Just 15 days for Ashes revenge to be complete

Cricket is getting shorter, and not just in the ways intended. But 3-0 so soon?

Shaun Marsh, skipper Steve Smith and Mitch Marsh celebrate in the changerooms at the WACA Ground with the Ashes won. Picture: AAP.

Cricket is getting shorter, and not just in the ways intended. It has taken Australia 15 days to regain the Ashes that they lost in 14 days just over two years ago. “Dead Tests” may not be an inappropriate designation in the context of a trophy with funerary associations. But it sits oddly with “live sport”.

Kudos to the Australians. They have played substantially the better cricket for significantly longer phases, and again yesterday, with Mitchell Starc, Patrick Cummins and especially Josh Hazlewood at their marauding best. The rivals have not bowled on different pitches during this Test, but it has seemed like it.

Steve Smith, meanwhile, has displayed a magnate’s acquisitiveness, in runs, in tricks, in moments. His impetuosity with reviews has been faulted. But it’s almost like an expression of belief in his own willpower, if he wants something hard enough it will come true. A lot of the time, frankly, it does.

England, meanwhile, have been locked ever tighter into a cycle of the bowling having to make up for the batting having to make up for the bowling … with quite a lot of it to make up for the absence of Ben Stokes. The crowd has grown used to it, too, not even troubling to boo Stuart Broad.

But 3-0 so soon? It leaves the summer’s showpiece Tests, Boxing Day in Melbourne and New Year’s in Sydney with no bearing on the series.

People will turn up. They loyally do. And it’s hard to see Australia playing such demob happy cricket as England did at The Oval in 2015 when nothing was on the line. But it has hardly been ebb and flow — more like crash through or crash. If attention turned naturally to the Big Bash, which commences tonight with its Sydney derby, it would be no wonder.

Some of the reason was on show in the damp morning of the third Test at the WACA Ground yesterday. There were mackerel skies, gloomy forecasts, flurries of inactivity. But the loss of overs was not, in the end, substantial.

To be saved by weather today requires quantities of rain that call forth arks. Otherwise overs unbowled one day are added to subsequent days by reference to sliding scales that result in starting times of improbable precision, like 9.51am or 10.13am, but better value to spectators. That leaves a lot of cricket to be played, and it’s as though the game burns almost too brightly for sustainability. Three times in the last 13 months, England have made 400 and lost by an innings. They have become cricket’s high-rollers.

The Ashes trend is likewise to extremities. Since the glory days of 2005, there has been but one genuinely close Ashes Test, Trent Bridge in 2013. Otherwise the margins have been blowouts, both ways. After only one series whitewash in the first 130 years of Anglo-Australia competition, there have been two in the last 11 years, and one would not bet against us watching the third.

Certainly, a key indicator in this series has been the form of the captains, Smith and Joe Root averaging 142 and 29 respectively. If it cannot faithfully reflect their respective talents, it does index the degree to which Australia have overwhelmed their oldest rivals. An away team, moreover, has won only once in the last 15 years, as tours have grown more crowded, less forgiving. The 25 scheduled Test days of 2017-18 span 46 days in toto. Before them three low-key games in empty grounds; between them another. Little chance to prepare; no chance to recover. A five-Test series in these circumstances is squeezing a quart into a pint pot. Home ground advantage really needs no further skewing.

That is not an excuse for England, any more than it was an excuse for Australia in 2015. Teams should not concede scores of nine for 622, any more than they should be bowled out for 60. But we are in an age of cricket and cricketers both impactful and brittle, long on thrust, short on parry.

Much attention, for example, has focused on Starc’s delivery to bowl James Vince on the fourth evening, deemed unplayable by many good judges. Yet it was surely significant how Vince chose to play Starc, bowling with a low-arm from round the wicket — naively showing all three stumps and attempting an attacking flick.

To that point Vince had played freely and fluently. And perhaps it was the difference between his missing the ball by an inch and two feet. But, with his team three wickets down and 159 runs in arrears, it had a kamikaze quality. Root himself had already given way to his baser instincts, chasing a wide loosener from Lyon that he could really only nick.

The Australians pursued their day 15 goal with a studied relentlessness, undistracted by the inauspicious opening when the removal of the covers revealed hessian wet and surface moist from copious overnight rain, the effect worsened by the kind of intermittent sprinklings that leave you unsure whether to cancel your family barbecue.

A slick groundstaff can make the folding and unfolding of covers look like a routine at an Olympic opening ceremony. The hapless crew here resembled crewmen in a yacht race trying to secure a flapping spinnaker. Reports came from the middle that the pitch was like, variously, playdough, plasticine, peat, treacle tart. There was time to muse on the collective noun for leafblowers. A scattering? An autumn?

In fact, the pitch cut few capers, and Hazlewood, the least of Australia’s attack in Brisbane but the best here, bowled finely. To be fair, it was not truly a capitulation of the visitors; rather a subjection. And not an hour after the fall of the last wicket, it was raining again. But for all its relevance to custody of the Ashes, it could rain for the next month.