The Ashes

Challengers will be a lot harder, and situations will test them in different ways than have been tested this summer.

But you can only beat what's in front, you can only go off and build confidence, and that is a great start going through to getting Stephen Fleming into the job and building towards the Ashes, which will be in 10 months' time.

Man of the series, Ollie Robinson, you just mentioned there.

Um, eight for 80 at, uh, Headingley.

I actually think this pitch was all right.

Yeah.

And I think if you turned up next year in the Ashes, I think you'd get a good contest between bat and ball, and a good contest between both sides.

Just to put it in context, Dan Lawrence, uh, finished with 187 runs at, uh, 46.7. Um, he was the third highest run scorer for England behind Harry Brook's 215 at, uh, 53, and Jordan Cox also finishing with 202 runs at 50.

Well, it was a challenging night, which I'll come on to.

But, yeah, I think, you know, in the build-up, I had a very big 2005 personally because just prior to the home-and-away series against Uruguay, I'd not only done the Oceania qualifier against the Solomon Islands, which they won by six goals to one if memory serves, but I'd also been hosting the Ashes, the cricket series on SBS, which was a total surprise, you know, I don't think anybody expected SBS to be broadcasting cricket.

And I remember when they got the rights thinking, well, that's an interesting one.

I wonder if they're going to get to present that.

And look, I don't know who was auditioned, but apparently they weren't happy with any of them.

So at the end, Ken Shipp, who was then the deputy head of sport, is now the head of sport at SBS, still there all those years later.

said to me, do you fancy hosting the Ashes? And I was like, I mean, I hadn't done cricket in 20-odd years.

And secondly, I was new to the country, and I thought, how is an Englishman presenting the Ashes in Australia going to go down with the audience? I don't think that would be too popular.

I do.

The ticket prices for next summer's Ashes Tour, which is the World Series of cricket, blah, blah, blah, the main event.

Australia, you know, coming to England, there has been a general increase in tickets of 40% across the board.

No rationale, no explanation, just boom, like that.

Uh, um-

I mean, Jamie Smith, for example, was asked at a momen- memorably at the start of the Ashes, you know, "You're a, you're in a team that is relaxed and you like to play golf." And Jamie Smith just said in front of the whole sort of phalanx of journalists, most of them Australian, "Uh, not, not an issue for me.

I don't play golf at all." It kind of sort of took the wind out a bit.

And Mark Wood actually is, is not into that either-

Yeah

...

the ashes a couple of years ago.

And I mean, he's an sensational fielder.

Like, 'cause you didn't collapse, you just kind of went down and then the cameras kind of panned away.

It was almost like, you remember when Steve Smith got hit by Jofra Archer in the 2019 Ashes-

Yeah.

Yeah

England collapsed kind of well short of the total they should've been looking at the halfway stage, but still up the thick end of 200.

Um- And Ireland were bowled out in response, giving England a series win.

Are we any closer to knowing, do you think, what England's ODI middle order will look like come the Ashes next summer from this series?

Oh, middle order? Um-

But first, Kevin Peterson is back in the England fold.

Why is this such big news? Well, he was an absolute superstar player, Ashes and T20 World Cup winning batter.

But he didn't always have the easiest relationship with the English cricket board or some of his teammates.

But he's now going to be working as a specialist mentor in the England men white ball set up as they build towards next year's World Cup.

you know, not so familiar with KP's backstory.

He was born in South Africa to an Afrikaans father, English mother, came over to England to play cricket when he was frustrated with the racial quota system in South Africa.

And he was immediately identified as a talent, qualified to play for England in time for the 2005 Ashes, when he absolutely then hit stardom.

But he was often viewed with a sort of level of or scepticism, I suppose, from a conservative point of view.

And then there'd be this, in the summer, they went on test matches in the half-term, the summer term at school, the half-term, summer term.

I'd often be at my adopted grandmother's house, the Swiss cottage, and there'd be these test matches on which she had the TV on all the time when England, especially the Ashes, England v Australia, or the most exciting, I mean, I found the Ashes to be, back in those days, a little bit boring, I must be honest.

I'm just a kid, right? So I found cricket to be quite boring to watch, to play, different ball game, but to watch, I found it to be quite boring.

And it always took forever because the test matches were four or five days and the first two batsmen were always trying to stay in.

And there was these sticks with some little funny things on the top, which I discovered later turned out to be the thing they burn.

And that's why they call the game, you know, the famous game.

rivalry between England and Australia, the Ashes.

I hadn't realised that was, and I learned that later, but it was quite interesting.