Ashes 2011 Read Free Page B

Australia's killjoy diktats, in good part too. And they have experienced the sincerest form of flattery in their emulation by Australia's Fanatics.
    Sadly for the Barmy Army, the days of 'We're fat/We're round/Three dollars to the pound' seem a thing of the past, and word is that their numbers will be down. But England's cricketers should take their example to heart: the Barmy Army has always paid for the privilege they are about to be paid for. It is also hard to imagine a member of the Barmy Army remaining as mute as E.W. Swanton in the presence of a cab driver extolling Australian virtues.
1 NOVEMBER 2010
FORECASTS
Future Imperfect
    Just as no battle plan survives contact with an enemy, few cricket predictions survive even a day of actual play. But the augurs of the forthcoming Ashes series are worth recording: England enter the series in the decidedly unfamiliar position of overdogs, forecast to ratify the possession of the urn they regained fourteen months ago.
    When did this last happen? England arrived with the Ashes four years ago, but vestigial belief in their hopes lasted approximately one ball – the Steve Harmison wide that zeroed in on Andrew Flintoff's sternum at second slip. Even when England last prevailed down under in Australia, they were decidedly unfancied, their tri-cornered triumph of 1986–87 coming after an immortal three-pronged assessment of their capabilities from the Independent 's Martin Johnson: 'Can't bat, can't bowl, can't field.'
    There was 1978–79, although the forecast that stands out from that series was Australian captain Graham Yallop's flippant prediction of a six-nil scoreline, which Mike Brearley's Englishmen almost entirely reversed. You must look back a further twenty years for a parallel with England's current favouritism, when Peter May's team of the talents arrived in Australia tipped to carry all before them – and were right royally ripped apart.
    Expectations weren't ill-founded. It's hard to pick a bone with selection when you run your eye down the MCC team sheet, studded with such names as May, Cowdrey, Graveney, Bailey, Evans, Laker, Lock, Trueman, Statham and Tyson. As Jack Fingleton records in his classic account Four Chukkas to Australia, May's team was thought so strong that it would have 'played the Rest of the World and beaten them'; their 4–0 defeat duly became the 'biggest upset of modern cricket times'.
    One individual not surprised was May himself. He embarked on the trip full of foreboding, believing 'we were always going to struggle'. The series was overshadowed by the Australian chuckers to which Fingleton's title slyly referred, but May declined to use this as an excuse, at the time or in retrospect: 'Australian cricket played on huge ovals is a young man's game and we had too many players on their last tour. If you have lost the keen edge, Australia finds it out.'
    So how does an XI's reputation inflate beyond its abilities, and do any such considerations apply to the circumstances preceding this Ashes series? May points to one common mistake: the tendency to read teams on paper, rather than gauge the potentialities of individuals at particular stages in their careers and against particular oppositions.
    Something similar applied ahead of the Ashes of 2005. On Statsguru, Ricky Ponting's team looked unassailable. McGrath, Lee, Gillespie and Warne versus Harmison, Flintoff, Jones and Giles? And had Glenn McGrath been injured at the end of the summer and Simon Jones at the start, what price the MBEs and open-top bus rides? Yet, as Adam Gilchrist has since admitted, the Australians, for all their battle honours, were an unhappy side, grumpily led by Ricky Ponting, absent-mindedly coached by John Buchanan. Andrew Strauss has also confided that a key conversation for him that summer was with Stephen Fleming after England's defeat at Lord's. Fleming urged Strauss to look past his chagrin – Australia were vulnerable, apprehensive about