6 minute readIt’s confirmed then. England have put themselves in a position to lose the Ashes without ever once playing the spinner they fast tracked into the team at least partly because they thought he could perform well in Australia. With no great career record and no real form to speak of,
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6 minute readIf England know one thing about playing Test cricket in Australia, it is that successful tours cannot be built on right-arm fast-medium bowling. Except for the one that was. (Or was it? Let’s come back to that in a bit.) At the same time, right-arm fast-medium has an incredible gravity
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2 minute readIt might seem a little odd to be releasing a podcast about a previous ridiculous Ashes series while the current one’s unfolding live. However, we thought the 2019 series would make a nice companion piece… or possibly a welcome distraction. For those that don’t know, the Ridiculous Ashes podcast involves
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4 minute readIt didn’t even take three days for England to lose the first Test in Perth… but the second Test performance in Brisbane was actually way worse. Here’s why. 1. It took longer England achieved some historic lows in Perth, but at least they contributed to the brevity of the Test
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3 minute readAn Ashes cliché that we repeatedly embrace in The 50 Most Ridiculous Ashes Moments is “the wheels are coming off”. (There’s actually a whole chapter on it, which is about the last Ashes tour.) It’s a term that crops up depressingly frequently when England are in Australia. On day two
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3 minute readYou wouldn’t think there would be much nervous tension about a guy with 39 Test hundreds getting into the 90s again and maybe scoring a 40th. But there was. Fortunately for all of us, very dull asterisks against career records and the prospect of Matthew Hayden doing a lap of
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6 minute readIf the Gabba is a fortress then it’s one where trebuchets and battering rams have taken out a fair few chunks of wall. In their last five Tests there, Australia have won two, lost two and drawn one. Needless to say, one of those wins was against England. The Gabba
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5 minute readZak Crawley. Every England fan’s favourite topic of conversation. You’ll miss him when he’s gone. And that might actually happen, you know. This Ashes series has become so pivotal for Crawley’s career that failure will most likely see him ejected for good; a long Test career definitively done and dusted,
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3 minute readNo team likes being called inconsistent, but inconsistency cuts both ways. In a scenario where you’ve lost a Test match inside two days, ‘consistent’ is absolutely the last thing you want to be. More two-day defeats? No, thank you. After the first Ashes Test, England can console themselves that they
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6 minute readSomewhat unusually, this first Test of the 2025/26 Ashes is in Perth. There’ll therefore be much talk about Australia surrendering the supposed advantage of kicking things off at the ‘Gabbatoir’ in Brisbane. Australia have certainly won a lot of first Ashes Tests at the Gabba, but our personal feeling is
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