The Ashes 2023: England's entertainers take on ominous Australia - Felix White column
- Published
Felix White is a musician, author and co-host of the BBC's Tailenders podcast.
In his first column for BBC Sport this summer, he discusses how an ominous if strangely mellow Australia and England's entertainers make this such an eagerly anticipated men's Ashes.
Has there been a more unusual, equal parts distressing and exciting, Ashes build-up in modern history?
Traditionally we lovingly lean in to the approach of cricket's ultimate rivalry by revelling in the trivial point-scoring between our respective sides.
Almost eerily this year, there has been precious little of it around.
If you have dared poke your head into the silence the past months, rummaging around and hoping to be reassured by the usual, you may have noticed the hype to be more of the existential sort.
The Ashes-isms have made way for alarming pieces and extended speeches from the heart - is Test cricket actually dying and what can we do to save it?
It is just as well then that through the fog, a series of sizeable substance is now upon us, with the first Ashes Test starting on Friday at Edgbaston.
And there is nothing like a formidable Australian Test team and an English one with a point to prove to sharpen the minds.
A childhood memory of the Australians still endures for most of us - where they turn up fierce and gloating, stationed at slip, bucket-handed, waiting for catches that everyone knows they are guzzling imminently.
If the camera was to pan left across the cordon, you imagined it would eventually reveal Bowser, Shredder, Darth Vader and every other hateful fictional bad guy.
It is how we were taught to receive them and how we expect to receive them still.
So, it's a little disorientating to find an Australian group awash with an altruistic sense of purpose here this year.
Some of them even arrived before they needed to, the Indian Premier League still crashing on elsewhere, for an early summer of sparsely populated county cricket.
They have since nicked off occasionally and worn jumpers in the freezing outfield with their hands in their pockets and generally humbly acclimatised without making a fuss.
The different glow is present in each of them. Marnus Labuschagne is tweeting things that I am constantly stopping doing myself, for fear they read like a primary school assignment on your favourite hobby. "I just love cricket" is pinned to his Twitter profile.
Captain Pat Cummins apologises to people he hits with bouncers. Steve Smith's collection of nervous tics in his set-up suddenly presents itself as an act of defiance on behalf of the longer form.
Cameron Green is diving to his left and his right taking game-defining catches with a strange humility. Scott Boland, having waited an entire adult life, now has a bowling average of 14.57 from eight Tests and doesn't seem even remotely interested in taking any credit for it.
Even David Warner is here with a sense of unnerving perspective, coming over all humble and full of praise for Stuart Broad in his recent interview for Test Match Special with Isa Guha.
Then there's Travis Head, man of the match in the World Test Championship final, reaching some kind of career zenith.
It doesn't belong to you, songwriters often say, on momentary higher-plane inspiration. I have begun to think the same of the Australian handlebar moustache; a singular object transported from generation to generation to denote halcyon years for whoever is bestowed it.
Where it once landed on Dennis Lillee, Merv Hughes, David Boon and then Mitchell Johnson, it now blesses the upper lip of Head.
He looked in ominous form at The Oval against India, free-flowing and lugging the look into its current ah-no-mate-look-to-be-fair-I'm-quite-a-nice-sensitive-guy-actually-just-really-good-at-cricket-pal motif.
'You've got to have fun' - Stokes on England's attitude going into Ashes
Of course, Australia are not the only team here with redefined perspective.
Ben Stokes' revelation that playing cricket should be fun has propelled England so far in such a short space of time they will soon believe they can probably save Test cricket single-handedly should they choose to.
As they have made eyeball-spinningly clear, the priority for Stokes' England is, by some distance, entertainment.
Entertainment over winning. Entertainment over caution. Entertainment over received wisdom. Entertainment over 'maybe we should just try and get through the next hour here actually'.
He has already laid out his own personal cinematic arc for what awaits - how many times will someone say 'Ben Stokes writes his own scripts' this summer?
Against Ireland, he was sure to clutch his troublesome knee and grimace regularly, hobbling around after taking a standing catch, not bowling a ball, leaving us all to worry, rewriting XIs in our phones in efforts to 'balance' the side.
And just when we've wasted enough time doing that and found 45 potential solutions, he posts a photo of him bowling full pelt from an undisclosed location in Scotland.
"We want fast, flat wickets," he told Nasser Hussain in early April, the lighting illuminating one side of his face, pausing as if allowing Headingley 2019 to flash into everyone's minds before adding, "I'm smiling, because I'm looking forward to it."
He's brought in Moeen Ali, probably only because it's kind of mad and exciting. And, let's be honest, every time Moeen bats we are darting out of whatever obligation we are tied to that day just to watch him.
Entertainment is more than accounted for alone in the return of Jonny Bairstow. He has the gloves. His own sense of destiny aligned once again with his actual place in the world.
There's also the small matter of Jimmy Anderson once again spearheading an Ashes attack at the age of 40, needing 15 more wickets to reach 700 in Tests.
World Test Championship final: Victory for Australia as they beat India by 209 runs
At The Oval on Sunday, Australia became world Test champions. It was a statement of some force leading into what should be a breathless seven weeks.
There was a rare stillness in the ground as they did. In real time, the stillness was one of mass dissociation from an overwhelmingly Indian crowd dreaming of something else.
You felt it too though, through television sets across the country, from an English perspective.
As Boland disposed of Virat Kohli and Ravindra Jadeja in the same over, before Mitchell Starc dismissed Umesh Yadav by rearing one off just short of a length and into his throat, fending to Alex Carey, we were all thinking, "Do we really want fast, flat pitches?"
And before you know it, there it is. We are thinking about the cricket and nothing else.
All the things that are about to unfold session by session, hour by hour, as our lives haplessly try to move alongside it. The absolute gift of caring very deeply about something very trivial.
And as we are lulled back in, credit where credit is due to Stuart Broad, who is so entrenched in Ashes player protocol he has no time for cricketing existential threats.
He doesn't count the last Ashes - an Australian 4-0 win - as a real Ashes. Because of the pandemic, you see. He also has a new delivery up his sleeve apparently. It's specifically designed for Labuschagne and Smith.
The sheer gall of this, that the suggestion of an almost definitely imaginary trick might still suffice to focus all our minds on nothing but cricket, should be enough for us all. For the next seven weeks at least.
Enjoy Edgbaston from wherever you are taking it in.