England’s dominance on the 2010-11 tour came with two teams heading in different directions and is unlikely to be seen again
On Friday 7 January, 2011, Mike Skinner posted a short new video on YouTube; it showed him asleep on his sofa, an empty tea cup by his head, a crumpled carry pack of beer at his feet, while he read, in voice over, the opening paragraph of Mike Selvey’s Guardian match report from the last day of the Ashes. “They came in their thousands to form an English corner of a foreign field for the climax.” It is a sweet, pretty and strange thing, one last surreal little turn in a winter’s cricket so full of them that it felt something like one long dream. “Where am I?” Skinner asks at last as he opens his eyes.
Following the Ashes in Australia from back here in England always feels a little like that, bleary-eyed snatches of action watched on fluorescent TV screens while everyone else in the house is sleeping, or fragments of shouted radio commentary through an earpiece that startle you awake at two or three or four in the morning. Most of the time it all gets a bit nightmarish. The 2010-11 series was the exception. England have only won four Tests in Australia this century. Three of them were on that tour.
