Now that the dust has settled on Sunday’s Ashes victory I can’t resist posting a few of my thoughts on the series.
I may have commented before that test cricket is a peculiar game, a point well illustrated when one looks at the individual performance statistics for the series.
In virtually every aspect the Australians performed better as individuals than their English counterparts – more 100’s, more wickets, higher batting averages etc.
Yet they lost!
England won the series on the strength of a small number of outstanding individual performances in key sessions – Flintoff’s bowling at Lords, Strauss & Cook’s opening partnership in the same match, Broad’s spell on Friday afternoon at the Oval and of course Collingwood, Anderson and Panesar holding out for the draw at Cardiff.
The teams in this series are certainly much weaker than those in the 2005 series – Australia simply haven’t yet found replacements for Warne, Gilchrist, Langer, Hayden and McGrath and the current English team is missing the likes of Vaughan, Trescothick and Simon Jones.
This hasn’t detracted from the enjoyment of watching the matches but in the historical context the 2009 series probably won’t be remembered as a contest between 2 good teams.
It reminded me of the 1985 series when 2 relatively weak teams contested a 6 match series that England won 3-1.
I thought that Ricky Ponting, the Australian captain, was extremely gracious in defeat and I hope that he decides to continue in post, or at least in test cricket, for many more years.
He is one of the outstanding batsmen of the modern era whose wicket is greatly prized by his opponents (remember the crowd’s relief when he was run out on Sunday afternoon.)
Kind of sad to see Flintoff retire from the 5 day game – he is certainly a player who has contributed greatly to English cricket, has won some key matches by his performances and is a superb entertainer.
However, in a sense I feel that Flintoff will be remembered as an underperformer at the highest level of the game.
He has a huge amount of talent but he hasn’t produced enough 100’s or “5 fors” to be considered as one of the great all-rounder players like Sobers, Imran, Botham or Hadlee.
There was some dreadful rubbish on the front page of a tabloid red top on Monday suggesting Flintoff should be knighted – sorry but he just hasn’t contributed enough for this honour.
In my opinion a very good but not a great player
In 18 months time it all starts again in Australia – hopefully with a better result than the last time England went down under.
