The Ashes: Buzzed Aussies ready to bury Bazball
Will Pat Cummins’ Australian team with their traditional brand of cricket overcome a revolutionary England to win the Ashes
The Ashes, Australian cricket’s most coveted contest, begins before the braying mob in the Hollies Stand at Edgbaston on Friday. The anticipation is exquisite: Pat Cummins must side do what no side has done since Steve Waugh’s outfit in 2001.
To win, they must stare down coach Brendon McCullum’s revolutionaries. No longer the hesitant, pasty-faced mob who zombie marched to an end-of-times 0-4 defeat in 2021-2.
Renewed by changes of leadership, the former Kiwi and captain Ben Stokes’s boys play a brand of cricket – Bazball – that owes as much to T20 as it does to history. The current England team scores at rate never before attained or sustained.
This weekend we will find out if it can be sustained against the best attack in Test cricket.
England laid waste to all and sundry in the past 12 months, winning 10 of their last Tests at warp speed. They’re here for a good time, not a long time.
Australia, then, find themselves representing an old world order. The recently crowned World Test Champions represent the establishment as they mark their guards and set their fields.
Steve Smith has played England 33 times, done three tours of duty and raised his bat to celebrate centuries seven times on this green and pleasant land.
He has scored double centuries at Lord’s and scored one in each innings on return from suspension at Edgbaston in 2019 – innings he rates as his finest – but has never been part of a winning series in the UK.
“It’s certainly something I have wanted to tick off my bucket list,” says the 34-year-old.
“I know it’s the same for a lot of the other boys in the room.”
Cummins wants it too. “Even after the other day there was a bit of talk that we’d ticked off the World Test Championship, the T20 World Cup, a one-day World Cup, but we still don’t feel like we’ve ticked off an away Ashes series,” the captain says.
No captain since Steve Waugh has returned victorious, with Ricky Ponting’s outfit ambushed in the celebrated 2005 series.
“I think if anything it just shows it is a really tough place to win over here, conditions totally different to what we’ve grown up playing,” Cummins adds.
“Just like when touring teams come to Australia it is really hard, when we are away from home, wherever it is hard, that is the challenge ahead of our group.”
Tim Paine’s team, riding on the wave of Smith’s 110-run series average, had the series in hand in 2019 but were defied by an incredible innings from Stokes at Headingley that saw England win a nail biter to level the series.
“2019 felt a little bitter sweet we left something out there,” Cummins says. “It’s always nice coming over here with a bit of experience – everyone who is coming over knows what to expect.”
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