The English reputedly love talking about weather as a conversational preliminary, so let’s. Perth is forecast to be delightful these next few days – 28 degrees on Friday, cooling to the mid-20s over the next week.
Nor is this mere embroidery. Summer in Perth can be pitilessly hot. Test matches are staged beneath cloudless azure skies in dazzling light. When England were here in 2017, chairs were brought out to support the batters during drinks breaks, with umbrellas to shelter them.
This time, while the tabloid press might be hostile, the weather is welcoming: Perth’s mildest winter in decades has left its parks and gardens lush and verdant. An omen, perhaps, if you believe in them: it was an unseasonably mild summer in 2010-11 when England last enjoyed Ashes success, allowing bowlers to bowl long spells, and Alastair Cook to bat on to the crack of doom.
Nobody should underestimate the task before the visitors. Not only have England won a solitary Test in Perth in 55 years, they have never played at the stadium where Australia have won four of five matches.
Cricket in Australia is proverbially gruelling anyway. “The grounds are hard, the ball is hard, the men are hard,” said Sir Leonard Hutton resonantly. “You need to be harder than they are to beat them… losing is foreign to their nature.” Australia in Australia play proverbially like 12 men.
The Australian camp have, however, dithered for weeks over the eleven they are allowed to play, concerned, for example, about the need for a sixth bowler, Beau Webster, to augment a fifth, Cameron Green, because two of their usual four are hors de combat.
Concern of such granularity is a reminder that this is a capable and resourceful Australian team but not a settled one. Nor is this a line-up particularly enamoured of Perth, Mitchell Starc having candidly conceded on Wednesday that he would have preferred to begin the series in the traditional setting of the Gabba in Brisbane.
Customarily, Australia present baggy greens with elaborate ceremony and tremulous hands. Suddenly, they will be presenting two at once – to opener Jake Weatherald and to pace bowler Brendan Doggett – for the first time since a Test against Sri Lanka in January 2019.
England, by contrast, shared their 12, as is their wont, a leisurely 36 hours ahead of time, and unlike four years ago, when the team’s Baldrickian brains trust had a cunning plan to leave out James Anderson and Stuart Broad, they have held nothing in reserve. The inclusion of Jofra Archer and Mark Wood means, just for once, that Australia will not have a decided edge in airspeed, and on a pitch reputedly the country’s fastest and bounciest.
It is a risk – a vibey, all-or-nothing, glass-half-full selection. Form, fitness and fate have permitted Archer and Wood to play precisely one Test together during their overlapping careers.
Still, the choice manifests the other, often neglected, half of the Bazball creed, which is England’s aim to take 20 wickets a Test, even if it entails leaking a few runs. The visitors’ Ashes bowling has not been so minatory in… well, 15 years.
There has been a lot of finger-wagging at Australia’s expense since Pat Cummins and Josh Hazlewood were ruled out of this Test. Dad’s Army! So let us remember that Wood, at nearly 36, is on this scale a Private Godfrey if not a Corporal Jones.
Yet as his impact on the 2023 Ashes demonstrated, Wood has those qualities that RC Robertson-Glasgow once credited to bowlers of excess speed – he causes “the batsman to fidget with his cap peak and shirt buttons, the wicketkeeper’s gloves to go off like an exploded paper bag, and the spectator to suck in the long-drawn breath”.
Bowled by Wood at Headingley in the last Ashes, Usman Khawaja, who until then had exuded complete serenity, suddenly looked up like he had seen a ghost. Wood’s spirit, meanwhile, makes him one of those personalities almost worth selection as a mascot.
Every time you run your eye up and down England’s team, however, it seems to settle on the name of the captain, Ben Stokes, whose presence makes every man in his line-up walk a head taller, and every Australian brood ever so slightly.Authoritative a batter as he is, Stokes is animated and liberated by his bowling – a Prometheus unbound.
Australia also have nobody quite like him, veering in the ball from beyond the perpendicular at speed, his bouncer very nearly a stock ball, his impulse to work bordering on the masochistic. It will not have eluded him that he needs success here every bit as much as Joe Root, for his greatest Ashes impact in Australia was not coming in 2017-18, which ruined Root’s campaign before it even began.
What awaits him? It is hard to see Stokes playing every Test; it will be against England’s interests if concern about Archer and Wood cause his overuse with the ball; it will be in Australia’s interests if he takes on the bigger boundaries in this country too eagerly. One of this summer’s most fascinating contests will be inside Stokes’s head, between his canny cricket intelligence and his never seeing a fray he did not instinctively wish to throw himself into.
A modish sentiment these days is cricketers’ legacies, the defining or redefining thereof. I suspect fans are kinder than that – the Flintoff of 2006-07, for example, did not discredit the Flintoff of 2005. But on his career in the next six weeks, Stokes could place a mighty capstone. And at the moment, he has lovely weather for it.
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