Massacre at the Gabbatoir

Don’t say you weren’t warned. You were. “Australia will win at least one test this winter…England will have a bad test or Australia an extremely good one…This is an Australian side learning who it is. There are signs of improvement, signs that on their day they could be formidable. (The question being, as before, how many of those days there will be). Meanwhile, England are solid but not perhaps quite as good as they think they are. Brilliant individual performances saved the English collective in this series. They are not a team in transition but nor are they quite a team going anywhere.”

That was this blog’s verdict on the last Ashes series. England’s 3-0 victory was both clear-cut and less than it seemed. England took their chances, Australia squandered theirs and Ian Bell’s runs accounted for much of the difference between the teams.

All across England today there are cricket fans trying to draw some gallows comfort from last night’s capitulation.