Eighteen months after the last series ended in English humiliation in Australia, cricket’s Ashes gets under way in Birmingham on Friday, amid confident forecasts of bright sunshine and a full house, and complete uncertainty over which of two of the world’s best teams will emerge as winners.
Across the last 12 months England have won 82% of their 11 Test matches after a revolution in their approach to the game and Australia 58% of their 12 – including victory over India in last week’s World Test Championship final at the Oval to become the format’s official global champions. Australia’s captain, Pat Cummins, predicted that the meeting of the sport’s two in-form sides would make “the whole cricketing world stop”.
While Australia have held the Ashes since 2017 they have not won a series in England since 2001, and since have lost four and drawn the most recent in 2019. England, meanwhile, have only won one series in Australia in the last 35 years and were humbled 4-0 there in 2021-22. But their fortunes have since been transformed under a new coach, Brendon McCullum, who has encouraged an ultra-positive approach that has become widely known – to McCullum’s evident discomfort – as “Bazball”.
Although officially sold out, tickets for the first day of the series, which will be contested in five Tests over six weeks, were changing hands on resale sites for anything between £130 and £650 each on Thursday, with the most sought-after being for Edgbaston’s famous Hollies Stand, renowned as perhaps the most loudest and wildest in the country.
“The crowd here is so, so good and loud,” said Ben Stokes, the England captain. “We know what it’s like in Australia when they’re on top against us, which is most of the time. What I would say to the people who come here is regardless of how things are going out there, just be with us.”
As well as the familiar atmosphere-building pre-game traditions – the singing of both teams’ national anthems and of Jerusalem, the hymn adopted by England’s most vociferous supporters, the Barmy Army – there will be a moment of collective silence in memory of the three people killed in Nottingham this week, Ian Coates, Barnaby Webber and Grace O’Malley-Kumar.
Webber and O’Malley-Kumar had both been cricketers. Both teams will wear black armbands for the duration of the match, as they will when the women’s Ashes Test – the first game in a multi-format series that runs until 18 July – is played at Nottingham’s Trent Bridge next week.
