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December 5, 2010Posted by Mike Holmans on 12/05/2010 in Mike Holmans
When will I wake up?
With a double-hundred in Adelaide, Kevin Pietersen has put his form woes well behind him
© Getty ImagesFor the dedicated fan back home in England, an Ashes series Down Under is always somewhat disorienting. Those of us with conventional day-jobs tend to have to choose whether to miss the beginning or the end of the day's play, so one always wakes up wondering what happened while one was in the land of Nod.
And since the third morning at the Gabba, what one has woken up to, has been so surprising that it's hard to believe one is not still dreaming. After all, we know what to expect for a series in Australia: the Aussies will bat forever and take wickets for fun; whenever England look as though they might be getting their act together and competing, something disastrous happens and it's back to the depressing old routine. What we are seeing conforms to the correct pattern – except that the hapless team with the wheels coming off are wearing baggy green caps, which is surely the stuff of either fantasy or the ravings of the mentally imbalanced.
More fantastic about this illusion is the list of England heroes. Kevin Pietersen and Alastair Cook spent the English summer making sure we knew they were horribly out of form and are really only in the side because the selectors can't think of anyone better, and it's a well-known fact that Jimmy Anderson is hopelessly ineffective unless he has a Duke ball in his hand and low clouds overhead to make it hoop around. Yet Cook and KP have notched double-hundreds and Jimmy's been the most consistently dangerous bowler on either team.
Even stranger is the Australian bowling attack. They did not do particularly well in England in 2009 or 2010 (against Pakistan), but the explanation given on both occasions was that they weren't all that well-equipped for English swinging conditions; since they were used to taking wickets with Kookaburras on hard wickets, things would certainly be different when they got back to home territory. Inured as we are to the dangers of underestimating Australian bowlers of whom we have seen little, that seemed the sensible view to take. Of course they wouldn't be as potent as Glenn McGrath and Shane Warne – that would be a bit much to expect even for the legendary Aussies – but they would surely be threatening on their own grounds with their own crowds. That they could be just about completely toothless was inconceivable but at their present rate, they will struggle to take twenty wickets in the series, let alone a match.
Which is why I have found it so difficult to write anything about this series so far. Using the head for logical analysis leads one to the conclusion that England's good balanced attack, in-form batsmen and excellent fielding makes them considerably superior to an Australian outfit who are doing their best to live down to the tag applied to Mike Gatting's team 25 years ago, with the exception that Mike Hussey and Brad Haddin can obviously bat. But the heart rebels against such ludicrous over-confidence against Australia in Australia, and the fingers won't hit the keyboard if you try to write sentences like “England are now clear favourites not only to retain the Ashes, but administer a comprehensive drubbing” as though you actually mean them.
Unbelievable. Utterly unbelievable. Surely this is far too good to be true. Perhaps there was something extra in that Lem-Sip I was taking for my cold a week ago.
But while this lasts, I'm enjoying this dream, hallucination or whatever it is.
Posted by: Richard S at December 6, 2010 12:57 PM
It is odd. We got so used to having predictable seamers, spinless spinners and spineless batsmen when playing in Australia that this all seems surreal. Australia's selection of Doherty has trumped any of the dodgy spinners we have fielded post Underwood pre Swann. My only problem is that, when Vaughan was reeling off century's in Australia 8 years ago it earned him the tag of one of the very best batsmen in the world. Cook is doing the same thing now but it is devalued due to the paucity of the bowling, which is a shame. The best thing about the whole thing though has been that the Barmy Army seems to have comfortably outnumbered the locals!
Posted by: Longmemory at December 18, 2010 11:58 PM
Yes Mike: it is too good to be true; there was something extra in that Lem-Sip; and the dream /hallucination is now truly over. Sorry.
- Shanaka Amarasinghe
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Shanaka Amarasinghe Possessing the best disguised googly in Sri Lanka (because no one has ever really seen it), Shanaka is the finest legspinner to never have played top-level cricket. He is a popular cricket analyst and host of The Score, the No. 1-rated, if slightly infamous, sports show on radio in Sri Lanka. While in England playing rugby, he earned his LLM at King’s College and is a lawyer by training if not inclination. He is also an actor, a journalist, a writer, and thinks he is a comedian.
- Mike Holmans
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Mike Holmans, a database consultant by profession, has spent thirty summers (and a few winters) going to the cricket. Brought up in one and working in the other, his dearest wish is for a season to end with Yorkshire winning the county championship by beating runners-up Middlesex by one wicket with five minutes to go. If it’s also a summer when England win the Ashes, so much the better.
- Michael Jeh
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Michael Jeh Born in Colombo, educated at Oxford and now living in Brisbane, Michael Jeh (Fox) is a cricket lover with a global perspective on the game. An Oxford Blue who played first-class cricket, he is a Playing Member of the MCC and still plays grade cricket. Michael now works closely with elite athletes, and is passionate about youth intervention programmes. He still chases his boyhood dream of running a wildlife safari operation called Barefoot in Africa.
- Saad Shafqat
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Saad Shafqat takes special pride that his cricket-watching life began during the three-month interval between Javed Miandad's debut Test in Lahore and Imran Khan's 12-wicket haul at Sydney. Although a practicing neurologist based in Karachi, cricket has never been far from his activities. He has co-authored Javed Miandad’s autobiography Cutting Edge and has been a contributor to Cricinfo since 2005. His regular column Reverse Swing appears fortnightly in Dawn, Pakistan’s leading English daily.
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