Twenty years on from the epochal Ashes of 2005, Phil Walker, Wisden Cricket Monthly editor-in-chief, remembers a “genuine cultural moment” and considers how the game has evolved since.
I’ve been helping Ashley Giles with his book. He’s been writing it for the best part of 20 years, and he needed an editor (of sorts) to tie up a few loose ends, so we got together at New Road, where these days he runs the show, to go back through the big stuff.
We began somewhere near the end, digging into that still unexplored era of biosecure bubbles, nose swabs and mounting anxiety. As the ECB’s head honcho, Giles ran that show too, until it broke him; it turns out that much of his career has been about keeping the breakages to a minimum. Finally, we arrived at the good place – the source from which, for richer, for poorer, the English game as we know it continues to flow.
It’s 20 years this month since Stephen Harmison bounded down the slope from the Lord’s Pavilion End to pin Ricky Ponting in the face. These days everyone has their own story, their bedtime fable, for any poor souls who weren’t there at the time. Mine is unremarkable, but at least I was there, squealing “He’s bowled him!” in the press box as Matthew Hoggard took the first wicket of the series and getting the death stare from the jaded lifers around me – each of them, to a man (there weren’t any women), pretending that they’d seen it all before.
I remember, too, the atmosphere turning quiet that afternoon, as rumours spread that the terror attacks which had hit London on July 7 could be happening again, and then the mood picking up when they turned out to be false.
Giles himself endured a bad game at Lord’s, then spilled out his guts to a journalist, got hammered in the press, and clambered back from the edge to play his own role in the series to end all series. Much of his book is the inside track on that summer: the sleepless weeks, the night terrors, the two to win, the Pietersen, the piss-up. You’d expect me to say it’s a rollicking good tale, and lo and behold...
One line in particular stuck out when I read it the first time. “It was around Old Trafford that things really started to change,” he writes. “Not just the momentum of the series, or the form of the two teams. It felt to me that the whole profile of cricket in the country started to shift and, arguably, it’s never looked back.”
There’s a good chunk of truth in that line. To begin with, the third Test at Old Trafford was indeed a genuine cultural moment, 10,000 locked out on the final day, eight million glued to Channel 4, and loads to TMS. What’s more, before 2005 the game had been listing badly: sporadic attendances, enervating coverage, women’s cricket remained a fringe pursuit, and the English never beat the Australians.
It had only been six years earlier when the Test team was booed by their own fans on The Oval outfield after losing at home to New Zealand. For two decades, give or take, the England cricket team had literally been a national joke, albeit a rather cherished one, affectionately told. No doubt, that summer transformed the game’s reputation. Numerous newbies who otherwise wouldn’t have gone near the thing were drawn in by it.
Perhaps the bleakest joke of all was that September 12, 2005, was the last day when an English home Test match was shown on free-to-air TV. By selling its TV rights exclusively to Sky, lodging it behind a paywall from the start of the 2006 summer, the ECB wrenched its own game away from the public at the precise moment they wanted more. The public, in turn, shrugged, and left it at that. Only as the dust settled, and the grim comparison numbers for the 2009 Ashes series were rolled out, were we left to square the irony that the Sky money, evidently outlined to revitalise the grassroots, would actually be spread across a steeply declining recreational game.
For all the great old stories and nostalgia trips (and the grammatically watertight and imminently released hardbacks), an uneasy sense remains that, just like Warnie on that final morning at The Oval, the ECB somehow contrived to spill its golden chance when the country was in the palm of its hand.
The landscape is different now, of course. Viewing habits have evolved. ‘Clips culture’ is bringing the game to new audiences, the live streams are doing their thing, Sky is an intrinsic part of the scene and the BBC recently signed a new deal to show highlights across all home internationals for the next four years. No live Test cricket on free-to-air still, but whole fleets have sailed since that one.
In a sense, every England cricketer we see today is a child of that summer, either directly or residually. Joe Root, who was 14 when it happened, once described it as “magical”, and when he was England captain, arranged for his own team to meet up with some of the side from 2005.
Lauren Filer would have been five in 2005, so not much doing there; her first exposure to cricket came via a flyer handed out at her school in Weston-super-Mare to get girls playing for the under-11s – she and her twin went to the first session, and that was that. But seeing her tearing in at The Oval against India this month, under the Friday night lights in front of a packed crowd – pushing past 77mph in her quest to become the first woman to officially break the 80mph barrier – was to witness yet another leap forward in our game.
Her insurgent pace didn’t merely blow India away. More than that, it captured something essential about this extraordinary idea that continues moving forward regardless of how it’s managed.
Two days after Filer’s game, I took my five-year-old nephew to his first T20 at The Oval. He loved it. He told me he wants to be a legend cricketer. Next time, I’ll have to tell him about Hoggy’s plinked drive through the covers at Trent Bridge. It’s about time he learned.
This article appears in the new issue of Wisden Cricket Monthly, available to pre-order now.
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