Ashes likely to be an undistinguished series

I have avoided speculation about the Ashes all year, for a number of reasons. First is my hatred of looking a fool, which is why I try not to make too many predictions. Second is that I find it depressing to witter on about future series when there is actual cricket being played: I'm a great believer that if you take good enough care of the present, the future will look after itself. Obsessing about the Ashes rather than concentrating on beating South Africa, Bangladesh or Pakistan seems to me a stupid way of proceeding.

My third reason was that the series was being ridiculously over-hyped, and I had no desire to add to the billowing clouds of pointless theorising. A prime example of the over-hyping is Cricinfo's poll asking readers to predict the result. I can't honestly pick any of the four alternatives on offer, but by some distance the silliest is the one which is leading the current standings, that it will be a 2005-type classic.

I very much doubt it will be the walkover for Australia that the last half-dozen series Down Under have been, but even that is more likely than “2005: The Return”.

Of course I'd like to be surprised, but I simply can't see where a 2005 repeat would come from. What lifted 2005 into the stratosphere was that it was played by one unquestionably great side and another playing the kind of cricket that great sides play.

England had assembled the mightiest pace attack seen since the West Indies heyday of the 80s, including an all-rounder of the explosive power of an Ian Botham or a Keith Miller, were brilliantly led by Michael Vaughan, whose batting, along with Kevin Pietersen’s, had demonstrated at least the potential for greatness. It may all have fallen apart with embarrassing rapidity afterwards, but for that series we watched two of the most outstanding teams you could wish for playing outstanding cricket. And that is just not going to happen over the next couple of months.

If Pietersen recovers his pre-surgery powers, that will make three world-class players on show in 2010, Ricky Ponting and Graeme Swann being the other two, whereas in 2005, there were only about three players who weren't world-class during the series. It may very well be a close series, and there may well be twists and turns with the result uncertain until the last day of the last Test, but this is a clash between two teams in the middle of the ICC ranking table who are not capable of much more than middle-ranking cricket.

It is, however, likely to be the best Ashes series played in Australia for many a long year, but that's because the others have been such non-contests that even moderately interesting with the losers playing at recognisable Test standard would be sufficient to take the title – and the shared series alternative in the Cricinfo poll is by no means unlikely: it's actually what the rankings would predict.

But my fourth reason for not saying anything was the view I formed immediately after the 2009 series, which was that it was all going to come down to who turned up fit and in form.

Six months before the 2002-3 and 2006-7 series, I thought that England would lose while making at least a decent fight of it, but those ideas were on the basis of what I thought the team was going to be. As it turned out, on both occasions the team landed in Australia carrying a couple of key players who were unlikely to get fit in time, and in fact never did, which uncertainty and dithering was a major factor in the abject capitulations the series ended up being.

This time round, though, it's England with the settled XI who are used to winning things and seem to be match-fit and in decent form and Australia who apparently don't know what their preferred team is (a squad of seventeen - I ask you) and even if they do, most of them seem to be struggling for fitness or form and haven't won a game in ages, let alone a series.

Logically, then, I should pick the England-at-a-canter option but I can't believe in this cantering bit. Even if they win, it's much more likely that they will crash into Australia in the final straight and fall backwards over the line. The most disappointing aspect of England's play these last two or three years is their inability to deal with being in front. Give them a lead and it's just about guaranteed that they will play their worst cricket until the other side have drawn level or, preferably, gone ahead. (It even applies at the personal level: established players seem to make a habit of notching up a succession of mediocre results until it dawns on them they are about to lose their place and turn in a career-saving epic.)

So instead I pick option five, which wasn't on the original poll, which is “England to win a close but undistinguished series, like in 2009.”