Australian sledging: the Ashes aperitif that won’t win any comedy awards

That summer the Barmy Army mocked up a sale of Warner’s bat. “Middle is immaculate, edges well used”, ran the ad, referencing his inability to resist temptation outside off stump. Warner’s nemesis, Stuart Broad, took his wicket seven of those 10 times. Now they clash again as “Head of Long-Range Sledging” for their respective teams as this winter’s Ashes approach.

Beef recap: Warner says Australia will win 4-0, an innocuous assertion compared with Glenn McGrath’s metronomic prediction of a 5-0 Aussie victory (it’s not even worth the cost of a phone call to check McGrath’s forecast).

More perplexing was Warner’s dig that Root will need “to take the surfboard off his front leg” if England are to have any chance. Translation: Root is supposedly vulnerable to quick bowling into his pads in Australian conditions.

While it’s true that England’s best player has yet to pass 89 in 27 Test innings in Australia, he has made nine-half centuries there, and 16 Test centuries and nearly 4,000 runs since the end of the 2021-22 Ashes. Root called Warner’s comment “all part of the fun”.

Broad is a willing counter-attacker, calling Australia’s current side “probably the worst Australian team since 2010”. In Australia, Broad, who retired two years ago, wasn’t much more popular than Douglas Jardine, the overlord in 1932-33 of Bodyline. Jardine sported a harlequin cap and white silk cravat like some parody colonial governor.

When an Australian told England’s captain: “They don’t seem to like you over here, Mr Jardine,” his reply was: “It’s fucking mutual.”

Studying footage of Don Bradman facing Harold Larwood at the Oval in 1930, Jardine noticed the game’s greatest batter backing off to the leg-side, especially after a Larwood delivery had smashed him in the chest. “I’ve got it. He’s yellow,” Jardine hissed. Now, that’s sledging. Bradman’s final Test average was 99.94.

The animus to Broad in Australia was largely based on his refusal to walk after edging a catch at Trent Bridge in 2013 (the umpire called it not out). That winter when England arrived, the Brisbane Courier-Mail chose not to use his picture, or even his name, calling him instead “the 27-year-old English medium pace bowler”, or “The Phantom Menace” in headlines. Readers called the paper’s stunt “puerile” and “embarrassing”, instances of which have not been hard to find in English coverage as well.

Broad is a bit of a smoothie. Australia didn’t like that either. Most of all they were annoyed that he kept getting their batters out with bursts of extraordinarily concentrated intensity.

Warner, meanwhile, was a throwback to Australian cricket’s proud self-image of “mongrel” teams summoned to batter the imperial smugness out of the Poms. That stereotype faded long ago. Since 2010, 44% of Australia’s Test cricketers have been privately educated. The current (injured) captain, Pat Cummins, is something of a renaissance man, a business graduate who helped set up a climate change foundation.

Warner, though, upholds the tradition of the agent provocateur from central casting, the bête noire of English crowds. His 12-month ban in the 2018 ball -tampering scandal gave hecklers plenty to feast on. Despite his mortification in England in 2019, his Test numbers were creditable: 8,786 runs in 112 matches at 44.6.

It’s just that he’s not much better at comedy than Steve Coogan’s Duncan Thickett, the amateur stand-up who would run on stage shaking with nerves, mangle his lines and scuttle back off, pursued by derision.

Asked the other day which method was likely to prevail this winter, Warner said: “The Australian way, because we’re playing for the Ashes and they’re playing for a moral victory.” Excuse me? Archivists had to explain the reference to the 2023 series, where England players jokingly claimed a “moral” win after a 2-2 draw.

All this chirping gains volume against a competing soundtrack of England legends bemoaning the lack of proper red-ball warm-up action before the Perth Test. The prep games now are all psychological – in podcast wind-ups – as cricket crowbars its most compelling contest into a slot between 21 November and 8 January.

“Sledging and verbals are all about getting you to play the person and not the ball,” Graham Gooch tells the Telegraph. Gooch suffered against Terry Alderman in 1989 much as Warner writhed against Broad six years ago. Back home, Gooch changed his answering machine message to: “Please leave a message because we’re all out, probably lbw to Alderman.” It’s still on there.

Verbals – often performative, sometimes intended for “mental disintegration”, in Steve Waugh’s term, are a side order. The real meal is Steve Harmison drawing blood from Ricky Ponting, Jofra Archer knocking over Steve Smith or Mitchell Johnson ripping through England with 37 wickets in 2013-14 – revenge on English crowds for singing, to a Beach Boys tune: “He bowls to the left, he bowls to the right, that Mitchell Johnson, his bowling is shite.”

None of it is Perrier Award winning comedy, but people seem to love it, as a kind of guilty pleasure, as Broad and Warner know. And at least, as Jardine said: “It’s mutual.”

Photograph by Ryan Pierse/Getty Images