On The Ashes Gideon Haigh by Gideon Haigh 9781761470028, 9781761186820, 1761470027, 1761186825 instant download after payment.

Australia, with a parent from each. I was eight when I attended my first

Ashes Test, twenty-four when I reported my first Ashes series. I never

intended becoming a cricket journalist, and would rather be considered a

journalist who sometimes writes about cricket. But this collection, I’m

bound to admit, makes an opposite case, collaging writings that cover

almost a century and a half of Anglo-Australian cricket, people and places,

news and olds.

Nothing compares to the Ashes, which in some respects is a shame, as

this results from the lamentable abeyance in bilateral competition between

India and Pakistan. But it is surely remarkable. After all, how many ideas

endure from 1882, when creationism and phrenology flourished, nobody

had heard of viruses or dreamed of X-rays, dreams of universal suffrage and

a universal eight-hour day seemed fanciful, and cremation, of course, was a

subject ripe for jokes? As the Empire sprawled mightily, the Australian

continent was a mere patchwork of colonies reporting individually to

faraway masters.

The Ashes has benefited hugely since by continuity, interrupted only by

world wars, adulterated only by greedy administrators – I’m looking at

those who inflicted ten consecutive Tests on us in 2013–14. The Ashes is

always coming, even when it is finished. Especially in England, the

intervening years are concerned with either soul-searching or

brainstorming. There are, to be sure, bigger games in town. Indian visits

line the vaults; World Cups gleam in the trophy cabinet. But the Ashes is

where hope, expectation, magic and chagrin flourish in equal measure, and

performance is permanently burnished. Ben Stokes at Headingley 2019

would have been a marvel against any opposition; its additional gilding is

that it came at Australia’s expense.