St John's Wort

I’ve been watching season 3 of Mad Men and it’s a good warm up for the Ashes because boy does it put the boot into the English. No likeable character was ever called St John.

As far as I am concerned, we don’t hold the Ashes until we win it in England. The 2010/2011 home loss has never been atoned for and two 5-0 home thumpings still haven’t hit the damned spot of 2005. After 2005, the 2006-2007 thumping was the very least we could do to make things up to Warnie. His own 4/49 in Adelaide Oval was satisfying indeed, but then we had the 2009 loss in the UK and the horror of 2010/2011 and the THIRD LOSS IN A ROW of 2013. Thanks once again for 5-0 in 2013-2014, and I don’t want to seem ungrateful, but I think this recap of the sequence of events makes it clear why we are NOT THERE YET.* We need to humiliate them at home. We need to shit where they eat, my friends. 

  
Oh, 2005, ten whole years ago. Why did it hurt so much? I want to say it hurt so much because it gave Them so much pleasure. That certainly was a revolting sight – Jerusalem! double decker buses! OBEs! – but they could easily say it gave them so much pleasure because it hurt us so much and then we are back to where we started.

It gave them so much pleasure because they hadn’t won a series since 1987, they’d endured EIGHT losses in a row, 4 at home and 4 away, we were the best in the world, no one liked us and we lost it. When I say ‘we lost it’, I am referring of course to Ponting blowing his top at Duncan Fletcher on his way back to the pavilion after being run out at Trent Bridge. That was the iconic image of that series, more than the 'Gladiators' image of Flintoff cuddling Brett Lee on the pitch at Edgbaston.

They were good games, and close games, which always makes losing more painful. But the great drama and ultimate trauma of 2005 was the Blond on Blond battle of Flintoff v Warne, one leading his country, the other desperately dragging it along. Flintoff straddled that series like a colossus, but Warnie… Warnie! He took 40 wickets (I really must italicise: forty wickets. Flintoff took 24). He made two hundred and forty-nine runs (more than Katich, significantly more than Gilchrist and Martyn). He worked so hard, he wanted it so much, he tried to do it all himself and it was astonishing and heartbreaking to watch. I remember being upset leading in to the series because with his divorce and another sex scandal it seemed to me that the off field stuff had finally got the better of him and that he was never going to be remembered for what he should be remembered for. This was wrong of course, it seemed to invigorate him, and that was remarkable in itself.

So, as I said above, 5-0 the next series was really the least we could do in return, especially since he also did quite a bit of that one himself. This is still all about 2005 for me. We need to do more to make up for it and we need to do it for Warnie.

* Style guides always say you should avoid using italics for emphasis, but they don’t say anything about ALL CAPS.