The 2006/07 Ashes Revisited

The lockdown has been kind to us here at Scorecards Towers in Wellington. We have both been busy working from home, in a big house with plenty of books. People who watch County Championship or Plunket Shield cricket are likely to be temperamentally suited to lockdown life. What’s more, Sky TV NZ’s cricket channel has been a treasure trove of delight; archive material is filling the Sky box, lifestyle programmes and earnest dramas surreptitiously deleted to make room.

Best of all, they are reprising whole Ashes series, first 2006/07, then 2010/11. Not highlights, but full days, with the commercial breaks edited out, so the over rate cracks along.

I knew the outcome of the 2006/07 series of course: a five-nil drubbing for the old country. There was a fair smattering of memories: England losing at Adelaide when it seemed impossible to do so; Gilchrist’s onslaught at the WACA; most of all, a lunchtime pub in Wellington falling silent for the first ball of the series, then erupting in laughter as Flintoff collected it at second slip. Of the fourth and fifth tests I had almost no recall at all; I had returned to the UK for a few weeks, and saw none of it live. I didn’t look at any scorecards or reports in advance of watching these repeats, so a lot of it came fresh, despite knowing the results.

There was more that surprised than might have been expected from the first whitewashed Ashes series since Warwick Armstrong. Five-nil suggests Australian dominance from first ball to last, but that’s not how it was. In every game England were in a good position at one time or another. At the Waca Australia were all out for 244 having won the toss. Margin of victory: 206 runs. At the MCG England were 101 for two before collapsing to 159; then they had Australia at 84 for five. Margin of loss: an innings and 99. At Sydney they were 166 for two. Margin of loss: ten wickets. Worst of all, in Adelaide how could they have lost from 551 for six declared batting first?

The Adelaide defeat was because England froze on the last day, the runs drying up like grapes in the sun. Had they made 30 more, but been out at the same time, the game would have been saved. Australia were better equipped to make sure that at the turning points the match went down the green-and-gold road. There was no shame in this for England as that Australian side was one of the finest test teams ever to play the game. They had four great players: Gilchrist, McGrath, Ponting and Warne, and a few more who weren’t far off.

For McGrath and Warne, it was last-chance-to-see, in test matches anyway. With the Ashes reclaimed at the earliest possible moment, the the Melbourne and Sydney tests became a royal progress celebrating the two great bowlers, and rightly so.

McGrath rarely ventured outside the 120s in terms of kph, and was not quite the force he once was; but he was still good enough as he showed by destroying England’s middle order in Sydney. He got the timing of his retirement exactly right, past the summit but before the downward slope got steep.

Warne might have carried on for years on this evidence. By this time, he was part spin bowler, part hypnotist and part PT Barnum. He certainly had a sense of theatre and the gift of timing: his 700th wicket was taken at Melbourne on Boxing Day and his 1000th in international cricket at Sydney in the New Year (though it seemed wrong to have him bowling defensively down the legside at Adelaide, like commissioning Canaletto to whitewash the ceiling).

The biggest difference between test cricket then and now was the absence of the DRS system. Over the series as a whole the umpiring was pretty good, but there were plenty of mistakes, and most of the critical ones went against England. Andrew Strauss copped a couple in Perth, caught behind off the thigh pad in the first innings and given lbw in the second for a duck off Lee, when the ball would have cleared the stumps as comfortably as a literary joke passing over the heads of the Barmy Army. Australians will make the point that, had the DRS been available in that era, it would have spotted that Michael Kasprowicz’s hand was off the bat at the climax of Edgbaston ’05, removing that series from the legendary category in a couple of frames.

Rudi Koertzen had a poor game at Melbourne. Hayden was stone-cold lbw against Hoggard twice in the same over early in his innings; Symonds was reprieved in the fifties. Both made 150s and put on 279 for the sixth wicket from 89 for five. That’s the biggest difference between then and now—putting up with poor decisions.

I’d forgotten about Koertzen’s self-indulgent manner of giving batsmen out, drawing the left arm from behind the back with cruel slowness; a man could be halfway back to the rooms before the finger was fully extended. In comparison, Billy Bowden’s crooked finger of fate appeared understated. Alim Dar also officiated, the only umpire from that time still on the international circuit (though Bowden still favours the domestic audience here with displays of his powers of rain divination, I am pleased to say).

Symonds achieved his maiden test hundred with a straight six off Collingwood. Reaching the landmark had taken him longer than expected and there was to be only one more century. I had the pleasure of seeing Symonds often when he came to play for Gloucestershire as a teenager, the most talented player of that age that I have seen. He had a good international record, with averages of 40 in both tests and 198 ODIs, yet there remains a feeling of what-might-have-been.

Symonds isn’t the only player who evokes that emotion in this series. Monty Panesar had been England’s leading test wicket taker in the 2006 season, but Ashley Giles was picked ahead of him for the first two tests of this series, continuing England’s long tradition of picking the lesser player in search of that elusive quality, balance (Giles had once been a worthy first choice, but that time had passed). As I write, somebody on Twitter is asking (out of genuine perplexity) how come Derek Pringle was ever picked for England.

Picked for the third test, Panesar finished second in the bowling averages, a fraction behind Hoggard, though the fact that they were both on 37 tells us much about the series. One of the commentators (I think Benaud, though it sounds a little acerbic for him) said that England had replaced a slow bowler with a spinner. They were critical of how Flintoff handled him at times. Ian Chappell said at Sydney that Panesar should introduce himself to his captain to remind him that his name was not Ashley Giles, and that Flintoff should stop setting fields as if he was.

Panesar was 24, and appeared set for a distinguished career. He finished with 167 wickets from 50 tests, which is not bad, but the exuberant, popular young man who bowled with such imagination and confidence here was capable of so much more. Of course, the emergence of Graeme Swann as a top-class spinner limited his opportunities, and he has faced some mental health issues bravely. At 38, he is two years younger than Jeetan Patel, and could have been mesmerising the best batsmen in the Championship still.

The biggest unexpected pleasure of rediscovering this series was the wicketkeeping of Chris Read, unexpected not because there is any doubt about Read’s quality, but because I had forgotten that he replaced Geraint Jones in the final two tests. Ian Healy said that Read’s was “the most convincing, efficient, technical display I’ve seen from an England keeper for 20 years”, and went on to say he was just as good as Alan Knott, which caused Bill Lawry to say “You’ve just made me fall off my chair”. Knott remains the gold standard of keeping for those who played with or against him, but the fact that the comparison is not fanciful is compliment enough.

Read never played test cricket again. Utility, in the form of Matt Prior, was preferred over beauty. Read continued in county cricket for another ten years, becoming, almost certainly, the last keeper to make more than a thousand first-class dismissals, and finishing with 27 centuries and a career average just a couple under Prior’s. That he did not have at least a hundred test caps is a scandal.

Coverage was from Channel Nine, close to its peak. In Richie Benaud and Ian Chappell they had two of the great commentators and the rest were more than the sum of their parts. They each had a distinctive voice and style, from Mark Nicholas’s plumed hat to Bill Lawry’s excited-falsetto. Nicholas spent much of the first test explaining the innovation of Hot Spot in the manner of someone introducing fire to the Neanderthals. In Nine’s final years, it was difficult to tell which of Clarke, Hussey, Lee and Brayshaw was at the microphone; they weren’t bad commentators, but they all sounded much the same. The common criticism that they looked at the game as if every day were Australia Day could not be levelled in 2006/07, it being difficult to over-praise a team that won five-nil.

Finally, what of Andrew Flintoff? The memory, and a superficial look at the numbers, says that his captaincy was a disaster from first to last. As ever, the reality was more complex. The commentators were quite impressed early on, at least in terms of setting an example and leading from the front. His handling of Panesar was astute when the spinner returned to the side in Perth. Many captains would have pulled Panesar out of the attack when Symonds took him for 17 in an over, but Flintoff showed confidence in a bowler who went on to take only the third five-for by a spinner in a Waca test. But the captain’s self-belief waned with each missed opportunity. It was that Hayden/Symonds partnership at the MCG that finally brought him down like a slaver’s statue. From that time on, he had the crestfallen look of a man who knew that there was a pedalo out there, waiting for him.