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And so to Australia. On Sunday Jofra Archer, Mark Wood and other members of England’s Ashes squad arrived in Perth, some flying from the white-ball tour of New Zealand and others from England with the Lions. The full group will not assemble for another week, with the players and coaches involved in the 3-0 one-day shellacking by the Black Caps now scattering for some much-needed decompression. There will be a lot of English accents on Kiwi golf courses over the next few days.
One can only hope they strike that kind of white ball a little more cleanly than the ones with which New Zealand’s bowlers have been torturing them of late. Take away Harry Brook’s magnificent 135 in the first one-day international, which hauled England from the brink of total humiliation and transformed the game into a mere embarrassment, and in their other 14 innings the five batters now turning their attention to the Ashes scored 129 runs at an average of 9.21, the start of every innings a cavalcade of misery.
In their final match, at Wellington’s Sky Stadium on Saturday, England found themselves three down with 26 balls bowled and 17 runs on the board, a fitting conclusion to a series pockmarked by similarly epic failure. Amounting to just 58, the combined scores across the three games of Jamie Smith, Ben Duckett and Joe Root are precisely 50 fewer than the next-worst effort of England’s top three in a series of three or more completed matches, the 108 in India in 1981-82.
Add the contributions from No 4, a position occupied by Jack Bethell twice and Brook once, and the number rises very slightly to 84, 70 fewer than the next-worst effort in English history, when West Indies visited in 1976, and making them the worst-performing top four from any country in any comparable series ever, five away from Bangladesh’s contribution to the 1988 Asia Cup. England have been bad before, but not like this.
The gentle wave of optimism that followed news that Pat Cummins, probably Australia’s best bowler, would miss at least the first Ashes Test feels a little less refreshing given the performance of so many of England’s key batters against a New Zealand team shorn of perhaps the finest five of theirs. Matt Henry was ruled out of two of the three games and Will O’Rourke, Lockie Ferguson, Kyle Jamieson and Adam Milne, for various reasons, missed them all.
Their batters might not have given England’s bowlers much to work with, but the form and fitness of Jofra Archer and Brydon Carse, as well as the sight of Mark Wood, Gus Atkinson and Josh Tongue gradually increasing their paces and workloads in training, has been hugely encouraging, even if the team’s outstanding ODI performer by a distance was the one who had just announced his red-ball retirement. Brendon McCullum described Jamie Overton as a “huge win for the tour”, saying: “We think he’s a better player than what he does.” The all-rounder suggested he was helped by the team’s dire position each time he came out to bat – “You’ve technically got nothing to lose” – which perhaps means the top four contributed something after all.
McCullum may feel he doubts himself too much, but one thing Overton does have belief in, despite recent performances, is England’s Test team. “It’s a completely different side, a different format,” he said. “I still think the boys are going to go really well in Australia. They’ve played great cricket in the last 18 months, two years, and you can rely on that, whereas this 50-over side, we’ve struggled in the last 12 months. It’s one of those things. Confidence can go both ways. The Test side is going really well so fingers crossed they can go well in the Ashes.”
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The first Test starts in a little under three weeks, long enough for memories of recent travails to fade a bit. “I’m proper excited,” McCullum said of his next test (after the golf). “We’re incredibly respectful of the challenge Australia is going to present us, we know how hard that tour is going to be. It’s going to require a team to stay together right throughout, to be as strong as we can to try and block out any of the outside noise. We’re very respectful of who we’re coming up against, we’re so excited to get over there and we can’t wait to get started.”
