Latest Ashes collapse is overly familiar and a backdrop to the beginning of the end for Stokes-Bairstow-Buttler middle order
Typical: Christmas evening, you turn on the television and it’s another bloody repeat. Although in fairness to England, pick through the dental records of their latest Ashes capitulation and you might just be able to identify a few distinguishing features. And above all the defining quality of their Boxing Day fiasco in Melbourne was the sense of hopelessness and predestination: of a team and a generation whose narrative arc has finally run dry.
There was a time when England collapses had a kind of fascinating car-crash quality. These days, by contrast, they feel strangely banal: tedious, overfamiliar, predictable, like a recurring anxiety dream. The openers disappear early. Joe Root does something pointless and defiant. All of a sudden you’re back at your old school. Someone in the middle order plays a stupid shot. You turn over the exam paper, but there’s nothing on it.
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