The Times - UK (2021-12-06)

the times | Monday December 6 2021 59

Sport

Elizabeth Ammon

Analysis

T

he unprecedented lack of match

preparation before this Ashes

series means that Chris

Silverwood and Joe Root, the head

coach and captain who will decide

England’s starting XI for the first Test

at the Gabba, have very little to go on

other than past performances. Here

are three key calls they need to make.

pope or bairstow at no 6?

The top four picks itself: Rory Burns,

Haseeb Hameed and Dawid Malan,

with Root at No 4. Zak Crawley is in

the squad but unlikely to play given

that he was dropped for the back end

of the India series.

Assuming Ben Stokes is match-

ready, he will come back at No 5,

leaving the only batting question as

Ollie Pope v Jonny Bairstow at No 6.

Bairstow was due to get the nod in

the postponed final Test against India.

Pope scored 81 in his last Test and he

did play first-class cricket at the end

of the summer, unlike Bairstow.

England have high hopes for Pope but

Root may feel that he wants Bairstow,

his long-standing friend and team-

mate, in the trenches with him —

especially after his century in Perth

on the previous tour four years ago.

what to do with leach?

With Stokes back, England can

balance their side in a way they could

Leach must play but Woakes

may be held back for pink ball

not over the summer. After a spell on

the sidelines, Jack Leach looks likely

to be the frontline spinner and

although he has not played an away

Ashes series before, he has a decent

record on the road.

The weather may make the Gabba

pitch look greener and softer than

usual, which could tempt England to

leave out Leach and go for an all-

seam attack, particularly if they feel it

will be a weather-hit, shortened game.

Leach has shown that he can play

the dual role of being a containing

bowler in the first innings and more

attacking in the second.

the seamers’ strategy

Assuming England go in with four

seamers, it is a question of which

three get the nod alongside Stokes.

James Anderson’s experience of

Ashes cricket and the pressure that

comes with it means his name is

probably already on the team sheet.

Mark Wood, England’s quickest

bowler, was expected to be a key part

of the attack but there are suggestions

that Silverwood and Root will opt for

an attack to contain, with Stuart

Broad and Ollie Robinson playing in

Brisbane and Chris Woakes held back

for the second Test at Adelaide with

the pink ball, where swing may be a

bigger factor.

Ashes veteran Broad has not played

since August because of an ankle

injury while Robinson made an

impressive start to his Test career,

taking 28 wickets at 19.60 in five

matches in the summer.

no escape from Sandpapergate

Australian player told The Ethics
Centre during its 2018 “cultural
review” of the Australian game.
As The Ethics Centre concluded,
Newlands was “not an aberration” but
“an extreme example of a latent
tendency growing out of the
prevailing culture of men’s cricket in
Australia”.
The French philosopher
Montesquieu had a dictum
that applies well to CA,
and equally to the
England & Wales
Cricket Board in the
day of Azeem Rafiq:
“If a particular cause,
like the accidental
result of a battle, has
ruined a state, there
was a general cause
which made the downfall
of this state ensue from a
single battle.”
Sandpapergate was the accidental
battle result — and let us not forget
how accidental it was, depending as it
did on a single SuperSport camera
being trained in the right direction to
detect Bancroft’s malfeasance. But the
general cause was the team’s sense of
impunity and entitlement in the
context of CA’s organisational
arrogance.

“Ultimately,” Greg Chappell says in

his new book Not Out, “every one of

us in the organisation was guilty.”

Now retired and deprogrammed from

the cult, he concedes: “We all walked

past things we shouldn’t have walked

past, from top to bottom.”

It has been rightly observed that

there was a disproportion to the

response after Sandpapergate.

But the team was finally

picking up the tariff for its

general dislikeability.

The bullies, we learnt,

were also cheats.

A lot of distaste

localised in Warner,

which suited his

coaching and

managerial enablers,

who thereby escaped

with minimal damage to

their reputations.

The lack of a comprehensive

public accounting for events at

Newlands, the drive to quickly

designate the guilty so that everyone

else could stop saying sorry, remains a

problem, not relieved by the scrutiny

of The Ethics Centre.

Given the time and resource

constraints on investigating officer

Iain Roy in 2018, is CA really sure it

knows the whole history of Australia’s

preparing balls for reverse swing in

and around Newlands? Or does it fall

into the category of things for which

it is better to have, to borrow from

Watergate, plausible deniability?

It confirmed some apprehensions

in May when Bancroft confided in an

interviewer: “Yeah, obviously what I

did benefits bowlers and the

awareness around that, probably, is

self-explanatory.” “The investigation

was a thorough one,” countered Nick

Hockley, CA’s chief executive, when

asked about Roy’s report. “As far as

we are concerned, the investigation is

closed.” In the matter of Paine, as in

Sandpapergate, the CA board has

faced the baneful combination of

good intentions and no good choices.

It is possible to sympathise with their

predicament. But CA’s tendency to

secrecy has had two negative

consequences: it has developed not

only a horror of negative publicity,

reflected in the haste of its recent

deliberations, but also a reputation for

expedient behaviour, which has

damaged its public credibility.

It is the worst of both worlds.

Because the natural inference to draw

from “move along, nothing to see

here” is: “Well, they would say that,

wouldn’t they?” It has been said that

Americans before Watergate believed

everything their government told

them, and that after they believed

nothing. Will that be Sandpapergate’s

legacy in Australian cricket?

6 Gideon Haigh is a columnist for The

Australian

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BRADLEY KANARIS/GETTY IMAGES

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