What Next for Australia?

GH wonders aloud

Hardly a level playing field

Australia should win Ashes series in Australia. That’s the verdict of history, from an ample sample size; it’s also congruent with the World Test Championship consolidating home advantage. The attitude to the host country’s 4-1 victory in 2025-26 is therefore more of a job well done than a sense of deliverance. Since lunch on day two in Perth, the arc of summer bent only one way.

Still, the Australian team can take more satisfaction than usual. The coped admirably with their absences - who could have foreseen a summer in which Pat Cummins and Steve Smith became passing strangers, let alone Josh Hazlewood and Nathan Lyon falling by the wayside altogether? Australia’s depth was further tested by longer-term injuries to the like of Lance Morris and Spencer Johnson, ruled out as reserves before the series began and thereby promoting Jhye Richardson and Brendan Doggett in the pace pecking order.

This was a triumph of the codgers. Smith, thirty-seven in June, signed off with a cricket-as-charades century in Sydney, plus an extraordinary fourteen catches in four Tests, having taken his record as locum captain to eight wins and one defeat in ten matches averaging 59.

There’s also something preternatural about the resilience of Mitchell Starc, who turns thirty-six in three weeks in arguably the best form of his life. For a long time the greatest danger to appreciation of Starc as a red ball bowler was Starc as a white ball bowler - he was marked down by comparison with his own standard. He could bowl the house down in a World Cup, then lose his place in an Ashes.

Starc’s new eminence, then, reflects not only his unwavering Test consistency but the curious eclipse in Australia of one-day and T20 internationals as they have slid into the pay television twilight. When Australia next take the field in the T20 World Cup, it will register only distantly. Scott Boland and Michael Neser, who toiled so manfully alongside Starc, won’t even be there.