Another one-sided Ashes result

Australia's innings victory at the WACA - which is hosting its last major Test - means they have regained the Ashes at the end of only the third match of series. This 3-0 margin is the 10th time a team has clinched the Ashes series by the end of the third Test. All but one of those ten wins were achieved by Australia, seven of which have come at home for them. The only England win in this manner came way back in 1928-29.

Overall, this is the 19th time in the history of the Ashes that a team has secured the trophy before losing a Test to the opposition in a series involving five or more matches. In ten Ashes series played since the turn of this century, this is the sixth time when a team has won the series before conceding a match to the opposition. England won the 2013 Ashes at home by the fourth Test of the series by a margin of 3-0, while the other wins to be achieved in this manner have all been by Australia.

This was the seventh successive loss for England in away Tests. The last time they came away without a defeat from a Test match played outside England was in Rajkot, when they drew the first Test of the 2016-17 series against India. They have endured only one other similar stretch before this, from 1993 to 1994 when they lost three away matches in India, one in Sri Lanka and three in the West Indies. Since the beginning of 2016, England have a 2-9 win-loss record from 13 away Test match. Only Bangladesh and Zimbabwe have a poorer win-loss record in away and neutral venues in this period.

With this loss, England also equalled the record for the most successive Test matches they have lost in any away country. Their eighth straight loss in Tests in Australia equals a similarly long streak they had way back from 1920 to 1925 when they also lost eight in a row.

As they have often done in the series, England seemed to put up a fight in this match on the first two days of the Test before running out of gas. The record 237-run stand between Dawid Malan and Jonny Bairstow had placed England at a promising 368 for 4 in the first innings before a lower-order collapse meant that they could not capitalise on the good work done by the pair. This was just the fourth instance in Ashes history that a team lost after being 350-plus for the loss of fewer than five wickets in the first innings of a Test. England were the team at the receiving end on the previous instance too, when a 310-run stand between Paul Collingwood and Kevin Pietersen in the first innings couldn't prevent England from eventually losing the Adelaide Test in 2006-07.

One of the few positives for England from this Test was Malan: he added to his first-innings hundred with a hard-fought 54 in the second innings, in all scoring 194 runs in the match. This is the most runs any England batsman has scored in a Test at the WACA. Before this, the highest was by Derek Randall, who made 193 runs in 1982-83 Ashes Test. Malan is also only the fourth England batsman to get two fifty-plus scores at this venue. Kevin Pietersen was the previous England batsman to do it: he made scores of 70 and 60 not out in the 2006-07 Ashes Test.

This was Australia's eighth straight win in Ashes Tests played at the WACA. This is the best streak any team has had at a venue in the history of Ashes. The next-best run for any team at a venue in the Ashes is five wins, which was achieved by Australia at the Adelaide Oval from 1895 to 1908 and by England at The Oval from 1886 to 1896. The WACA, Perth has been the most favourable venue for Australia in the Ashes, with nine wins out of the 13 Tests played while losing only one. For either team, no Ashes venue that has hosted more than two matches has been as favourable in terms of win-loss ratio as the WACA has been for Australia.