Waterloo sunset

I feel like the icon of the Australian victory this summer will be a great hovering Cheshire-like moustache. It's Johnson's of course (whose Cheshire smile is already pretty impressive), but it will have a life of its own as the prickly symbol of all the biff and Boof and snarly hairy manliness. And in the other corner will, alas, be a plate of crumbed tofu, symbol of the "1 percenters", as Kerry has started to call them, the namby-pamby book-learned carrot-munching sports scientists who clearly made off with the balls of the English team. It's a bit silly and a bit offensive in that rah-rah let-men-be-men way, but every series must have its mythology. It's been a remarkably consistent one. I can't remember a series where there have been so many similarities between the course and flow of each game, the same story told over and again, and not a story with any great twists. It feels a bit like a dream. I'm sure it doesn't feel that way to people who have had to work their guts out in the middle of the WACA in a heat wave. Plenty of beautiful cricket love out there at the end of the game today, lots of "hugshakes" to use Quentin Hull's slip of the tongue. Siddle and Haddin were a highlight.

For me the wait to get the Ashes back has really been since 2005 rather than 2009. In my mind the 2006-2007 clean sweep was a blip, a parting gift from the outgoing greats that couldn't be built on because of that. So this is sweet but it also means I'm hungry (already! the ingratitude!) to see us do it again in England. I have strangely no memory of the 2001 Ashes. I have no idea what I was doing, obviously not paying attention, but I feel like I've never seen us win in England.

I've mentioned my love of a wilty English cricketer previously and I do also love the wilty English cricket commentator. Someone like Jim Maxwell keeps to a firm school-principal tone whether times are up or down, but people like Jonathan Agnew get this wonderful sigh in their voice when they're losing, a sort of resigned wistfulness that reached its apogee when Aggers suggested to some downhearted English spectators that they contemplate the beautiful WA sunset. Geoffrey Boycott is philosophical in another way. On Sunday he described the ball of Siddle's that removed Prior not as a "nothing" ball, but as a "nothingness" ball. I think that would actually be quite hard to play.