It doesn't seem over a year ago already, that the umpires made the purely symbolic gesture of toppling the bails in the last Ashes test match at the Oval in Kennington, London.
Rarely has a nation been so united as it was for the ultimate victory, the final toppling of the outstanding Australian cricket team by Michael Vaughan's up and coming young England side. Much water has passed under the bridge since then, and we've had some interesting test series to whet our appetites for the main event this winter.
The winter tour of Pakistan showed us how thin on the ground we were for quality other than the main team, and a spirited performance to earn a draw in the second sub-continent tour of India did little more than disguise the team's shortcomings.
We seemed to have reason to worry when we let Sri Lanka off the hook in the first series of this Summer, and they fought back very creditably for a series draw. Then of course, we had the terrific series win over a tremendous Pakistan team (officially 3-0 but 2-0 as far as I am concerned), that was soured by events off the field, which seems to have showed Pakistan in a very unfair light.
So now it's the big one. Cue jokes about pots of yoghurt having more culture than Australia and songs and jibes about our ancestors stealing loaves of bread... You can say all you like about Australia, but what cannot be doubted is that for a country with a smallish population, they have to be the world's greatest sporting nation. The population, young and old, live, eat and breathe sport, and when we went down under for the Ashes tour in '98, they made us more welcome than any other place I've ever been to. Australia is a FANTASTIC country, and my experience of Australians, is that they are FANTASTIC people.
I really f***ing hate their cricket team though!
Shane Warne excepted.
That pigeon-toed tosspot Glenn McGrath has already dared to criticise our own dear Monty Panesar for wanting to see a sports psychologist before flying down there. I don't blame him one bit. They will look for any weakness in our morale and work on it, so the better prepared we are, the more chance we will have of bringing home what is rightfully ours. We are a younger up and coming team, whereas they are a bunch of washed-up old convicts with less culture than a pot of....... Ahem.
It'll be a fabulous series, and if Warne and McGrath stay fit, it will probably be their last major contribution in an ashes series. Let's hope our boys can stop them making it their most successful.
So good luck, in no particular order, to: Marcus Trescothick, Alistair Cook, Andrew Strauss, Michael Vaughan?, Kevin Pietersen, Paul Collingwood, Andrew Flintoff, Ian Bell, Chris Reade, Gerraint Jones, Liam Plunkett, Sajid Mahmood, Monty Panesar, Ashley Giles, Jimmy Anderson, Matthew Hoggard and Steve (Grievous Bodily) Harmison.
Go on lads, you can do it, you did it a year ago, they're the same Aussies, just a year older and stiffer!
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