Why England’s Ashes humiliation was so well deserved

After a long, humiliating summer in Australia, England’s cricketers were at last put out of their misery this morning. They lost the fifth and final Ashes test in Sydney by five wickets, bringing the final scoreline to 4-1 in Australia’s favour. For an English side that arrived in Australia brimming with confidence, and emboldened by the support of 40,000 travelling supporters, this was not how things were supposed to end.

The story of this Ashes is not so much the cricket that has been played – most of it was second-rate, for which England is largely to blame. Rather, it is the bewildering level of arrogance and entitlement displayed by the English side, led by captain Ben Stokes and coach Brendon McCullum. They arrived in Perth in November expecting their attacking game style – ‘Bazball’ – and their new-age, ‘be yourself out there’ mentality to wipe the floor with an old, injury-depleted Australian side. Their underwhelming performances across six weeks showed that this confidence could not have been more unearned and misplaced.

Winning a series in Australia is perhaps the most difficult thing a visiting team can do in test cricket. Indeed, it has been 15 years since an English side accomplished this feat. It is made more difficult still by the strange hostility that envelops Australians when an English team arrives on their shores. This summer was no different: tabloid newspapers, such as the notoriously parochial West Australian, adopted an almost contemptuous tone to England’s star batsman, Joe Root, before a ball had even been delivered in the series. Australian supporters, as they get progressively drunker and more sunburnt over the course of a day’s play, abandon good-natured ribbing for vituperative abuse. They really seem to dislike the English.

England wilted under this pressure. The Australian side, missing both captain Pat Cummins – the best fast bowler of his generation – and fellow great Josh Hazlewood still managed to dispatch England in the first test in Perth in less than two days (a test match usually runs to four or five days). The next two test matches in Brisbane and Adelaide didn’t last much longer. England, suddenly, had been defeated in just 11 days of competitive cricket – a record-equalling failure. The Ashes – often described as the greatest, and certainly the oldest, rivalry in sport – was over before it had seemingly begun.

England’s cricketers were warned this could happen at every step of this slow-motion disaster. Former test greats, from Geoffrey Boycott to Ian Botham and Michael Vaughan, publicly despaired at the lack of match practice England’s players had been exposed to. Incredibly, this amounted to a brief trial match on a country wicket on Perth’s outskirts. Nonetheless, Stokes dismissed their concerns as the grumblings of ‘has-beens’.

England’s capitulation in Perth made the second test in Brisbane even more important. If England went two-down, a recovery – winning the three remaining tests – seemed all but impossible. Yet Brisbane was also considered to be England’s most formidable challenge: it was played with a pink ball under lights (most test matches, and all tests in England, are played during the day with a red ball), a format that had proved the perfect hunting ground for Australian fast bowler Mitchell Starc.

England was offered the ideal preparation for this task: a three-day trial match, under lights, against Australia’s Prime Minister’s XI – generally, the best players in Australia’s highly-competitive domestic league, many of whom have international experience. It is an opportunity granted every visiting side – but one that was considered beneath England’s cricketers. They went on to lose in Brisbane in an inept display – notably dropping five simple catches in a single day of cricket. McCullum laughably suggested that England had ‘over-prepared’.

This precipitated what, in hindsight, has proved to be the defining event of this Ashes series. England’s cricketers decided to take a ‘mid-series break’ in the tropical paradise of Noosa, north-eastern Queensland. They played golf, frolicked in the surf and – in the finest tradition of English tourists in Australia – got riotously drunk. All very well if England had something to celebrate. But they were supposed to be in the middle of an Ashes that Stokes, speaking before the first test, described as the ‘biggest series of our lives’.

England’s defeat in Adelaide – albeit over a more respectable five days – came as little surprise. Yet it was a profound disappointment to the Australian public. Ultimately, they wanted a gripping, hard-fought Ashes series – the kind supporters are used to. Instead, they witnessed a feeble, overrated English side get blown out of the water by a largely second-choice Australian team.

The response in Australia was telling. It was, ultimately, one of disappointment. Ashes series are supposed to deliver high drama and enthralling cricket. Now, the two biggest fixtures in the Australian summer – the Boxing Day test at the Melbourne Cricket Ground, and the New Year’s test at the Sydney Cricket Ground – were dead rubbers. There was a great sense of the cricketing public being deprived of something that they had been promised.

Speaking after his side’s defeat in Sydney, Stokes generously gave his side a rating of ‘three out of 10’ for its performance over the series. McCullum, the chief architect of England’s failure, insisted with his typical intransigence that he ‘won’t be told what to do’ by England’s cricket administrators. Both Stokes and McCullum seemed more interested in reminding the public of their self-appointed status as saviours of English cricket, than reckoning with the scale of their defeat. The cricketing public, not least the thousands of England supporters who spent thousands travelling to Australia – which for many will be the biggest trip of their lifetime – will no doubt have reached other, more critical conclusions.

Hugo Timms is a staff writer at spiked.