This has been a week when Australia could no longer deny the dark stain of anti-Semitism on our national soul. When our Prime Minister, faced with the horror of Bondi and Islamic jihadist fanatics, failed to rise to the crying need for genuine national leadership. When all Australians, not just our Jewish brothers and sisters, are lost, bewildered and angry.
But there has been something that has at least provided a modicum of comfort after the raw emotions: the Ashes cricket Test in Adelaide. As former England bowler and BBC commentator Phil ‘Tuffers’ Tufnell says, touring teams don’t just play an Australia XI; they play an entire country. If there is an Australian version of Norman Tebbit’s cricket test, it’s not about what side you support when Australia is playing, it’s whether or not you follow cricket at all.
Tonight Australia celebrates, and England drowns its sorrows in a wake for Bazball
The summer game is our national sport. In the lead-up to a Test series in Australia, the ‘barbeque-stopper’ conversations are not about politics, religion, or international events. Instead, they’re about how the Test team will do this summer. We take our cricket extremely seriously in Australia, and arguably Australia is now the only major cricket-playing nation that still sees Test cricket as the highest form of the game and the other formats as sideshows; India went white-ball crazy decades ago and even England has all but succumbed to it. What else is Bazball but frenetic white-ball cricket with a traditional red six-stitcher?
This year, as early as October, there was intense speculation over whether Australia’s champion fast bowlers, Pat Cummins and Josh Hazlewood, would be fit to face the Poms in Perth. The disappointment was universal when Cummins was ruled out for two Tests, and Hazlewood for the entire series. No one underrated the English side, with ace batsmen like Zak Crawley and Harry Brook, world-class fast bowlers in Jofra Archer and Mark Wood, and the modern Botham, Ben Stokes, as captain and all-rounder. Certainly, the England team, management and most media were confident to the point of cockiness.
Before the tour the English camp sounded all but certain their talent and aggressive style of play would guarantee victory against what former Test quick, Stuart Broad, labelled the worst Australian side in 15 years. But, as England stood at the brink of an Ashes-losing defeat on Saturday, Crawley told the BBC that Bazball ‘winds up’ Australia and effectively conceded the match, and the sacred little urn.
In Adelaide, as in Perth and Brisbane, an injury-hit Australia played like a champion team, and on Sunday secured the Ashes in just ten-and-a-half playing days. Meanwhile, until well into the second innings in Adelaide, England were merely a team of champions, too wedded to their Bazball faith, and too used to short-form contests to outthink and outplay their opponents. If there was any one moment in the series so far where Bazball was shown to be bankrupt, it was Harry Brook being bowled by Nathan Lyon on Saturday when playing a reverse sweep, throwing his wicket away less than an hour before stumps, just when England was starting to dare to dream of a record winning run chase. This was a batsman who, before the Test match, has said he was swearing off such childish things as reverse sweeps.
On Sunday in Adelaide, as the England lower order gave reaching a target of 435 a real shake, the last rites of Bazball were read. For the first time in the series, both sides were playing Test cricket: Australia doggedly focusing on their line and length as England dug in, relying on good line and length, and Lyon’s superlative off-spin, keeping their nerve and inviting batsmen to make mistakes. The English middle- and especially lower-order batsmen Jamie Smith, Brydon Carse and Will Jacks showed on Sunday that patience, graft and application matter. It was a real Test contest, not hit-and-giggle fireworks.
With the Ashes gone, the English camp is now asking itself, ‘what if?’ and ‘what now?’ Meanwhile, Australia has lost Lyon to a hamstring injury on Sunday, and Cummins’s fitness is in doubt for the two box-office marquee Tests in Sydney and Melbourne.
But tonight Australia celebrates, and England drowns its sorrows in a wake for Bazball. The way Australia has played this Test series – as a team with both first- and second-string players striving to do their best for the common cause – is an object lesson when the Australian nation needs to defeat a menace far greater than a touring Test team. If Australians, well-led, can look after their own and each other, and strive together to defeat the incubus of Islamist fanaticism that, one week ago, destroyed so many lives at Bondi beach, we can yet pull through the great crisis of national character in which we find ourselves.
Comments