The Summer Field

94 Australia and Sydney how intimately the crowd of spectators seems to follow a match: how accurately it knows what each player has done in the past …’ In 1989 the former Lancashire captain John Abrahams, by then Shropshire captain, summed up briefly why the Australians outplayed England. Everything about England was second best: the Australians prepared better; they batted and bowled with more patience; they were, in a word, more professional. The change from Welldon’s day was that Australian Test players were no longer fresh part-timers; many thrived as county pros’. * Despite yet more one-sided Test series after 1989, the fascination between the two countries endured. That masked the 1960s faltering in interest in the Ashes, and the game generally. The reasons were the same; batsman, bowlers and captains played slowly and shunned risk. In fairness, that was usual when playing Australia. Cardus recalled Leyland’s 187, ‘made with a terrible, deliberate slowness’ in the timeless Test at the Oval in 1938. At an interval, when England were 500 for three, Cardus (so he recalled in Leyland’s obituary) chided him. ‘Even you, Maurice, I complained, even you are perpetuating this stone-wall game. Hey, he replied. Hey, Mr Cardus, tha’ must remember as I am playing for mi’ place in the team.’ Leaving aside how the men addressed each other – the journalist familiarly using Leyland’s first name, the player respectfully calling Cardus mister – Leyland was (with mischievous irony?) pointing out he had been an England regular for ten years, and yet had been left out of the team earlier in the series. Some spectators had seen enough by 1964. The fourth and fifth day of the admittedly rain-ruined Nottingham Test saw crowds put variously at Edgbaston club shop, 2013: t-shirt with Douglas Jardine’s portrait and (inaccurate) bodyline quote: ‘I’ve not travelled 6000 miles to make friends. I’m here to win the Ashes.’ As in most things, there’s a market in the English obsession with beating Australia.