England's Ashes obsession

It doesn’t take much to get England players and fans optimistic about their chances in an Ashes series. One victory in a dead rubber after badly losing a home series seems to be enough.

While Kevin Pietersen barely put a foot wrong on the field, his immediate declaration that his team was good enough to win back the Ashes was misguided. Obviously there is nothing wrong with pundits such as Ronnie’s Ghost looking ahead to the Ashes, but you would expect the England team to know better.

Australia had exactly the right response: silence and then some brilliantly patronising comments by Tim Nielsen. The telling quote for me was: “We've got a couple of big series coming up that are taking up most of our thinking at the moment.”

Isn’t that the case for England as well? If I’m right England have a Champions Trophy one day competition (if they deem Pakistan safe enough), an opportunity to avenge last summer’s home defeat against India, a series against the Windies and then a potentially very tricky series against Sri Lanka, who recently moved above England in the ICC Test Championship, can beat all comers at home and now have a mystery spinner. Given that England once managed to make Paul Adams look like Shane Warne , we should be a bit worried. All that remains is for people to start excusing poor performances by Harmison on tour by saying “it will be different during the Ashes” and another 5-0 defeat becomes a real possibility.

Two other points stand out for me in this opening round of Ashes speculation. First, the idea put forward by Andrew Millar on Cricinfo today that Pietersen as captain is the Aussies worst nightmare doesn’t make much sense to me. Usually in a test series the Aussies target a team’s captain and best batsman. Haven’t we just made their life easier by combining the two? Plus there’s plenty of opportunity for sly digs about his nationality.

Second, a few weeks ago the ECB was complaining about the fact that India’s cricket board had denied the fans the chance to visit some of the country’s great cricket venues during their tour. But why should India bother putting England in the decent venues if our tour there is nothing more than an insignificant warm up for the Ashes?

We could, possibly, win the Ashes, but it’s not even vaguely likely at the moment. We would need our entire team to be fit, and to have the kind of luck we had last time (McGrath’s injury, Ponting’s bad call at Edgbaston, Gillespie losing his mojo etc etc).

Most importantly it is vital that we start the Ashes after notching up a long sequence of victories. And we can only do that by taking each match as it comes, which is the cliché Pietersen should have used after the Oval victory.