Down but not out
FRANK KEATING
Never bet against world champions is the sage ringsider’s timeless rubric. Certainly not when they look to be cornered and groggy. In what is already the most imperishably thrilling cricket series staged in this country since the whole motley began 123 years ago, to regain the Ashes England need only to draw the final match, which begins at the Oval on Thursday, while Australia, strutting world champs for the past dozen years, must win it. Having humiliatingly lost the first of the five Tests at Lord’s in July, the intense euphoria of outrageous subsequent victories (by just two runs at Birmingham and three wickets at Nottingham) has had Englishmen forgetting how whisker-close on each occasion they were to losing. In between, the palpitating draw at Manchester tellingly summed up the overall state of the contest — that is, that England can readily win most rounds on points, but find it awfully difficult to land a conclusive knockout blow. So the Australians come to Kennington, bloodied and black-eyed for sure, but clear-headedly aware that one big belter of a punch can still preserve their title. It is absurd to presume that the crack batsmen in the baggy green have each, simultaneously, forgotten how to play a brutal matchturning innings; and with the ball, the pitilessly unforgiving McGrath is back to rage alongside the furies of bluechip sidekick Lee and, of course, the peerless, fuming warrior Warne. Never bet against world champions.
Acclaiming Dickens, Chesterton wrote, ‘There is a great man who makes every man feel small. But the really great man is the one who makes every man feel great.’ For English cricket you would say the same for Grace and Compton and Botham. Suddenly, nonesuch prodigy Flintoff demands to join that company. Once the hero was castled by Lee’s desperate, unerring thunderbolt which exploded into Nottingham’s soft, Sunday evensong sunlight — 111 for six and 18 perilously impossible runs still needed — I spooled back 50 years to Adelaide and the boyhood tale of England’s gloomy Job of a captain, Hutton. Set only 94 to retain the Ashes, England had scarcely eked out half when, at 49 for four and Hutton, Edrich, May and Cowdrey bombed back into the hutch by a defiant Miller, the whey-faced skipper retired to the loo, unable to watch, lamenting, ‘T’boogers have done us again.’ In the event, Compton and Bailey calmly carried England across the line, just as on Sunday did the unlikely and intrepid batting partnership of Giles and Hoggard.
This time 129 to win, and again the fancy Dans of batsmanship — not least England’s two flash colonial boys: all mouth and tighttrousered show-off Pietersen and impetuous butterfingered stumper Jones — had flapped, fannied and died in a fretful sea of adrenalin. No doubting now that t’boogers had done us again, till the artless nobility of Hoggard met the prosaic resourcefulness of Giles, imperturbably to steer the ship into port. Hoggard and Giles are picked as England’s upstage makeweights, attendant lords called on only ‘to swell a progress, start a scene or two’. They were Prince Hamlet and Prince Hal all right at the rafter-packed Nottingham playhouse on Sunday. Famously to beat Australia at the Oval in 1902 — with 15 needed for victory Rhodes told Hirst, ‘Let’s get ’em in singles.’ At Nottingham, 103 Augusts later, good Hoggard ploughman-plodded in to demand of Giles, ‘Come on, lad, let’s you and me just get it done.’ Precisely the battle-cry edict which serves all-round for the Oval.
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