Ashes 2023: a cricket classic

By Gideon Haigh and Peter Lalor

A great cricket series, as reported by a great cricket writer.

High hopes were held for the Ashes of 2023. They were exceeded in an instant classic of five Tests between a bold England and a battling Australia, finally drawn two-all. Ashes 2023 captures all the drama and skill, as well as the controversy over a stumping at Lord’s that followed in the tradition of Bodyline as a clash of cultures and of stereotypes. With a foot in both camps, Gideon Haigh wrote for The Australian in Australia and The Times in the UK. This book mixes his popular match reports with new material to create a priceless memento of an unforgettable series.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Scribe Publications
• Release date: Oct 26, 2023
• ISBN: 9781761385674

Gideon Haigh

Gideon Haigh is an award-winning writer, described by The Guardian as 'the most gifted cricket essayist of his generation'.

Book preview

The World Test Championship Final

7 June

Two Cheers for the WTC

Cricket scheduling keeps finding ways to make itself a darker art. A final is, by definition, usually the last game one plays. But next week Australia will start its northern summer with a final, the World Test Championship, ahead of its most prestigious and storied series, the Ashes.

Yes, Australia, the number-one ranked Test nation, will play a single match against India, ranked number two, in what most fans will view as a warm-up to five matches against England, ranked number four. That this WTC final will be the first Test in 143 years The Oval has hosted in June is really one of the less weird things about it.

All this is occurring in arrears of the world’s richest cricket event, the Indian Premier League, which is so old-fashioned that they still play the final at the end. The Tests are being squeezed up in order that the England Cricket Board devote August to its tenth-rate IPL knock-off, The Hundred. So here we are.

The prospect of Australia v India at The Oval should by rights be pleasing. No, let’s be fair. It is pleasing, quite: here are two well-matched teams, consistently the best of the last two years and full of quality players, who can play five bowlers and still bat deep.

Their recent meeting in the Border-Gavaskar Trophy was undermined by shit-tip pitches, but The Oval seems to offer probably the fairest surface possible, with a hint that runs on the board will matter. In the venue’s last ten Tests, the team batting first on winning the toss has won four times, drawn once, and lost once; the team fielding first on winning the toss has won twice and lost twice.

England took the latter course last year and bundled South Africa out for 118, but the Proteas’ top order these days is like an Ikea kit without the instruction booklet. The northern summer has so far been dry, the skies look pretty clear for the next fortnight, and the average first innings score in the County Championship at The Oval has been around 300.

Australia may have the slightest edge. Pat Cummins’ team will be the fresher, himself included. Steve Smith and Marnus Labuschagne have acclimatised in county cricket. The bowlers are well rested. The squad is at full strength, that ugly blow to Cameron Green’s arm in his last IPL engagement having proven less serious than one first feared, while Scott Boland is the ideal proxy should Josh Hazlewood not come up.

India have both enormous experience, with Cheteshwar Pujara grinding runs out for Sussex lately, and ample flair, with Shubman Gill probably the world’s hottest batting property at the moment. But they have lost four and drawn one of their last ten Tests abroad, even as their strength at home has grown — the two may not be unrelated. They still lack Jasprit Bumrah, Shreyas Iyer, and Rishabh Pant — perhaps indefinitely in the case of the last.

Which is why, I suspect, they will be sorely tempted to go into the final not with Pant’s replacement during the Border-Gavaskar Trophy, KS Bharat, but Rohit Sharma’s Mumbai Indians’ exuberant opening partner, Ishan Kishan.

In India, Bharat rather failed to meet the standards of an elite gloveman; uncapped Ishan probably won’t ever, but the brio of his left-handed batting is the nearest his country have to a like-for-like Pant substitute. Ishan’s fourteen one-day internationals include a 131-ball 210 against Bangladesh six months ago, and his freedom at number seven would be enhanced by the presences of the Ravis, Jadeja, and Ashwin, at numbers six and eight. He’s twenty-four, ripe and dauntless.

But again, to step back a little, what’s discouraging about the World Test Championship final is that the occasion must be enjoyed, in the words of Viktor Frankl, in spite of everything. There is virtually no lead-in for expectation to build; there is no pause afterwards to savour its events or significance; four days separate it from the Edgbaston Test.

You must squint in such a way as to overlook that the World Test Championship itself is bonkers. One team has played as many as twenty-two Tests (England); others, as few as twelve (Bangladesh and Sri Lanka); and three other Test nations (Afghanistan, Zimbabwe, and Ireland) do not even compete, having been allotted a total of half-a-dozen Tests in the last two years. While Tests are traditionally played in series hosted by one nation or the other (viz the Ashes), the final is a one-off in a neutral venue, far from the fans of the participating countries, muting the overall effect, reducing a global showpiece to a boutique property.

Finally, the WTC final is another expression of cricket’s devil’s bargain. It depends for its commercial viability on India playing in the final, bringing some of its vast television audiences — even as the politically squalid Board of Control for Cricket in India connives to suck the marrow out of the rest of the international game.

So let’s be absolutely frank as well as fair: as terrific as the cricketers will be on show from next Wednesday, as exciting as the potential of their rivalry, the WTC final is cricket’s lip service to a format with a clouded future. Which is a thousand pities.

Cricket will pause momentarily, then revert to the far more pressing business of making money. After the Headingley Test, in fact, it will be time to tune in to the likes of the San Francisco Unicorns (captain Aaron Finch) and the Washington Freedom (captain Moises Henriques) in the US’s Major League Cricket. I haven’t checked, but imagine they will also have the final at the end.

11 June

WTC Man of the Match

Gimme Head

Pretty soon you will look up the word ‘counterpunch’ in the dictionary and find a photo of Travis Head. Since the start of the last Ashes, he has become Australia’s beacon of bouncebackability, as hard to bowl to as David Warner in his pomp and nearly as reliable.

His 163 from 174 balls in the World Test Championship final, the first century in that fixture, has now taken this capability to the world, where previously it had been largely for home consumption — as reflected in a Test average in Australia of 58 and abroad of 27 going into the match. By the end of the Ashes, the gap should have narrowed further.

So what goes into a game like Head’s, which Ben Stokes confided a week or so ago made him as challenging a rival as anyone in Australia’s top six? ‘He was so hard to bowl to in Australia when we were there last time [2021–22] because he just threw counterpunches,’ said England’s captain — no stranger to using opponents as speed bags.

‘Counterpunching’ — essentially the choice to attack when the orthodox response to a scoreline might be to defend or consolidate — may be counterintuitive, but it is not illogical. Attacking field settings and bowling to wicket-seeking lengths are also favourable to enterprising batsmanship. So a bit of nerve can go a long way.

Head himself has also always been a batter harder to subdue than to get out. His maiden T20 hundred took 53 balls; he has made two List A double centuries. He relies on fast hands to make up for flat feet, but his attacking options are broad: he not only savages width, but owns anything bowled too straight; left-handedness and sharp running enhance his value further.

That makes for rapid impact, and the boundaries that Head peeled off through and over the leg side after coming in with Australia having lost three wickets in the first twenty-five overs of the innings on Wednesday seemed to turn the match in a trice.

After sixteen deliveries, Head was 27. Bowlers who had come into the match after two months of one-over and two-over spells in the Indian Premier League suddenly found themselves challenged to maintain consistency for anything longer.

The Oval’s outfield is as frictionless as a polished mirror: Head would eventually hit twenty-four fours, one six, and only one three. But India had to keep attacking in order to justify their decisions to bowl first and to exclude Ravi Ashwin (who has dismissed Head thrice in six encounters — just saying).

Rohit Sharma’s struggle to contain is reflected in the balls that Head took for each of his half-centuries: 60, 56, and 48.

Any prolonged innings by Head, it is also true, contains its share of miscues and misfires, and this was no exception. Between the powerful cuts, pulls, and punches, he scattered some wacky wafts and ham-fisted hooks.

Twice he was hit on the bonce; he nearly dragged on; he top-edged into space. When the ball was hip high, Head looked like he’d been administered a shock with an electric cattle prod. But his control percentage of 69 per cent proved less significant than his intent percentage of 100 per cent.

The South Australian reminds you of the phrase ‘good bad books’ that Orwell popularised for ‘the kind of book that has no literary pretensions but which remains readable when more serious productions have perished’. For Head is a master of good bad batting. He lays no claim to easeful style or technical precision, yet has found a way to accumulate more than 10,000 first-class runs.

It is not only the moustache that lends Head a 1970s retro chic; the unself-conscious roughness of his technique has defied the homogenising influences of coached conformism and video self-scrutiny. Like Doug Walters, he can contribute useful overs also.

Stokes and Baz McCullum now have more counter-counterpunching to contemplate. With his reliance on boundaries, Head will likely find himself hemmed in with more defensive fields; with his propensity for closing off, he will cop a lot more along the body. His head-to-heads with Moeen Ali, now mooted as England’s proxy for the injured Jack Leach, are unlikely to last long either way.

Early thought in England had been that the Labuschagne-Smith axis would prove the home team’s most formidable obstacle in these Ashes. Australia’s number five has now countered that, too.

SCOREBOARD

Final: The Oval, 7–11 June 2023 Toss: Australia

Australia: 469 & 270/8d India: 296 & 234

Australia won by 209 runs

AUSTRALIA 1ST INNINGS

INDIA 1ST INNINGS

AUSTRALIA 2ND INNINGS

INDIA 2ND INNINGS (T: 444 RUNS)