England lost the Ashes so quickly it barely qualified as a series. By the time most supporters had adjusted their sleep schedules, the urn was gone, Bazball was wobbling, and Brendon McCullum was explaining — calmly, politely — that his future was someone else’s problem.
After months, if not years, of Bazball chest-thumping about England’s best chance in 15 years, the home side applied the final stamp on a deeply familiar Ashes script, sealing the urn in just 11 days and confirming that Australia remains the only country where English reinvention reliably goes to die.
Some men chase enlightenment in monasteries; Brendon McCullum appears to have found his in the warm, humming void between reality and whatever dimension England’s Ashes preparation currently occupies.
Joe Root, one of Test cricket’s modern greats, is backing England’s decision to skip the pink-ball Prime Minister’s XI game
and their habit of “responding well to bad weeks of cricket” – a philosophy that only works if you run out of bad weeks before the series runs out of Tests.
Travis Head has made a career of gate-crashing tidy narratives, but even by his standards this was impolite. An Ashes Test that kept shape for roughly six hours blew apart in the space of a single innings, and Australia walked away 1–0 up after two days that felt like cricket written by someone who’d only skimmed the instruction manual.
Perth didn’t just wake up hot — it woke up hostile. The city buzzed like a neon motel sign on its last night before collapse, flickering over the great baked bowl of the stadium where nineteen wickets were about to get dragged screaming into the void.
It begins, as all good hallucinations do, under floodlights that feel like interrogation lamps. The pitch is a slab of madness, the crowd already fizzing with sugar and beer, and somewhere deep in the corporate cortex of Cricket Australia, a banker has decided that this — this first over of the Big Bash — needs to be a democracy.
Ok so the first question you’re asking is “Who are you and what are you doing in my house?”. This will be followed by “Where have you been all these years?”. I can’t answer the first due to legal reasons however I can have a stab at some professionally poor excuses for the second.
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