Ashes Buzz

Many books have been written on the history of the Ashes, but none quite like Stiff Upper Lips and Baggy Green Caps by Simon Briggs. It’s the story of a great contest – to see who can come up with the best insults, put-downs and ripostes. What goes on the field, stays on the field, the players like to say, but thankfully this rule is often broken. Briggs's book is so full of good lines, it almost convinces you that sledging is acceptable.

But which side does it better? I suspected it was Australia, but Simon has immersed himself in 124 years of sledging, so let’s ask him. “Well,” he replied, “WG [Grace] was an early leader. I tend to think that England were the villains in first 30 years, as they thought they had a God-given right to beat the colonials and would use any methods. Then it was Warwick Armstrong giving it back to them.

“In the modern era, the Aussies definitely lead. Ian Chappell’s mob upped the ante, and then you have Allan Border, Merv Hughes and Steve Waugh. Some of it comes from grade cricket being much rougher than English clubs, and some of it comes from just being better. Verbal aggression and on-field dominance are a bit chicken-and-egg, it’s hard to do one without the other. You can’t sledge from a crap position, partly because you don’t have the close fielders.”

The Australian selectors have decided on their strategy for winning back the Ashes: being more like England. They will play four fast bowlers in Brisbane, just as England did for most of the 2005 series. It’s a case of imitation being the sincerest form of assault and battery.

To make their foursome look even more fearsome, the Aussies have included two spares. Their 13 contains no fewer than six quicks – Lee, McGrath, Clark, Johnson, Tait and Watson. It’s a lopsided squad, with no spare batsman, no Stuart MacGill, and no doubt at all about the first nine places, down to Brett Lee. In fact, if the return of Glenn McGrath is a sure thing, the only doubt is about the third seamer – one of Shaun Tait, Stuart Clark, and Mitchell Johnson. The options come down to a three-way tussle for a single place. One thing is certain: the Aussies’ drinks will be delivered at high speed.

Yesterday England lost their most experienced batsman. In his place they have called up the least experienced of the realistic options – Ed Joyce, the stylish, gifted, but uncapped Middlesex left-hander.

The gamble on Marcus Trescothick backfired badly, but that hasn’t stopped the selectors taking another one. The experience they gave Rob Key (15 Tests, four of them on the last Ashes tour) and Owais Shah (one highly successful Test in India earlier this year) has been binned. The idea of maintaining a clear and logical pecking order has gone with it.

The thinking seems to be that they need another left-hander, and that Australia’s pacy pitches will suit Joyce, with his strong eye and fluent strokeplay. He is Ireland’s answer to David Gower, and Gower was certainly at home in Australia, hitting nine international centuries there. With Trescothick goes a chunk of England’s flair: they now have a batting line-up that includes two old-school grafters, Cook and Collingwood. The choice of Joyce offsets that. He may even be tempted to go up in a Tiger Moth.

Marcus Trescothick has flown home again. To flee one tour may be considered a misfortune; to do it twice looks like naivety, not so much from Trescothick, but on the part of the England management. When they picked him for the Ashes at the same time as saying he was unfit for the Champions Trophy, they were treating a mental illness as if it were a physical one. Stress doesn’t work like that.

Trescothick’s timing could be better, but it could also be worse – he could have hung around right up to, or even into, the first Test. As it is, England have a ready-made replacement at the top of the order in Alastair Cook, who should make more runs as an opener, protected to some extent from Shane Warne, than he would have done at number three. And they have a ready-made replacement for Cook in Paul Collingwood, who didn’t deserve to lose his place in the middle order. For the team, this isn't a great blow. They coped with it last time and on this year's form, Trescothick shouldn’t have been in the side anyway. He will be a bigger loss at first slip than at the top of the order. He did great work in the last Ashes in getting England off to rapid starts, but Andrew Strauss, currently playing with a new freedom, has it in him to take up that mantle.

The only problem is that Ian Bell has to move up from six, where he flourished against Pakistan, to three. England would be more comfortable if they had followed the advice of certain bloggers and brought Owais Shah, Mark Butcher or Mark Ramprakash, instead of a sixth seam bowler.

England’s winter began, in India, with two bad days followed by a good one. They have now repeated the pattern in Australia, with Kevin Pietersen the star once again. At this rate, they will go 2-0 down in the Test series, before pulling one back in Perth through a blazing Pietersen hundred.

Interest in the Ashes is running so high that England’s opening tour match was shown on television back home. Half-way through this afternoon’s highlights, the signal went on the blink, before packing up altogether. As a comment on England’s performance, it was eloquent.

The game could have gone worse, but only if a senior player had fled the ground in distress. England lost to a virtual Australia A side by a margin that was not so much wide as insulting. More importantly, not a single selection issue was cleared up.

At last, a Champions Trophy has gone according to form. In the end Australia were as far ahead of every other team as they were at the last World Cup. West Indies defied gravity once against them, and threatened to repeat the feat for 45 minutes or so yesterday, but when they fell to earth, as is their wont, they really crashed.

Australia’s victory doesn’t necessarily mean the Ashes will be theirs. We keep being reminded of how England beat Australia in the Champions Trophy of 2004 before their Ashes triumph, but people seem to have forgotten that the last thing that happened between the two sides before the Ashes of 2005 was a three-match one-day series which Australia won quite comfortably. And Test cricket is a half-different game, perhaps more so for England, because they are hopeless at one-dayers and good at Tests: paupers in one form, pretenders to the crown in the other.

On the field, things are going swimmingly for Australia. They are winning, Glenn McGrath is taking out top-order batsmen again, Mitchell Johnson is coming along nicely: the pieces are slotting into the Ashes jigsaw, better than England’s. Off the field, though, the Aussies have just done something strange and sad.

They have struck a deal with a sponsor, Commonwealth Bank, which includes naming rights not just to their annual one-day triangular tournament for the next three years, but also to the national team. As Cricket Australia explained in a press release today, “The one-day competition will be known as the ‘Commonwealth Bank Series’, and the Australian team known as the ‘Commonwealth Bank one-day international team’.”

You can sell a lot of things in sport without losing much – boundary hoardings, canopies on drinks buggies, ad space on bats – but there are some things you cannot sell, and the name of the team is one of them. Fans won’t see the Australian team as the Commonwealth Bank one-day international team. It’s a hideous mouthful, and they already have one of those in the shape of the meat pies they chomp on as the twilight descends.

But more importantly, this is a national team. It’s not supposed to be for sale. If you are an Australian fan working for a rival bank, how are you supposed to feel about this? A national team is for everyone. It doesn’t line up with one company against another, any more than it should favour one state over another. Part of its job is to transcend petty rivalries, and replace them with bigger ones, like a loathing of the Poms.

Quotes from players’ press conferences don’t often shed a whole lot of light on the game, but there have been a couple of revealing ones this week. Mitchell Johnson, the new kid on the Aussie fast-bowling block, was asked about Kevin Pietersen, whom he dismissed last weekend with the age-old two-card trick – a nasty bouncer, which Pietersen fended off uncertainly, followed by a full-length ball in the slot outside off, which he edged, equally uncertainly, to Adam Gilchrist.

“My plan to him,” Johnson said, “was to get a short one in early and then try to get that nick. Against Pietersen maybe the short ball is something we will try - from the footage that I've seen, he likes to get forward early.”

Fairly standard stuff, but it told us that Johnson had done his homework. So what did Pietersen have to say? “He's a new bowler, check him out, probably see a lot of him over the winter. Never heard of him before.’