The Coulda, Woulda, Shoulda Ashes – the Choose Your Own Adventure book with no winning page

7 minute read

How do you feel about this one England fans? We feel like the team went from monochrome dreadful four years ago to at least striving for technicolour peaks. The bleak truth is that they’re 3-0 down after three Tests and we’d still chalk it up as progress. 

Let’s quickly recap the loss of the 2021/22 Ashes, just for context.

• England made 147 in their first innings of the series, Australia replied with 425 and won by nine wickets.
• In the second Test, England made fewer than half of Australia’s runs in the first innings and lost by 275.
• In the third Test, Australia made 267 and WON BY AN INNINGS. 

It wasn’t so much the fact England lost those first three Tests, it was that at no point did it feel possible to envisage any other outcome. 

Paul Collingwood meant something slightly different when he said they were sitting ducks, but that’s nevertheless a pretty good assessment of how they approached the series; as passive targets just waiting for the worst to happen.

Ben Stokes and Brendon McCullum subsequently imposed a, “let’s at least throw a few punches,” philosophy that provided a plausible if unlikely course of events whereby England could win matches that would previously have always ended as sleepwalks to defeat.

Sometimes it actually worked. Surprisingly often really. These higher highs were more than welcome and they dragged England up to a better level overall. But not to a stunning level once you factor in the off days. And those off days couldn’t really be entirely suppressed with an approach like this.

England sometimes talk about the ‘high ceiling’ of an individual player, but they probably bounced off their own collective ceiling a year or so ago. There was no raising it without more players getting an awful lot closer to those idealised fantasy versions of themselves.

2025/26 punch-throwing

We count one meaningful jab so far – Australia’s first innings in Perth – plus the glancing blow of Joe Root’s Brisbane hundred. 

That doesn’t feel like much and because there’s always plenty to take issue with on a losing Ashes tour, it’s tempting to identify Where England Went Wrong. But it’s a fallacy to view the series as some Choose Your Own Adventure book where if you make the correct decisions at the end of each page you’ll ultimately emerge victorious.

People love to pinpoint mistakes, but sometimes you just can’t make enough right choices. Honestly, the team that wins the Ashes is generally the one that’s good enough to get plenty of things wrong and emerge unscathed.

Misshapes, mistakes

Australia suffered a bunch of injuries, didn’t pick their spinner, stumbled on an opening partnership basically by random chance and won anyway. 

In contrast, England simply weren’t good enough to get away with anything. They’re a team whose greatest performances have stemmed from taking risks, but there’s a reason why cricket has always valued averages over highest scores. It gives a truer measure of worth over a span of time.

Zak Crawley retained his place in this side in large part because he was expected to perform better in Australian conditions. He has indeed performed better, but his baseline is so low that he could have excelled himself even further and it still wouldn’t have been anything incredible. Conversely, there was a good chance Ben Duckett’s desire to hit every ball would prove counterproductive in these parts and so it has proven thus far.

Basically, England hoped conditions would outweigh class for one opener, but that class would outweigh conditions in the case of the other.

Ollie Pope has been an okay number three. Believe it or not, he actually averages almost 40 in that spot. But for whatever reason – the relentless scrutiny and intensity or whatever – he invariably performs worse in big series. The Ashes is the biggest series. Pope has been terrible.

It’s early days for Jamie Smith, but he’s been a little bit the same – albeit tempered by the fact he isn’t a 60-Test veteran and the fact he made a few in his most recent innings. Smith was the right pick, but he’s another question mark; another unknown that may or may not have worked out that England needed to get lucky with given the sheer volume of other question marks in the equation.

The bowling attack is callow and has bowled like it. The most experienced, Jofra Archer, has missed a lot more Test cricket than he’s played. Nobody else, other than the captain, has done much bowling at all in Australia. Gus Atkinson arrived with the most promising record and method and so far has been the least effective. 

Up until this tour, these guys had performed well enough. England could have kept Jimmy Anderson around but how would that have looked had he failed or succumbed to injury – both of which would have been entirely plausible outcomes?

A few years back, England gambled on a spinner. Surveying the alternatives and not seeing much that inspired confidence, they concluded at least Shoaib Bashir could work out. As with several other things, they saw one possible sequence of events where he would become a more threatening option than anyone else. Alas, those events didn’t happen and then, with all those other things-that-might-or-might-not-work-out already in play, they chickened out. 

Would picking Bashir have helped? Probably not. Would picking someone like Jack Leach instead have worked out? Looking at those first two Tests in particular – again, probably not. 

So spin-wise they had three options and no obviously correct answer. Presumably one would have worked out better than the other two, but not to the extent it would have made much difference. 

We feel similarly about the team’s much lauded/derided/mocked approach to batting, which has only intermittently been attempted to our eyes. (Most likely an enforced absence stemming from the accuracy of Australia’s bowlers.)

England’s batters have at times seemed hell bent on ‘giving it away’, but in other innings the majority of them have actually lost their wickets playing defensive shots. Whatever they’ve tried to do, the one constant has been that they’ve been dismissed for fewer runs than their opposite numbers.

When Ollie Pope blathered on about putting pressure on the bowlers and sometimes absorbing it and being crystal clear about which to do when, he was essentially saying, “We need to be better at batting.” Making the appropriate choices for your level of ability is what batting is – and again, better players have more margin for error. 

We’ll use the one thing we’ve got more of

Australia haven’t really blooded the next generation, which represents a not insignificant vulnerability should they need to replace anyone.

Steve Smith missed the last Test. Josh Hazlewood is sitting out all five. Pat Cummins missed Brisbane and Perth. Usman Khawaja was unavailable in Brisbane and hurt in Perth. And they’re winning 3-0.

Australia responded to Khawaja’s injury by setting their openers to ‘shuffle’. There is no clearer measure of the difference between the two sides than the fact that they tried two stand-in openers in the span of one Test and one of them performed well enough to get the gig for the rest of the series and possibly beyond.

Australia make dumb decisions and win. England make dumb decisions and lose.

Decisions of course matter. But Australia have had the raw materials that taking the worse option often hasn’t been so bad, while even some of England’s better decisions haven’t really ended up especially helpful.

Where did it go wrong for England?

Certainly not solely with the coach or captain, who initially played a poor hand massively better than the previous England management team, even if they’ve perhaps not played it quite so well more recently.

Not massively with the players either, we’d argue – except insofar as a couple of them have manifestly failed to improve over the course of unjustifiably sizeable Test careers.

Team selection? Certainly a bit – but a lot of the wishful thinking that’s been exhibited is really just a reflection of the alternatives. Rob Key has certainly overshot in his distrust for county cricket performances, but that doesn’t mean there wasn’t a basis for doing so. The domestic game remains low intensity and we struggle to fathom the huge collective aversion to playing spin bowlers these days, regardless of how they’ve chosen to schedule red ball matches. (As Graeme Swann pointed out last week, it turns square in England in September.)

A lot of us don’t like this insidious school scholarship system that’s developed either. A good cricket team contains all sorts, but England’s seems to contain fewer and fewer sorts with every passing year. The many paths into the England team seem to have narrowed to just one.

Finally, there’s the basic fact that when playing in the opposition’s home conditions, you already start at a disadvantage.

All these things stack up. None is unsurmountable on its own, but queue them all up, page after page, and it might just be that the path to victory is no longer there to be read.

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