England’s Ashes campaign may have been doomed from the off but there are still objective standards of competence
Clang. Bring out your dead. There was something a little ghoulish about the spectacle down the wires from Adelaide as England’s last-wicket pair attempted to push the second Ashes Test into its final knockings on day five.
An Australian Ashes summer always has a strangeness about it seen from 10,000 miles away: those bleached-out greens and blues bounced around the world and beamed into the depths of a northern winter. Watching James Anderson and Stuart Broad fence and fend at the teeth-and-toes assault of the 6ft 6in, 92mph Mitchell Starc, it was hard to avoid the feeling of something hollow-eyed and ghostly; an emblem of the ill health of this tour but also of the wider entropy of English red-ball cricket, a grief that really is going to have to be processed at some point.
