An opportunity to create history is at hand

Pat Cummins will bring a calmness and quiet dignity to the office of captain

The greatest of cricket contests is upon us. Not a minute too soon for some, a minute too late for others. The tension is palpable, the expectation exquisite and the opportunity to create history at hand.

Not everybody survived the winter. Tim Paine should have been walking out in the captain’s jacket ready to toss the coin and see how the final act of his renaissance played out. A lap of honour after the fifth Test, a final exhilarated and exhausted celebration was hoped for. Life had other plans.

Cricketers know a career can be snatched from them at any time by injury, injudicious selection or — god forbid — form.

It is fair to say few anticipated it ending in such a manner.

It is a first for some and should be a last for others. Pat Cummins plays his first Test as Australian captain and becomes the first fast bowler from these parts to toss the coin since that rare sighting in the middle of last century.

Cummins will bring a calmness and quiet dignity to the office. Raised to respect others and expect little, if he shapes the side in his image it will put further distance between them and the succession of outfits whose abrasive manners threatened to overshadow their impressive skills.

Vice-captain Steve Smith’s peculiar purgatory continues in a wing attached to the mansion he once walked.

Joe Root is here for his third Ashes contest, his second as skipper on an Australian tour. He could not win the last contest at home and was worn down to the point of hospitalisation by the fifth Test in 2017-18, but would be raised on shoulders and carried from Heathrow to Number 10 should he manage to win this series.

English bowlers James Anderson, 38, and Stuart Broad, 35, are surely on their final tour down under. They bring with them more than 300 games experience and more than 1100 Test match wickets. Anderson has already been placed in cotton wool and looks set to make random guest appearances through the series.

David Warner is 35 and it is hard to imagine him playing the Ashes of 2025-26.

England has not won a single game in any of the last 10 Ashes Tests in Australia. Its best effort the dullest of draws at the MCG in 2017-18, but that series finished with them being beaten by an innings and 123 runs at Sydney a week later.

Root has never scored a century in these parts, but he has scored half a dozen in 2021. He has batted like a man possessed and must be hoping this never passes.

He turns 31 this month and it may not be his last visit, but England players give the impression of ageing fast.

The English team has played and played and played in the past two years while Australia sat idle. Root has attended the toss 20 times in the past two years, where his opponents have roused themselves for just five Tests — and all of them at home.

For a while it appeared this would be a series that might give an indication of whether too much or too little preparation is better.

An IPL, a T20 World Cup, a Queensland quarantine stint and weeks of rain will have reduced any advantage the match-hardened once had.

Australia has only the warm glow of the T20 World Cup and the distant memory of a loss to India in Brisbane back in January.

The first statement of Cummins’s captaincy will be made before a ball is bowled. Will the side take a knee or form a circle to signal respect and awareness of racial inequality? The issue could not be more timely for Root, who has seen his Yorkshire club condemned and its administration cast out as racial failings of the recent past came home to roost. Australians would be foolhardy to claim any high moral ground on this issue.

Cummins will be acutely aware that any act signalling inclusivity will inflame the small but vocal outrage brigade.

Both sides will be aware of just how important the first Test is — even in this longest of series. If Australia get away to a good start it will be hard to catch them up. Andrew Strauss’s men managed to hang on for a draw in 2010-11 despite falling 210 runs behind on the first innings and went on from there to win the series.

Then again, that’s what everyone thought after India were humiliated at the first Test last summer and that’s the beauty of the looming contest. No statistic or expert or soothsayer can tell you exactly how it will play out or who will stand up.

If history is any indication this is Australia’s series to lose. They are a better side on paper and they have the home ground advantage.

But the skies, the pitch, the toss, the weather, the gods, the opposition, the weight of expectation and the heat of the moment are only some of the variables that will come into play over the next 25 days of scheduled play.