A triumph of the codgers – but now Aussie old boys face a real challenge

Australia should win the 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 is therefore more of a job well done than a sense of deliverance. Since lunch on day two in Perth, the arc of 2025-26 bent only one way.

Still, the Australian team can take more satisfaction than usual. They 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 likes 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, 37 in June, signed off with a cricket-as-charades century in Sydney, plus an extraordinary 14 catches in four Tests, having taken his record as locum captain to eight wins and one defeat in 10 matches averaging 59. There’s also something preternatural about the resilience of Mitchell Starc, who turns 36 in less than three weeks in arguably the best form of his life.

For a long time the greatest danger to the 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.

Travis Head’s emergence as an opener, meanwhile, is perhaps not so accidental as it looks. No, it may not have occurred but for Usman Khawaja’s back spasm in Perth. Yet it also speaks of a set-up that, for all its discipline, logic and system, is prepared to indulge individual ambition – to give Head his head as it were. It turned out that Australia’s have-a-go hero was an excellent match-up against an English attack unable to bowl consecutive deliveries in the same place. After Perth, Head scored almost as quickly without ever seeming in a hurry, his walking long singles a motif of ease.

Five Tests, however, was insufficient to resolve other questions that had hung over from the day before Perth. As Head’s partner, Jake Weatherald rather failed to grasp a first chance; as No3, Marnus Labuschagne wasted a second chance. Weatherald’s case is interesting, in that he was initially drafted because it was thought his enterprising stroke play would be a foil to Khawaja. The changed tempo at the top could now reasonably accommodate the likes of Matt Renshaw, Campbell Kellaway or even Sam Konstas.

Labuschagne’s helter-skelter run out on the last day in Sydney, meanwhile, rather epitomised his series, in which concentration seemed as much an issue as his much-analysed biomechanics. He may need a mode more sustainable at the crease than his manic, garrulous intensity. He has, at least, his fielding – never more brilliant.

Discussion of these roles will carry over until Australia’s next Tests, against Bangladesh at home in August, and probably into their three-Test series in South Africa to follow. With Khawaja’s retirement, a middle-order vacancy officially yawns, which might be filled internally, by Beau Webster or Josh Inglis, or by one of a number of emergent colts, especially Cooper Connolly. At one stage it appeared tailored for the chimeric Cameron Green, though his average of 29 from a score of home Tests leaves his status precarious – except in the Indian Premier League, where for more than £2m he will step out for Kolkata Knight Riders as the most expensive overseas player in the competition’s history.

The greatest lacuna the Ashes has left, however, is in the realm of Australian slow bowling. Lyon was a supernumerary in Brisbane; once he hobbled off at Adelaide Oval, so was his replacement Todd Murphy. Australia’s commitment to deep batting suggests further opportunities for Webster and/or Connolly, with the likes of Murphy, Matthew Kuhnemann and Corey Rocchiccioli to come into calculations only in south Asia. Nobody quite wants to own the decision. Australia and spin is like a relationship gone sour for reasons too sensitive to mention.

This brings us to something also left rather unresolved by the end of the Ashes – the curious incident of the ABC interview in the night time. You’re right: there was no interview given to the ABC at the close of play on day four in Sydney.

Whose decision was this exactly? It remains ambiguous who so objected to the criticism of Australia’s high-performance system by former Test paceman turned ABC commentator Stuart Clark. Officials? Players? Coaches? It was a curious sensitivity to express at a point of success; one wonders how the system would cope under broader criticism.

It drew further attention to the team’s increasingly sequestered and aloof existence. With three series of documentary series The Test, the Australian team made strides in opening itself to the public. Efforts have since gone rather flat. The way that social media condenses and sharpens any media sound bite not entirely banal may have contributed to distrust. Though Khawaja described himself in Sydney as leaving cricket with “gratitude and peace”, his retirement press conference was a disarmingly combative affair.

These are challenges, of course, that England would love, having shifted from Bazball to Bazblame. But there was just a hint as the Sydney Test ended that it was time for everyone to take a beat, before reuniting for Australia’s matches in Colombo for the T20 World Cup. Ranking just behind India in the format, they’ll fancy themselves. They always do.

Photohgraph by Philip Brown/Getty Images