It’s the final day of the final Test of the Ashes. Spoiling under heat that could melt a blacksmith’s gloves, England are once more toiling at the SCG.
They’ve handed a spinner their Test debut – why not? The management just don’t have the quicks they need to succeed Down Under, which they readily admitted by Boxing Day, only a few weeks after assuring all and sundry that the Ashes would not be staying in the country without a fight.
Those who doubt the merit of public relations degrees need only look as far as the ECB. Nothing-to-see-here soundbites, including chestnuts such as ‘no knee-jerk reaction’ and ‘the team is still in good shape’ fly out of inboxes.
Out in the middle, though, England’s last tail-ender gets clonked just below the knee roll and that’s it for another few years.
Can you guess which series I’m referring to? It’s a multiple choice question: a) 2013/14; b) 2017/18; c) 2020/21; d) all of the above.
The brutal reality facing England is that there is no reason to expect any change in approach to an Ashes series in Australia when diddly squat has been learned from the preceding four years.
England play the same, tired hand not just in Australia, but in the sub-continent too – where pace is not just important but a pre-requisite for victory. One, even two, Test matches may swing your way but an entire series without cranking up the speed? Forget it.
The problem is that England seem to forget every time they pop back home. Get some nibble out of the wicket and all their worries fade away. They haven’t lost a series in England since the two-Test clash against Sri Lanka in 2014.
It is, of course, fiendishly hard to win a Test series away from home because no amount of training camps and Lions tours will condition players to be as familiar with foreign wickets as their hosts. For a board awash with cash like the ECB, though, the least you can expect is a long-term strategy and a competitive side.
Mason Crane conceded 193 runs on his debut.
— Test Match Special (@bbctms) January 7, 2018
That is the most by any @englandcricket debutant & the 3rd highest by any England bowler. #bbccricket #ashes
👉https://t.co/3ULcqn4l6z pic.twitter.com/WH6WwbrHPj
Instead CEO Tom Harrison and managing director Andrew Strauss – a man who apparently knows how to win an Ashes series Down Under – now have India, 4-0 and Australia, 4-0 marked against their names in the space of 12 months.
Their National Performance Centre at Loughborough, in Leicestershire, is stuffed to the gills with new-age tech, thinking and facilities.
Under a huge tent that acts like a greenhouse, England prospects are invited to have a bowl in what is meant to replicate sub-continent conditions.
There’s a ‘personal development team and ‘performance psychology’ team in addition to the usual jumble of coaches, managed by lead pace coach Kevin Shine and lead spin coach Peter Such.
Andy Flower – the then England coach who promised no knee-jerks after that 2013/14 tour – is now the technical director of the entire set-up. They all pore over hours and hours of video content, presumably to tweak a bowler’s this or that.
There are so, so many programmes. The Young Lions. The (slightly older) Lions. The ‘Pace Programme’, which has undergone a rebrand, but been in existence for a decade.
It all sounds state-of-the-art, visionary even. But pace is not a label of a fancy, well-funded initiative – it’s the figure that appears on a speed gun. That a broken Mark Wood and a suspended Ben Stokes were England’s only options in handing their attack the required pep is embarrassing for an organisation that view themselves as being, like, really smart, as the leader of the free world might say.
Is the definition of insanity doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result, as Albert Einstein almost certainly did not say, or is repetition the mother of all learning, as a motivational speaker called Zig Ziglar once uttered?
Whatever the answer is, in this particular case, England need to stop listening to Ziggy.
