Too shocked to gloat

Adelaide awoke this morning with a massive hangover. At least, I assume it did, because nothing else could quite explain how quiet the city was on the morning after the night before. The streets seemed empty, aside from a few bewildered Englishmen standing out from the (lack of) crowd in their “Douglas Jardine - Ashes hero” T-shirts, hoping against hope that everything they’d just witnessed had all been a bad dream.

I’d imagined this moment ever since I first starting watching Ashes routs. What would it be like, I wondered, to be Pom Down Under, on the day after England had slumped to one of their most wretched defeats in history? The answer surprised me, because the result had surprised everyone. Australia, it seemed, was too shocked even to gloat.

The headline on The Age summed up the mood perfectly. “How could it be?” they asked, after watching their respected opponents regress by approximately 16 years in an imitation of Graham Gooch’s domino-ralliers of 1990-91. To a connoisseur of English batting disasters, nothing quite topped the events at Melbourne on that trip - until now.

Like all the best collapses, it started with a tremor. A little frisson of excitement, made all the more dangerous by the sense of injustice that had gone into Andrew Strauss’s dismissal. Could it? Would it? Ian Bell, confused into being in a hurry after he and Strauss had swapped ten runs in ten overs, then added to the alarm, and by the time Kevin Pietersen had swept hubristically at his first ball from Shane Warne, the day’s expectations had gone into total meltdown.

Not least the expectations in Adelaide’s Central Business District, the clutch of high-rises that lie beyond the “City” End of the ground. The prospect of a brisk day’s trading on a warm Monday morning went straight out of the 12th-floor window, as the white-collar workers downed spreadsheets and legged it expectantly across the River Torrens.

The official figure for the final day was 20,355, although that was announced at 5pm, just as the gates were thrown open to allow the baying masses free access for the final hour-and-a-half of Australia’s chase. A total figure of 136,761 had watched the match - the most at Adelaide since the 1958-59 series. There’s definitely something sadistic about the Australian psyche. That match was a ten-wicket thrashing that brought the Ashes back with a game to spare.

But sadism on the streets? Not a bit of it.