Offmessage

It’s been 86 years since the last Ashes whitewash. And now it’s happened again. All I can take from this is that Australia will be a completely different team the next time we play, and so will we. Hopefully the balance will be in our favour then, but 2009 seems a long way away.

Strangely 86 years is already symbolic in sport - it’s the length of time it took the Red Sox to lift the Bambino’s Curse. Not sure if that’s significant, just thought I’d mention it.

It’s a dead horse. Stop flogging it. Blood a few new players, play for pride and get the hell out of Dodge. That’s my advice anyway. Of course, Duncan Fletcher has his own view:

Coach Duncan Fletcher is still hoping that England can attain the mammoth 557 needed to win the third Ashes Test.

That’s torn it. Well. At least we had hold of them for a year and a half.

There has been a good minority of England fans who have always felt that Paul Collingwood deserved to be found a test place somehow. The fact that it’s Michael Vaughan’s injury that has got him it is unfortunate, but at least he has taken his chance with both hands. Still - he really is an unlikely hero, however you look at it.

Ah well. That said, I still feel more confident than if they’d enforced the follow on and spanked us in 3 days.

It’s been taking place in the middle of the night so I’ve been pretending that the state of England’s performance in the Ashes isn’t important. The hell it isn’t. It’s been gnawing away at me ever since the match started.

When I woke up Thursday morning I was hopeful, but worried. We weren’t looking like we were bowling at anywhere near the strength we need to and their batting looked as dominating as ever.

When I woke up Friday morning to hear that they’d declared with over 600 and that we were 50 for 3 I all but gave up.

When I woke up yesterday morning to hear that they hadn’t enforced the follow on I wondered what on earth Ponting was up to. Surely the emphatic victory was what they wanted? Batting again might tire and demoralise England some more, but it also gave Steve Harmison chance to get his radar sorted (I said chance, he didn’t, but he could have) and the possibility of the batsmen getting themselves in order.

This morning then, I found myself with something to cheer about. And this might be Ponting’s mistake. We’d all but given up on this match. We were demoralised. We were beaten. Batting again, particularly with the risk of bad weather on day 5, he suddenly gave the opportunity for any sort of performance to feel like a positive. If they’d enforced the follow on the game would like as not have been over yesterday and we would be feeling that a series defeat was inevitable. Instead we’ve got 43 from Cook, 96 from Collingwod and 92no so far from Big Kev. It’s still unlikely that we’ll hold on for a draw, but we’re sure going to feel a hell of a lot better at the end of this match than we probably should have.

The Australians have already blamed Ponting for losing the Ashes once. Let’s hope that this is another early misstep that leads to him failing to regain them. It’s certainly nice to see him being so sporting and giving us a chance to get ourselves sorted out.