England’s Ashes: a premature post-mortem

“It’s not the despair,” implores John Cleese’s character in the movie Clockwise as he slumps on a roadside while wearing a monastic frock, in one of many memorable moments of farce.

“I can stand the despair. It’s the hope.”

There is an echo here of Nietzsche, who thought hope “the worst of evils because it prolongs the torments of man.”

But the German’s grim sturm und drang is absent – in Clockwise, it is an unmistakably English sentiment, prompting Bill Brysonesque ruminations on the national character.

Who other than the English could prefer the certainty of gloom to the distant promise of glory; steady showers to the tantalising chance of sunshine?

Why England Lose was the title of a book about England’s football team, shrewdly released before the last World Cup in anticipation of the inevitable disappointment.

Defeat, it seems, is a safe bet where England is concerned.

In cricket, it is much the same story. Notwithstanding its recent run of Ashes success, England has over the years played so feebly that there is a feeling of bitter relief once another game is lost.

The last wicket or losing runs might even be said, in the jargon of pop psychology, to ‘bring closure’, putting any absurd optimism safely to rest.

Remembering his painful hope after the stunning first day of the Edgbaston Test of 1997, with England 3/200 after dismissing Australia for just 118, Andrew Hughes wrote:

“The curtains came down with an hour to go. Going home, big fat jolly raindrops spattered the windscreen. None of us had been drinking, but we all had silly grins on our faces. Could this be the year?”

The hubris is palpable; the question rhetorical, even mildly tragic. Hughes composed those lines more than a decade later, in full knowledge of what actually transpired – England won by nine wickets, but was soundly thrashed in the third, fourth and fifth Tests.

Coming eight summers after relinquishing the Ashes in 1989, and another eight before regaining them in 2005, the 1997 series was in fact the bleakest, blackest midwinter of the Waugh era; the Edgbaston match the cruelest of false dawns.

It was the only Ashes Test England won during that 16-year period when the series was still ‘alive’. All of the remaining six occurred when the urn was out of reach.

Watching and listening to the Barmy Army in full voice on the doomed fifth day in Adelaide earlier this week, even Australians in the crowd might have felt a pang of sympathy.

Theirs was not, it should be said, the spontaneous, soulful song of passengers aboard a sinking ship (although some no doubt later ‘drowned their sorrows’!)

It was more a case of ‘no hope, just principles’, to borrow a line from that modern English classic Brassed Off – a decision to carry on singing because it is what they do best, regardless of the situation. Whatever people say about the Army, no one can deny they possess a deep, comic nobility.

In his peerless Fever Pitch, Nick Hornby describes a similar feeling watching Arsenal fans prepare to journey to Liverpool on the last day of the 1988/89 league season, with the Gunners needing to win by two goals to claim their first title in 18 years:

“Their positiveness… on this beautiful May morning made me sad for them, as if these chirpy and bravely confident young men and women were off to the Somme to lose their lives, rather than to Anfield to lose, at worst, their faith.”

What makes England’s current predicament so hard to swallow is that the team arrived on these shores with such high hopes and a not-so-quiet cockiness.

As Jonathan Agnew observed, with a touch of melancholy, at least previous England teams knew they were going to be thrashed.

It didn’t take long, however, for that old despondency to show itself again.

There was something almost willed about England’s first innings implosion at Adelaide: the batsmen seemed eager to share the shame, to at least make a ‘good show’ of making a very bad one. If anyone doubted it, here was conclusive proof: no-one does ‘woeful’ quite as well as England.

Such defeatism sits uneasily with the nation’s self-image as a place of unusual pluck and resilience.

There is a whole literary (or perhaps oratory) tradition, from Shakespeare to Churchill, emphasising English steadfastness.

But England’s batsmen in Adelaide proved as meek as field mice. “Wee, sleekit, cowran, tim’rous beastie/O, what a panic’s in thy breastie!” wrote the poet Robbie Burns after uncovering a family of the tiny creatures while farming.

He could have been describing any member of England’s XI, with the possible exceptions of Carberry and Root. (Fittingly, a statue of Burns stands outside South Australia’s State Library, not far from the Oval).

There was a stomach-wrenching inevitability about the first and last wickets of the final day. After pulling a Siddle short-ball for six, Stuart Broad attempted to repeat the feat next ball but instead picked out a prowling Lyon.

Panesar, on the other hand, fell to a fuller delivery just as the Barmy Army started to reach peak decibels.

The chorus had got as far as “Migh-ty Migh-ty Eng-land,” belted out with gusto and rubato, when Monty drove straight to short cover, prompting an artless cheer that drowned out the chant.

One of the Army’s chosen tunes that morning was the upbeat anthem ‘Go West’, with the doctored lyrics “Four more to the England!”

Now that the series has pressed on to Perth, it would be fitting to return to the original version, especially the couplet: “If we make a stand/We’ll find our promised land.”

After all, England did just that in 1986, with Chris Broad and Bill Athey, and then David Gower and Jack Richards, combining for two of the top ten highest partnerships on the WACA Ground as England compiled 8/592 dec, then a record score for the venue.

That performance, however, will be hard to emulate.

The England of ’86 was buoyed by beating Australia in Brisbane.

The current team, on the other hand, has failed dismally in its first two Tests.

While they would no doubt claim, in Monty Python-style, that they are not dead yet, they would also probably concede that the pacey Perth pitch seems an unlikely place to launch a revival.

As the players sat back in their seats on the plane that took them west on Tuesday, more than a few must have wondered whether their chances would shortly be heading in the same direction.