THE BATTLE OF BRITTLE & OTHER CONFLICTS
FRAIL batting always makes for an exciting series. The wickets tumble. The stumps fly. The acrobats snaffle and somersault, coming up with the ball like a magician producing a purloined watch. The bowlers enhance their CVs. The careers of batsmen brave enough to face hostile thunder-chuckers or shrewd swindlers in front of millions of viewers and ominously howling live crowds shatter before our eyes. Local bowlers suddenly look so invincible in their own conditions, it’s hard to know how good they actually are.
Remember 2015? When the state of Australia’s batting was so flimsy, the amazing feats of Broad and Anderson blurped with all the historical resonance of a false note on a kazoo? By Ashes 2017-18 in Australia, the same pair looked ready for the knackery, to be blunt. Yet at home Broad shone once again, as no doubt Anderson might have, had he been fit.
We can say much the same of the action-packed 2019 Ashes series as we did in 2015: it, too, had as much in common with great contests of the past as panting supermarket fiction has with a good novel. It was a bizarre imitation; a potboiler. Everything was sensational; anything else – like the Smith and Archer “rivalry” – was sensationalised, where possible.
The deeds of Stokes and Smith in particular rose colossally above those of team-mates around them, dwarfs in comparison. Imagine the series without them! Apart from them, the batting was so poor that undoubted Test-match champions like Smith, Cummins, Stokes, Broad, Lyon and Archer had their worth somehow discounted in a series that seemed to prefigure a diminished future for the Test-match genre. Atticus, Ahab and Oliver found themselves in Mills and Boon.
Australia’s batting was impoverished. Despite Ricky Ponting’s claims otherwise, Steven Smith is the reason they took home the Ashes urn. It’s as simple, random, depressing and statistically provable as that. All the other times Australia went to the Old Dart and retained the Ashes, they were either a building team with a settled, or settling, top-six, or they were a team of batting titans. This batting line-up was neither. It had Smith. That’s all.
The drama of this series was, as in
