Couldn’t care less about who captains England? About whether or not Alastair Cook is sacked or not and who replaces him? Five-zip, hurrah, hurrah – now bring on the South Africans?
Well, if you don’t then you should – or at least take a moment to think about why a strong England cricket side is also necessary for a good Australian side.
Five to nothing may be good for team which was losing regularly until recently but that is where it should end – as an anomaly.
You always get the feeling England could be on the edge of a losing abyss. They’ve already been through one from 1989-2003.
Imagine an Australian side (any major international sport, not just cricket) being uncompetitive for that long?
“Sure”, you say, “What about the All Blacks in rugby union and us: since 2002 and still counting. Or the West Indies 1978-1995?”
Yeah sure, but the fact is Australia was generally always competitive in a majority of these contests. There was always a sense of hope (both of the heart and rationally) Australia would give a good account of itself, compete and make them beat us, not beat ourselves.
Which returns me to English cricket at its nadir of forlornness pre-2005.
There was (I remember it well, living there at the time) a sense of utter desperation and hopelessness for a lot of those years In England. A sense that English cricket, along with English sport in general, was in an irrevocable and terminal decline.
I mean, come one, Australia has been in troughs (anyone remember one silver and four bronze medals in Montreal?) but can you imagine, as a cricket supporter, going 10 years without winning a major Test series, as England did in the 1990s?
80 years and counting (Andy Murray is a Scotsman!) at Wimbledon?
It got so bad, with the possible exception of football, they had to divert the hard-earned quid of millions of beer-swilling, dart-throwing and besotted English pessimists from the national lottery into a sports fund so they could start winning gold medals.
And foul-mouthed little cockney chefs had to start national school health-food programs just so the nation would have the minimum fitness required to play ultimate cage fighting every four years with other football fans from around the world.
When the English do pessimism they do it like no-one else on earth, especially when it comes to sport. They make Marvin the Paranoid Android and Shane Watson look like Bobby McFerrin in a 1980s conga line.
Canvassing the English media and sports pundit commentariat the last few days you can see hints of this sense of desperation already creeping in.
The hysteria is bordering on the outrageous from such recent psychic luminaries as Ian Botham. And this after one thrashing (a really really bad one, admittedly) following a year where you actually won the first series 3-0, your cyclists go back-to-back in the Tour de France, win Wimbledon for the first time in 80… Oops, yeah sorry – that was a Scot.
It is as if many an Englishman and women almost expect the bad old days to return; the days when the only thing you were good at was snooker, darts, hooliganism and making music and this state of affairs is the status quo.
I can’t help but thinking generally – there are always rabid exceptions – Australians, when confronted with sporting disaster like last year’s 4-0 in India or Montreal 1976, tend to just knuckle down and with pragmatic determination rationalise how to improve, with common criticism amounting to little more than ‘not the Australian way’ or something equally inane.
But criticism – which, equally, many Australian sportsman seem inherently to understand – sees them set about doing something about.
The English, however, may have a reason to be so pessimistic. The late, and great, doyen of English cricket writers, Christopher Martin-Jenkins, observed in his tome on an earlier English Ashes tour down under that cricket (ostensibly England’s national summer sport) had become only the 17th most preferred sport among 15-21 year olds.
The participation numbers in all sports was also appalling, as was the lack of facilities for many sports.
This was only 1998, and things have hardly improved at grass roots levels since. Is an impending sense of doom a reflection of a nation that knows it swindled a couple of good years with lashes of generous cash targeted at high performance and (limited) talented identification?
Is it a slight and brief incline in the trend of terminal decline since the 1970s? Or just the mad, wishful rantings of an amateur and biased Australian cricket fan?
Only time will tell, really. But this at least brings me to my final point and reason for this article’s title.
As a fan, and watcher, none of us can really know what goes on out of the public eye and the secret machinations/dynamics of sporting teams.
Who knows if Andy Flower has had his day, if KP is egotistical blight on England’s cricketing soul, or if Hamish and Andy will soon be forced to do Gap Year Antarctica?
But what we can see is what happens on the field.
England could start by changing their captain. For a real, smug, obnoxious Englishman, Stuart Broad is your man.
Sure, there is the received wisdom that bowlers shouldn’t be captain, or Broad is not an obvious choice (whatever that means?).
This is not so much about any technical reason (although, I could give plenty) as it is about attitude and grit.
When you’re in trouble, when your country is deep in it, you revert to good, tried and tested formulas – updated, of course, with modern tactics and talents but an archetype nonetheless.
This is what Broad is.
It came to me following the build-up to the Brisbane Test a few weeks ago. He is the villain, the blue-blooded English public school boy. The toff with the sneer we all love to hate, the arrogant Lord Broad who had the audacity not to walk.
There is something of the Winston Churchill about Stuart Broad – a smug, yet inspiring defiance and disdain of all things antipodean or not quite English.
There is also a lot of the Douglas Jardine in him. Remember him from your sporting history books? He was the Pom who, through sheer bastardry and demon cunning, came up with bodyline and incurred the wrath of the Australian public.
Why was his like not planning and captaining for England this summer?
Australia needs a hard, uncompromising contest every time we play England, not a bunch of molly-coddled, pessimistic and scared excuses for a cricket team.
No Australian cricket team would ever be accused of being outright gutless – incompetent and not good enough, yes, but not lacking the fortitude so many Englishmen from the Independent to the BBC have accused their cricket team of this week.
And that is just the point: there is nothing Australians would hate more, no-one who gets under their skin better.
No-one to get in their face more or seize the moment (watch every new ball spell of his this summer – the man knows what is required and when to call on his best efforts).
We love to hate him. The English would be stupid not to take him as their next captain.
Alastair Cook is a great batsman but a choirboy of a captain: all innocence and sweet-sounding.
Give me, and his country for pity’s sake, the Pommie bastard who looks down his nose at his opposition and declares, “this field is mine… and England’s”.
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