Don’t you love The Ashes? Not the kind left over in your fireplace when you wake up with the fire burned out overnight at the dawn of a frosty day in July. I mean the kind we see on the television screen and beamed to us from the English summer overnight. With the heated play, it’s been something to wake up to on these cold mornings, hasn’t it?
I don’t know how many telly sets and radios here in Yallambie have been tuned into the cricket – chalk up this household for one – but with two games in the bag already, cor blimey, haven’t we seen some great cricket? The First Test at Edgbaston last month was won by Australia by just two wickets, the runs achieved inside the final hour as the Australian tail-enders somehow dragged in a victory. I checked the score online with sleepy eyes on the final evening of that match at 4:00am Melbourne time and was astonished to find the game still in progress at 7 o’clock in the evening over there. I listened to the final runs on the radio without getting out of bed, settling back contentedly to sleep afterwards.
Then what about the Second Test at Lords which was completed on the weekend? Australia won that game by just 43 runs, the result concluded early enough that most cricket fans in Australia were able to follow the result live in Australia. The English Captain Ben Stokes at one point looked like he was going to win the game for England off his own bat with a fine “Bazball” exhibition of hard hitting inspired by the emotions generated by the stumping/runout of Jonny Bairstow at the other end. In the end it wasn’t enough but hasn’t there been a lot of rubbish written about Bairstow’s dismissal since?
I read in the press today that the British Prime Minister has waded into the controversy with a spokesman for the PM criticising the Australians’ tactics. The news reminds me of another era, the infamous Bodyline series of 1932-33 which verged on causing a diplomatic incident between the two countries at the time. The recent Second Test at Lords was dominated by short ball tactics and nobody bats an eyelid now, least of all the batters.
Really, there’s nothing new in the sort of dismissal that got Bairstow the other night. Indeed, the English keeper had tried the same tactic in the Australian innings – just he’s a lousy throw at it. Indeed, if you go back far enough, you’ll find all this talk about the “spirit of the game” is just a Furphy. Four years ago during the last Australian tour of England I wrote about cricket in a post on these pages and I made mention of the game in 1882 that led to the famous newspaper obituary to English cricket that started The Ashes. In that game, Fred, “The Demon” Spofforth bowled an inspired spell to rout the English team after W G Grace had earlier run out the Australian tail ender, Sammy Jones who had left his crease to do “a bit of gardening,” to the pitch.
Sound familiar? Might as well be talking about Bairstow’s wicket the other night, the only difference being Bairstow’s wicket has gone into the record book as out, stumped, not runout – proof that the ball was still in play.
So all this nonsense about Bairstow’s dismissal not being in the spirit of the game, I say look at what has gone before. Grace ran out Jones that day one hundred and forty years ago, with some reports even suggesting that the great hairy Englishman hid the ball under his beard as he approached the stumps, whipping the ball out from under the nose of Jones to break the wicket. The story gets even better when you realize that this wasn’t the first time Grace had used the tactic. In a previous game while captaining a United South of England XI against Coventry and District, Grace is supposed to have run out an opposition batter after the batsman lost his belt while crossing for a run. The run was completed successfully but when the Coventry batsman, Jimmy Holmes left his crease to retrieve the belt, hitching his trousers up to stop them falling around his ankles, Grace ran him out.
Just imagine. So much for the tradition of sportsmanship on the cricket field.
It makes a good story, but then such stories are part and parcel of the theatrics of cricket aren’t they? Holmes wasn’t of course the last player to lose his strides on the cricket field. Ian Chappell did so once upon a time in the process of adjusting his box protector, but the press had a field day at the time calling the act obscene. Chappell is no stranger to controversy, both on and off the field. In one of the longest running feuds in cricket, Chappell and Ian Botham, later Baron Botham and a member of the House of Lords had a bar room confrontation with the latter allegedly threatening the Australian with a beer glass. So much for McCullum’s beer after the game.
The Preamble in the Rules of Cricket talks about the “Spirit of Cricket” exhorting players to play the game, “hard and fair”. So yes, there really is such a thing as the “Spirit of Cricket” but the boundaries are not where the British PM would have it. In the televised Lords game last week, I saw an Australian batsman defend a ball to his feet, then bend and pick it up, handing it back to the English fielder. It saved the Englishman the effort of picking it up, but who remembers the Australian batsman Andrew Hilditch being given out under the seldom used cricket rule, “Handled Ball” for a similar action in a game against Pakistan? That appeal was in retaliation for an earlier “Mankad” incident from the Australians in the same match. Such was the “Spirit” of that game.
There have been many times in International Cricket when that ill-defined grey area of the spirit of cricket has been called into question. Greg Chappell instructing his brother Trevor to bowl underarm for Australia against New Zealand. Dennis Lillee’s tantrum when not allowed to use an aluminium bat. Sandpapergate. Colin Croft deliberately shouldering an umpire out of the way in his delivery stride. Various betting and match fixing scandals. The list goes on and on but this time is not one of them.
With the Third Test about to get underway at Headingley, two others Ashes games played at that venue leap to mind immediately, both won by England using a prototype of their present day Bazball approach. Stokes in one of the great Test innings in 2019 and Ian Botham without a helmet in 1981, hooking Dennis Lillee out of the park to win an unwinnable Test. It was only later that it was revealed that Lillee and Marsh had put money on the long odds of an English win.
So forget about what happened at Lords the other day. It’s in the history books now. Ashes to ashes. The Third Test in the 2023 Ashes is about to get under way and if the first two Tests are anything to go by it will surely be an enthralling contest between bat and ball and between two very different approaches to the game. The free-wheeling Bazball of England against the more nuanced and dare I say, professional approach of Australia.
Whichever way it goes. We will be following it here in Yallambie.
What’s the weather forecast?
Yallambie 