lines to such a degree that a wild and deeply random tear-up of a cricket match, which appeared to be anybody’s until about an hour before it finished, should provoke such a full-on plebiscite into the team’s culture.
Two days.
This is just where we are now, where the discourse has taken us: to the point where the thick, blunt bullshit of the awful build-up, laced at times with genuine spite, bleeds into the aftermath, coarsening groups against each other and followers against their own. It’s cricket’s Overton window, Ashes style: a portal flung open, through which the most extreme reactions and ideas settle inside the mainstream.
The bubble that England’s cricketers live inside will be pricked. The noise will have seeped through, and many will say that’s no bad thing, knock a bit of sense into them. So, OK, let’s do this.
England’s opening batsman maintains an air of diffidence and 44 single-figure dismissals in 109 knocks. The extraordinary faith he’s been afforded for those occasional moments when it clicks is either admirable or mad but most likely, at this late stage, both. His shot in the first over of the series was variously a dereliction of his talent, an insult to himself and an arrogant snub to the game’s timeless difficulties. Presumably not unlike Andrew Strauss’ third-ball square cut straight to gully to kick things off in 2010.
What else? Well, the troika of uppish drives offered by England’s middle order in the second innings spoke of a failure to recognise the dimensions of the ground and the nature of the surface. To emphasise the point, when Travis Head later went to work, he hit just two of his 20 boundaries off good-length deliveries. Lessons, lessons.
Other stuff: losing five for 12 to fold their first innings, sealed by a wave of lower-order hoicks to a deep-set field, was at best tactically naive, and at worst inept. The quicks tired a bit in the second dig. A lack of miles in the legs, perhaps? Stokes was maybe (and ironically) a bit passive with the bat. Jamie Smith should have stood his ground on the caught-behind.
Oh, and Harry Brook, first innings, should have dropped his gloves a split-second quicker after batting like a god, and the fact that he didn’t, undone by his eagerness to toe the line and curb his instincts, was always going to lead to a blizzard of high-handed detritus about how this arrogant little guttersnipe with 10 hundreds in 31 Tests at an average the same as Hobbs and Hutton should learn how to play the game like a real man.
The Ashes brings all the simmering resentments that lurk in English cricket to the boil. Yet one of the most implausible of all the takes is that they don’t give a toss one way or another, that ‘the way they play’ is some mere extension of their decadent worldview. Brook faces this slur basically every week, despite never deviating from his stance that he hopes to play Test cricket for 15 years and that nothing will ever get in the way of that dream.
Look at Stokes’ bloodshot eyes on that second night, echoes of Flintoff past. Listen to Mark Wood haltingly describe the raw emotion in the dressing room. Think of Joe Root, by every measure a decent man and a champion player, enduring his latest harrowing match in Australia and now, after two innings, held up as symptomatic of some deep malaise.
The game in England is indeed fragile. It’s weak and unsure of itself, embarrassed to have fumbled its way to this point, unknown in many quarters of the country and on life support in others, an afterthought if it’s a thought at all. There’s your story. Such a loss as we’ve just witnessed stretches well past the headlines and daily finalities and the told-you-so triumphalism and right into the guts of a desperately fragmented and vanishing community.
The city which has just hosted their latest capitulation has two remarkable cricket venues. The Optus is a monster, a shimmering multi-purpose 60,000-seater which somehow retains the properties in its pitches – it’s to do with the soil from a nearby creek, apparently – of the old coliseum over the road.
The WACA, for its part, still stages cricket most days. Recently, a combination of federal and state governments pumped the best part of £90m into building a new eight-lane indoor cricket centre, plus a research lab, a swimming pool and gym, a water park and a four-storey hospitality facility. All the state cricket associations are profitable. All back each other in, and the state government finances the game to a healthy degree.
Compare all that to the UK government’s decision last August to dismantle a £35m nationwide scheme which had been earmarked to resurrect cricket in state schools, offering a derisory £1.5m for a couple of domes in Lancashire and Luton instead. The message: Sorry folks, no cash. And let’s not kid ourselves, eh?
As an Australian colleague said to me recently, “Australians don’t live in a cricketing culture where it feels under threat. It’s a sport which dominates the summer conversation in ways that cricket people in England could only dream of.” According to Statista, just seven per cent of English schoolchildren aged 5-16 played any sort of cricket last year. Ten years ago, that figure was at 19 per cent. There’s your story. Ticket prices for the Tests next summer were released this week. That’ll be £150 for a day at a London Test please, squire. And we wonder why the game is not culturally dominant.
Next time you’re feeling hangdog, unable to shake the sense of another precious opportunity having blown up in your face – let’s book in our next session for day three from Brisbane – consider where best to direct your resentments.
Perhaps they are losers. But they’re our losers. And they’ve still got one hell of a bowling attack.
Follow Wisden for all cricket updates, including live scores, match stats, quizzes and more. Stay up to date with the latest cricket news, player updates, team standings, match highlights, video analysis and live match odds.
