On the Ashes
Gideon HaighAustralia, with a parent from each. I was eight when I attended my first
Ashes Test, twenty-four when I reported my first Ashes series. I never
intended becoming a cricket journalist, and would rather be considered a
journalist who sometimes writes about cricket. But this collection, I’m
bound to admit, makes an opposite case, collaging writings that cover
almost a century and a half of Anglo-Australian cricket, people and places,
news and olds.
Nothing compares to the Ashes, which in some respects is a shame, as
this results from the lamentable abeyance in bilateral competition between
India and Pakistan. But it is surely remarkable. After all, how many ideas
endure from 1882, when creationism and phrenology flourished, nobody
had heard of viruses or dreamed of X-rays, dreams of universal suffrage and
a universal eight-hour day seemed fanciful, and cremation, of course, was a
subject ripe for jokes? As the Empire sprawled mightily, the Australian
continent was a mere patchwork of colonies reporting individually to
faraway masters.
The Ashes has benefited hugely since by continuity, interrupted only by
world wars, adulterated only by greedy administrators – I’m looking at
those who inflicted ten consecutive Tests on us in 2013–14. The Ashes is
always coming, even when it is finished. Especially in England, the
intervening years are concerned with either soul-searching or
brainstorming. There are, to be sure, bigger games in town. Indian visits
line the vaults; World Cups gleam in the trophy cabinet. But the Ashes is
where hope, expectation, magic and chagrin flourish in equal measure, and
performance is permanently burnished. Ben Stokes at Headingley 2019
would have been a marvel against any opposition; its additional gilding is
that it came at Australia’s expense.