NICE WHILE IT LASTED...

E-mail this Article

Print this Article

Subscribe to RSS Feed

Australia celebrate their series win.

By Peter May

Having watched an England captain hold aloft the urn for the first time in 16 years, Australia on Monday reclaimed their prize after less than 16 months.

The style and margin of victory were wholly deserved after dominating their opponents in every discipline of the game.

They had been given five Tests to reassert supremacy but needed only three: billed as the 2006/7 series, this was the 2006 Ashes.

Only one issue now requires clarification in Melbourne and Sydney: could Pigeon's insufferable biannual "5-0" jibe be fulfilled when we had least expected it?

History teaches us that even the Australian competitive edge is blunted in dead rubbers, but the home team have been extraordinarily motivated in this series and do not yet look sated.

Ricky Ponting does not feel he has to prove critics wrong either as batsman or a captain but this does not diminish his satisfaction in doing both.

There is scope for further vindication and none of his players will be adverse to heaping humiliation on the visiting team, perhaps for the last time.

This is certainly a final Ashes series for Justin Langer, Matthew Hayden and Glenn McGrath, quite possibly for Adam Gilchrist and Shane Warne.

It may even prove a Test farewell for Langer and McGrath, so England can expect the clairvoyant seamer to chase his prediction hard.

While the veterans will live for the moment, the new class are focused on their long-term places.

Despite rediscovering his old fluency, Michael Clarke knows he has more to do to nail down a middle-order berth; Stuart Clark and Brett Lee are being chased hard by Shaun Tait and Mitchell Johnson.

Alongside Ponting, Gilchrist and Warne, the only undroppable man is Mike Hussey and, as England have learned to their cost over the last three weeks, the left-hander is not prone to leaving a job half-done.

Any interpretation of this Australian team suggests that they are fired to fulfil McGrath's prophecy: as if the status quo were not imposing enough, Warne ought to become yet more influential in the final two games.

Draws have been touted as possible results at the MCG and SCG but were too in each of the first three matches.

Still it is difficult to believe that the hosts will retain the same intensity shown in Brisbane, Adelaide and Perth, but England are ill-equipped to resist the Australian tide.

Many reasons contributed to the tourists' substandard performance, both externally imposed and sadistically self-inflicted.

These will be gone over in some detail on these and many other pages over the next few weeks, but Australia's superior players have proven the inescapable predominant factor in a contest as short-lived as it was keenly anticipated.

It was ever thus in their eight consecutive series wins as well as in defeat in 2005 - the better team invariably triumphs in cricket's oldest and greatest rivalry.