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Is anybody up to speed with mathematical equations, or more to the point, can the same equation have two different answers?
At Lord’s in July, team A produced a moderate, if seemingly under par, effort in their first innings.
Team B then replied with a woefully poor effort of their own.
With a significant advantage, team A drove home their lead by putting the game way out of reach.
Team B then offered a bit of token resistance in a futile chase but ended up losing emphatically.
At Brisbane in the past few days the run of play was exactly the same but there was a different outcome and while I won’t expect anyone to point out that there were a few variables, what intrigues me is how the team A of Lord’s, in such a short space of time, could be transformed into team B and vice versa.
At Lords, England were very good and Australia were woefully poor whereas at the Gabba the tourists were dire and the hosts were right on the money.
As an Englishman it was painful to watch and while I’m not of the opinion that one performance will define the whole series, it was baffling to see the extent to which the wheel has turned.
Were England under-prepared? Were they complacent? Had their stranglehold over the Australians in recent series led to an expectation of an easier ride?
Well it’s difficult to answer the first point given that three warm-up matches constitutes a marathon by the standard of modern-day tours, with regard to the second it certainly wouldn’t have been wittingly encompassed and as for the third, I can’t believe it would have been the case.
But take all peripheral factors out of the equation and reduce it down to the lowest common denominator and you get a game of cricket that was alarmingly one-sided and for a side that are meticulous in their planning this will be especially hard to take.
I can’t believe that England didn’t have plans of their own – the selection of three almost identical seamers tells you they did – but they were matched and then raised by what the home side came up with.
From being a cohesively efficiently unit, significantly evident cracks appeared in the batting which was both naive and rabbit in the headlights-esque and the bowling attack, the first couple of sessions aside, didn’t function anywhere near their usual standard.
Cricket around the world is rarely played on the kind of surface that was presented but you would think that England had wandered into McDonalds and been offered lobster.
They couldn’t have looked more out of place and while they have a bit of history in this regard – the South Africans gave them a going over in Johannesburg a few winters ago – it’s not as if they are taking the leap from stock car racing to Formula One.
Players with the ability to get to international level should have the wherewithal to do a lot better.
A bombardment from a revitalised Mitchell Johnson was always going to be on the cards as the dangerous swing-bowler that has been forever promised is yet to turn up, yet the enigma was made to look like Curtly Ambrose.
They knew it was coming but nothing could be done about it and while the chances of Johnson backing this up aren’t endorsed by history, more of the same is definitely on the agenda or an attempt certainly is.
But sometimes you have to mess up to advance and it shouldn’t be as grisly again, regardless of whether the Perth pitch mirrors its Brisbane counterpart.
On the bowling side of things, there isn’t really anywhere else for them to go.
Two spinners has been mooted for Adelaide but that would mean giving Ben Stokes a debut at number six and this is a path England just don’t want to go down.
Jimmy Anderson, Stuart Broad and Graeme Swann are shoo-ins and the only decision will be whether to replace Chris Tremlett, a shadow of the bowler that dominated three years ago, with a slightly speedier version.
However, to focus on the bowling would be to miss the point by a distance as England were hammered in Brisbane because their batting was sub-standard.
If this improves then the team’s fortunes will match but if it doesn’t then it will almost certainly turn uglier.
As a final aside, much has been made of the antics of both Michael Clarke and David Warner and all I would offer is that the former can hardly be blamed for getting excited on the verge of a victory having gone so long without one – and did he really do that much wrong apart from being in the vicinity of a microphone?
As for the latter, given his charge sheet, sending him into a press conference is like giving the class idiot a microphone at the school assembly, so nobody should really be surprised by the rubbish he spouts.