The Ashes 2009: Final Test @ The Oval – Hats off to England!!

E ngland regained the Ashes by comprehensively defeating the Australians in the last test played at the Oval and they deserve all the accolades and the celebrations. As a unit they stood up and ensured that the test match and the series was won against the form book. More importantly, at the key moments in the game when it called for raising the intensity and creating an opening they were the ones who did that. So Strauss’s role in the victory cannot be underestimated.

This series is a statistician’s nightmare. Consider this. Australia has 8 centuries against 2 for England. The top three wicket takers are all Australians. Yet in the final analysis the Ashes remain with the English team. This is because Australians failed on three key occasions and all of them made a huge difference to the outcome of the series.

First, the final session the first test match. The Australians had the victory in their pocket with the last pair batting. But they did not force the play. They should have used pace and got Monty out, but he hung on and defended the pedestrian spin bowling thrown at him. They lost a golden opportunity to go 1-0 up in the series.

Then at Lord’s it was the magical spell from Freddie that spelt doom for them. That one session was enough for them to lose the test match.

And finally, the Chris Broad’s spell on Day 2 of the final test, provided England a match winning lead. To their credit, England batsmen also batted sensibly in the second innings and put up a total to take ‘win’ out of Australia’s reach.

Apart from these key sessions, I think the English team played with a lot of maturity and purpose. They too had their middle order batting problems, but they managed to create a wall around it. Jonathan Trott is an excellent find and showed lots of commitment and solid temperament. He has a great future ahead of him. It is not easy to make a debut in a high voltage test match like this and that too against the chirpy Australians. England created heroes out of regular players.

Australian selectors made a mess of the team selection and the touring party also failed to read the wickets. The result was that they lacked penetrating bowlers and did not have the usual strong batting lineup that one would expect.

In the aftermath of the analysis, one comment that caught my attention was about the lack multi-racial multi-cultural representation on the Australian team. They must evaluate that option considering what the SA has done successfully. If one also connects this story with the racial attacks on Indian students, somewhere down the back of the mind this also raises a question as to whether the Australian culture is indeed multi-racial.

With that I wrap up this coverage on the Ashes. Watch out for my notes as things develop down under when the post mortem truly begins.