England chucked away the first Ashes Test by playing one-day cricket
Backyard cricket has spoilt the game I love. You had only to watch the first Ashes Test in Perth to understand that.
You missed it? Well, I’m not surprised. It only lasted two days. The shortest Test match in over a century.
England went in under-prepared, with little meaningful match practice behind them. But crucially, they were not in the right frame of mind either.
They took the field for a Test match with a T20 mindset, determined to play Bazball, the attacking philosophy championed by coach Brendon McCullum.
This resulted in the kind of cricket shots you see played by eight-year-olds in the backyard. And a blink-and-you-miss-it first innings from England.
You just knew what was coming after Zak Crawley took the first over from Mitch Starc. Crawley tried to drive Starc’s last ball on the up through the covers. Oh, the arrogance.
Crawley has form for this. You might recall that in the 2023 Ashes series, he cracked the first ball of the first Test through the same area. It was entirely premeditated and equally crackers.
McCullum wants two things from his team: to play without fear and to put the opposition under pressure with controlled aggression.
Some of them have taken this as a licence to abandon the conventions of Test cricket. Among these are that batsmen play themselves in, taking their time to gauge the pace and bounce of the wicket; to get their eye in.
There are five days to go. Why not be watchful, nudge it around a bit until you are feeling comfortable at the crease and the shine has gone off the ball? Instead, the T20 mentality took over.
In T20, the greatest constraint, the greatest pressure, is time. You have 20 overs and if you don’t make enough runs, the other side will. The coach would rather you got out than occupied the crease accumulating runs slowly.
If this sounds as though I don’t like T20, think again – I do. Admittedly, I have never been to a T20 match but I have watched plenty on TV. It is bite-sized cricket, designed for the frenetic, time-poor world we live in now.
People can go after work. It is distilled excitement. Kids love it, which is important for the wider future of the game.
And the importance of scoring quickly has brought really creative technical innovations to the game that cause cricket lovers such as me to marvel.
These include the ramp shot, the reverse sweep, both technically very difficult. And the slog sweep, which is a respectable name for the classic backyard agricultural hoik.
To score runs in such a way is risky. It often requires premeditation and can easily go comically wrong, even for the best batsmen. Test players are more risk-averse.
The old school opener’s attitude was that you left what you could, played straight to length balls, took singles where possible and attacked the one, perhaps two, bad balls you could count on each over.
When Crawley was caught in the slips I couldn’t help wondering what those great openers Hutton, Edrich, Boycott, Gooch and Atherton would have thought of it.
Well, we know how Athers saw it because he told us in The Times. Crawley, he said, aimed “a mighty drive to a ball that demanded much greater care and attention”.
And Boycott, Yorkshire curmudgeon that he is, didn’t mince his words in the Sunday Telegraph. A Page One x-ref to his column summed it up: “Sorry, but I can’t take stupid England seriously”.
Crawley’s dismissal was just the start. A middle order collapse ensued in which five wickets fell for 12 runs. Even Joe Root, arguably England’s greatest Test batsman of all time, went for a duck waving an airy-fairy drive at a ball well away from his body.
And yet it was still a match England should have won, despite being 172 all out on a wicket that was quick and had bounce but no hidden terrors, and against a second-rate Australian team.
England’s bowlers put in a superb shift and got rid of Australia for just 132. But in the second innings, Crawley, who attended the same school as Colin Cowdrey, Tonbridge, got another duck in the same fashion as the first innings.
They may have the same alma mater but, though talented, he’s no Cowdrey. As an up-and-coming player at Kent, he was a protégé of the captain, Rob Key, who is now England Cricket’s managing director.
It was Key who appointed McCullum to the Test coach’s job. McCullum initially interviewed for the role of the short-form coach, taking in one-day and T20 cricket. But he so impressed Key that he got the Test job too.
All this might help to explain why a batsman with the lowest average (30.22) of any England Test opener who has batted 50 times continues to be a shoo-in for McCullum.
“We believe he is a quality player, particularly in these conditions, against this opposition. If he can get going, he can do damage,” said the coach.
After Crawley bagged his pair in Perth, another collapse followed and England were all out for 164. The Aussies, led by Travis Head with 123, easily knocked them off for the loss of just two wickets.
It left fans like me feeling let down, though not as cheated as those who had gone out to join the Barmy Army in Australia anticipating five days of intense cricket. I only had to get up early, they had to fly more than 10,500 miles.
It is probably not something professional cricketers think about, but cricket is showbiz. They are highly paid because their skills, technique, athleticism put bums on seats.
If the match is over after two days, it is not just a calamitous failure by both teams and an anticlimax for fans, but a costly loss for the bean-counters.
The Times revealed on Monday that the shortfall in revenue for Cricket Australia was £2 million. They didn’t break it down but for a start there’s three days of gate receipts that had to be refunded.
And that’s not counting the bar takings (we’re talking about Australia, where they like a few tinnies to go with their cricket) and the money lost at the burger concessions and hotdog stalls.
Then there’s the telly. Discovery+ reportedly paid £50 million for a four-year package to screen both the men’s and women’s Ashes Tests and other cricket. Bosses there would not have been clapping the teams off.
And companies that booked airtime or ground hoardings to advertise their goods and services over the five-day course of a Test match will have legitimate complaints too.
It is a long time since Test matches routinely went the full distance. Often now it is four days’ play.
But two days is a complete clusterfuck.
Much more of this and the purest, most fascinating and most demanding form of cricket – both mentally and physically – will be lost for ever. All we’ll be left with is the short-term gratification of one-day and T20 formats.
Like a Chinese meal, it leaves you hungry a couple of hours later.
*****
I caught my first glimpse last week of the Met’s new armoured cars. Two of these nine-ton beasts tore down our High Street, sirens blaring, blue lights demanding everyone clear a path.
They are a fearsome sight and a depressing one. So it has come to this, I thought: our police officers have to turn up to quell disorder not in Panda cars, but in battle-wagons.
Matte-grey, bullet-proof and costing £180,000 each, the 4x4 Sandcats are designed for police or military to deal with extreme riots.
They stand 7ft 7in tall and can carry up to 11 officers. The Met has ordered 18 of them. Drivers are still being trained.
The cost will come from the Met’s budget, from the Home Office and from Heathrow Airport, where I assume they will be deployed in the event of a terrorist attack.
The vehicles are built in Israel and used by the Israel Defence Forces in trouble spots in the occupied West Bank.
As Mayor of London, Boris Johnson splashed out £322,000 to buy and refurbish three second-hand water cannon from Germany in 2014. They were preparation for any repetition of the 2011 riots in the capital.
But Prime Minister Theresa May banned their use in riots on the British mainland and the water cannon were sold for scrap for £11,000 in 2018, drawing scorn from the new Mayor, Sadiq Khan.
“For too long, London taxpayers have had to bear the brunt of Boris Johnson's appalling botched water cannon deal. This has been another waste of taxpayers' money by Boris Johnson,” scoffed Khan.
I wonder what he thinks now. After all, he is Police and Crime Commissioner for London and the Met is his responsibility. Are £3,240,000 worth of armoured cars a waste of taxpayers’ money, too?
*****
So, it looks as though Lord Rothermere’s Mail will, after all, take over the Telegraph titles. No one is going to fight it. The uncertainty has gone on for too long and everyone just wants it to be over.
On the face of it, the Telegraph will be in its happy place, as far as party politics and quality journalism are concerned.
Daily Mail and General Trust, Rothermere’s publishing colossus, has promised editorial independence for the Telegraph and investment to allow it to expand into America. He praised editor Chris Evans as “excellent” and promised to help him make it a global brand.
By offering £500 million, Rothermere has also tacitly accepted that there is no way round the so-called “poison pill” clause in a previous agreement stating that if the papers fail to fetch half a billion, then the difference goes on the Telegraph’s books as debt. Some value the Telegraph group at only £350 million.
The Mail is a rats’ nest of intrigue and the Telegraph will be decidedly the junior partner in the takeover. There is said to be “discomfort” in the Telegraph newsroom at the prospect.
How long before the Mail considers whether it might solve some of its own problems by sending senior figures to guide and advise the executives on their new acquisition?
It could be irresistible.
RICHARD DISMORE
25 November 2025
