Ashes Noise

The 2 old worn out super powers of Cricket -- England and Australia are busy planning mind games and tactics for Ashes something which has lost relevance in last decade.  England are no 4 in the test rankings and Australia are no longer the dominating ones. Yet the media and cricket pundits from this 2 countries make us believe that the Ashes is the cricket series which would save the cricket world from the evil clutches of Asian cricketing bloc.

No wonder the English authors call Australian preparation to the Ashes as bulls hit as they have been playing 2 Tests and 3 ODIs in India and 3 ODIs home vs SL.  No first class games as they say for preparing for the Ashes. Few players are playing but then English media wont look at them.

What ideal preparation does England have? They won 3-1 in a series with Pak which nobody knows if all Tests were rigged or fixed or how many of them were clean and how many of them were not.

Then they went for a boot camp in Germany only to return with injured James Anderson, their best bowler in swinging conditions. Australia does not have swinging conditions like SA and England.

KP is in the worst form of his life and he is doing everything except what he should do -- make runs.

So is that an idealistic build up to the Ashes?

There are many in England team who believe they have best chance to win in Australia in 24 years.  They have been making tall claims on the back of batting prowess of Strauss, Cook, Trott, KP, Collingwood, Morgan, Bell.  Except Strauss and Trott none of this batsmen are in any kind of form. They just managed to get through the Pakistanis because the latter were busy rigging the game.

And do not forget they did not win a single Test on the last tour to Australia.

Johnson, Bollinger, Siddle, Hilfy should be handful for Australia to run through the feeble English batting lineup 2 times every Test. And the batting of Katich, Watson, Ponting, Hussey,Clarke, North and Haddin / Paine may not be like the Hayden, Langer, Ponting, Clarke, Hussey, Martyn, Gilchrist of 2006, yet this line up is strong enough to post a total of 400 plus and leave England reeling with the walking wickets like Cook, KP, Collingwood and Bell / Morgan.

In short, the Ashes would not be that important a cricket series as it used to be may be in 1980s or earlier. Its the contest of Bangladesh vs Sri Lanka thats more important for the life of Test Cricket to be longer.