In cricket, as in life, there is truth to the enduring words: “A house divided against itself will not stand.” Jesus said it, Abraham Lincoln famously quoted it and the 2009 Australian Ashes tour party is well aware of its veracity.
The common thread to be found among all Australia’s four most recent Ashes defeats in England – 1977, 1981, 1985 and 2005 – is that the talent of the team was undercut by divisions and personal differences.
Each tour saw outstanding individual performances by Australian players, some of them record-breaking.
But on each occasion there was not enough team unity to produce the sort of collective effort required to win the Ashes away from home.
English cricket is well-known for misadventure and failure, but in each instance, the home side produced a more unified performance, motivated as always by the prospect of claiming cricket’s most venerable trophy.
Occasionally a team may be able to forge on to victory without the benefit of a friendly background.
In 1997 Australia won a home Test series over New Zealand when all players concerned were preoccupied with a pay dispute, and the awesome West Indian sides of the 1980s were never far removed from inter-island tensions.
But that has seldom been the case in the Ashes’ recent history, when Australia’s successes have coincided with English in-fighting almost as neatly as Australia’s defeats were blighted by internal differences.
The 1977 tourists were doomed to failure virtually before the tour began, with 13 members of the squad about to be exposed as throwing in their lot with Kerry Packer’s World Series Cricket (WSC).
After arriving in England in April, the team was rocked when the story broke in early May, and a pall followed them across the UK as they stumbled to a 3-0 series defeat.
Tour manager Len Maddocks asserted in the immediate aftermath of the WSC story that it would not have a “detrimental effect” on the tour.
But by the time he returned to Australia, he would admit that the Packer influence on the result was profound.
“There were overtones of the Packer thing all the time,” he said in Peter McFarline’s book A Game Divided.
“Everywhere we went, the media were on the subject.”
The war between Packer and the establishment was resolved in 1979, but it left wounds susceptible to reopening for years afterwards.
Australia’s 1981 tourists were captained by a loyalist in Kim Hughes – Greg Chappell having elected not to tour.
The choice of captain was a point of contention with Hughes’ two senior most players, Packer men Rod Marsh and Dennis Lillee, who both felt Marsh should have been appointed.
What followed was an extraordinary series, with Ian Botham starring for England in a 3-1 victory while the Lillee/Marsh duo demonstrated an attitude to Hughes that was poor.
Mike Whitney, who was called up from club cricket to play in the fifth and sixth Tests, described it as “the maximum lack of respect to the Australian captain”.
“Rod and Dennis gave Kim no support at all,” Whitney told Christian Ryan in his Hughes biography Golden Boy.
“Looking back now, he was under enormous pressure, getting squeezed from all angles.”
Others, including Geoff Lawson and tour coach Peter Philpott, described the dynamic in similar terms.
By 1985, the Australian team had said goodbye to Marsh, Lillee and Hughes.
Marsh and Lillee retired and Hughes failed to win a place on the Ashes tour of that year. Hughes responded by defiantly signing up to play in South Africa with Ali Bacher’s rebels. It left a trail of bitterness.
Much like WSC, the South African option left Allan Border’s tourists crippled by disunity but also shorn of quality players.
Terry Alderman’s 42 English wickets in 1981 and 41 in 1989 were sorely missed in `85 when he chose the Rand over the Ashes.
Four of the rebels who did eventually go to England only did so after being persuaded not to join Hughes and Alderman – Murray Bennett, Wayne Phillips, Graeme Wood and Dirk Wellham.
The last three players were lured back to the establishment via the deep pockets of Packer, something other tourists did not appreciate.
All this made it a near-impossible tour as captain for Border, and despite providing more than his fair share of runs, the bedraggled Australians were beaten 3-1, losing the finals two Tests by an innings to relinquish the Ashes.
Australian chairman of selectors Laurie Sawle was also new in the role at that point, and he recalled the tour “falling apart”.
“It was AB’s first real go at captaincy, his first tour, and apart from the Lord’s Test, we fell apart pretty badly,” Sawle told Mark Ray in Border And Beyond.
“He was a reluctant captain. He was groping to find his way.
“The only feeling the selectors had about it was we hoped he could come to grips with it and learn to handle it.
“We felt for him, as did the country. There was an inner turmoil eating at him. But Australian cricket was just about in ruins then.”
Border eventually led the team out of those ruins and into a bright era that saw Mark Taylor, Steve Waugh, and then Ricky Ponting lift Australia to new heights, all the while keeping tight possession of the Ashes.
By 2005 the Australians had achieved just about all there was to achieve, having finally won in India in 2004.
When they arrived in England for the 2005 Ashes, they discovered an English opponent that was hungrier and better prepared.
But the Australians were far from united, unbalanced by a poor start to the tour and struggled to bind together as they had done previously, affected by differences with coach John Buchanan and scuffles between players’ partners.
Adam Gilchrist has described 2005 as “the worst time of my cricketing life”, and in his autobiography, True Colours, he gave full measure to the internal rumblings that be-devilled a series England won 2-1.
“We were breaking up into factions, sticking within our little subgroups, and working at odds with each other,” he wrote.
“We weren’t doing enough things together, as a team, off the field.
“In part, that was because some of the partners couldn’t abide each other.”
With this in mind, Cricket Australia invited partners to be part of a pre-Ashes camp in April this year.
It is not hard to imagine the concept of team harmony being earnestly discussed.
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