The 39-year-old bowler is steadily getting better despite the battle scars with the team going in the opposite direction Jimmy Anderson walked into the indoor nets at the Melbourne Cricket Ground and slumped into the first available chair. His eyes were weary. His boots were scuffed. His trousers were soaked in blood, a fielding injury from Adelaide two Tests earlier which had never been allowed to heal. The fourth Ashes Test of 2017-18 had just ended in an excruciating draw, Anderson had just bowled 59 thankless overs and only a lunatic would have entertained the notion that he would be back at this very ground in four years’ time for more of the same.A lunatic such as Jimmy Anderson, in...
Latest Ashes collapse is overly familiar and a backdrop to the beginning of the end for Stokes-Bairstow-Buttler middle orderTypical: 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 host captain’s early incision undid England before lunch at the MCG not the tourists’ mid-session muddleYou could easily arrive at the conclusion that Patrick Cummins had been blessed by some benevolent god. The best-on-ground performance in the teenage Test debut, the personal qualities that made people speak of him as a future captain, the rise to that position despite a century and more of entrenched Australian opposition to bowlers taking the job.That interpretation, though, would be overlooking the long, long wait after that teenage beginning, when Cummins had played one Test but spent six years being denied the next, the cycle of injuries whirring as endlessly as the exercise bikes on which he did another stint of rehabilitation. Your...
Undertaker’s cart is creaking across the cobbles but the ashes of these Ashes are not quite ready to be scatteredClang. Bring out your dead. There was something a little ghoulish about the spectacle down the wires from Adelaide as England’s last-wicket pair attempted to push the second Ashes Test into its final knockings on day five.An Australian Ashes summer always has a strangeness about it seen from 10,000 miles away: those bleached-out greens and blues bounced around the world and beamed out into the depths of a northern winter. Watching James Anderson and Stuart Broad fence and fend at the teeth-and-toes assault of the 6ft 6in, 92mph Mitchell Starc, it was hard to avoid the feeing of something hollow-eyed and...
A comprehensive victory achieved without their captain and two best bowlers means talk of Australia winning 5-0 again is not just for laughsFive-nil now has a life of its own. Whenever England come to Australia for an Ashes tour, it has become traditional to speculate about the prospect of a series whitewash. What started as a comedy routine by Glenn McGrath has become pre-series bravado from home pundits, a performative dance done on the ramparts as invaders approach the keep. On most recent tours, though, it has been the visitors who end up living in a state of siege. And after Australia went 2-0 up by winning the second Test in Adelaide, that scoreline is beginning to firm up in...