Just under three years ago, after Australia were soundly defeated by South Africa in a Test match in Hobart,
Steve Smith remembers being visited in the dressing room by James Sutherland and Pat Howard, Cricket
Australia’s chief executive and performance director. They were, to put it bluntly, unimpressed with what
they had just seen. And so they laid out to a stunned Smith and his team just what was expected of them.
“We don’t pay you to play,” they were told. “We pay you to win.”
In many ways, this was simply an indelicate enunciation of what Australian cricketers have innately known
for decades, an unspoken truth that no amount of culture reviews and fancy slogans and tearful interviews
can ever fully elide. Australia’s win-at-all-costs mentality led to plenty of things: an uncompromising
attitude to player welfare, a spiteful on-field demeanour, and ultimately downright cheating. But - and this
part is often forgotten - it also led to a hell of a lot of winning.
It’s in this context that we need to understand Australia’s quest to win on English soil, a quest that began
with this ominous statement of intent at a half-full Edgbaston. And this was some statement: England’s
fortress torn down, their batsmen spun to ruin by Nathan Lyon, their bowlers ground into the dirt by Smith
and other players not quite as good as Smith. Moreover, the celebrations of the Australian team afterwards
spoke not just of a Test victory earned, but of something more: a sort of catharsis, an itch scratched, a plan
on the verge of coming to glorious fruition.
The summer of 2001, the year Australia last won at Edgbaston, was also the last year Australia won an Ashes
series on foreign soil. I was at that game, and it certainly didn’t feel like the end of an era at the time. Losing
to Australia was, after all, what England did. And so we politely applauded the brilliance of Adam Gilchrist
and chuckled along as Mark Butcher picked up four wickets with his filthy medium pace, and then packed
up our half-eaten sandwiches and went home. It would have startled us to learn that a baby born on that day
would be eligible to vote by the time Australia next won here.
Australians are not bred the same way. Eighteen years to an Australian cricket fan is not the same as
eighteen years to an English fan. It’s an existential crisis, a top-to-bottom failure, a national bloody disgrace.
It’s a run without precedent in the history of Ashes cricket. For Mark Taylor and then Steve Waugh, the
search for a win in the Caribbean (no win between 1973 and 1995) and India (no win between 1969 and
2004) became a sort of all-consuming obsession. India (15 years and counting) may yet become the next
frontier. But for now, winning in England is the fixation.
Nathan Lyon took six second innings wickets
for Australia (Getty)And the signs were there, if only we’d been minded to read them. Around 18 months ago, according to a
report in The Australian, Cricket Australia were so concerned about finding a decent standard of warm-up
opposition ahead of this series that they seriously considered offering a cash prize to any county who could
defeat Australia A in a tour game. That plan was shelved, but the commitment to securing Test-standard