ADelaide comes across as a posh town, but for a long time there was a contrasting level of brutality with the Adelaide Test. At the height of summer, late January, it was a pan: hot, flat, home to impossibly long days. The mood changed in recent decades as it shifted to milder weeks in late spring and then to nighttime competitions. But with the third Test being a day match and forecasts reaching 39 degrees Celsius this week, the old taste is expected to return. And if England’s 2-0 deficit becomes an Ashes-losing 3-0, we will see an attendant awakening in the Australian sporting public for total destruction.
There is talk of this set of audiences yearning for competitiveness. Perhaps true, at least abstractly during the endless months of build-up. But let’s face it: when the Kookaburra starts flying, much of Australia will have a much more vigorous interest in the opposite direction. Something innate comes to life. The distinctive scent of a whitewash ahead makes the skin tingle, the hair on the forearms salute and the postures correct themselves. Five-zero is not just a punch line from Glenn McGrath, but the grail of a fanatic. You can tell because we’re already looking for it after two tests. If England were to concede the series this week, it would stoke interest in Britain but inspire it at home: Australians may be more excited about Boxing Day, which offers the chance for their team to go 4-0 up than for the visitors to make it 2-2 and set up a classic.
The whitewash hunger was not always the right choice, purely for practical reasons. Rewind the tape to our last millennium and a series ending 5-0 was simply not considered. Only once had such a score been handed out in the Ashes, at a time when England was still a wreck after the First World War, and at the other end of the 20th century Warwick Armstrong’s team of 1920-21 was no longer on the tip of the tongue. A draw was inevitable, and winning two or three games was as much as anyone had hoped.
There was an uproar first when Steve Waugh’s team reached new levels of dominance, beating a struggling West Indies team in all five Tests in 2001 and then getting the chance to repeat that against England in 2003, only to drop the final set at the SCG to Andy Caddick. In 2006-07, the whitewash became a reality, while also being seen for the anomaly that it was: a new chapter for a team now managed by Ricky Ponting, on a revenge mission after the unhealed sting of 2005 in England.
But repeating the 5-0 dose so soon after in 2013-14, when Mitchell Johnson made his pyrotechnic crack, led to a new expectation that Australian host teams should not only beat England in a series, but do so in every encounter. It almost happened in the next two Southern Ashes, remaining at 4-0 on both occasions, only for unavoidable New Year’s rain in Sydney and a pitch so lifeless in Melbourne that the MCG was notified.
All this, glossed over as cricketing zeitgeist, was already present before Bazball and its specific irritations were a current approach. The English types whose social calendars give them time to write ‘rent free’ hundreds of times on the internet don’t understand that this is nothing new, just a variation in reasons to be annoyed by the same number of people who have always found Australians annoying. The Australian perception, which readers can decide for themselves, is that this English setup has generated a lot of talk, has been both self-referential and self-referential over several years of mediocre results with a few exciting games sprinkled in, and has come to Australia to be destroyed, just as it was four years ago before all this fuss started. In short, England built itself a rather nice sand castle in the silence between the tides.
This means that in the current series, defeating Bazball is not the main point. Beating England in any form has always been that. The Bazball aspect would just provide the Australians with an extra dose of flavor, something that would make this win taste a little different from the others; a lash of revenge as a supposedly smart and brave new philosophy was destroyed by an Australian team playing largely normal cricket. Regardless of the ill-timed contract extensions for England’s coach and captain, few survive an Ashes whitewash, and such an ending would surely end this phase of their experiment as well.
So next week could be the week for another Bazball wonder, the game that turns this series around. But the hard, flat skies pushing over Adelaide the day before the Test don’t bear those signs hidden in the blue. If it goes the other way, to three and zip, the momentum won’t be so much downhill as downhill, and the Australian hunger on the bench or in the stands won’t be sated by Christmas Day. Had England shown any fight up to this point this might have been different, but there was weakness. Pin this on whichever part of the national psyche you like, but whatever the score, until the final session of the summer, Australians now en masse want to see England fall apart piece by piece.
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