There go the Ashes

The Ashes are gone, to begin with. Switch off the TV, dial down the radio and flick over the back pages. Fans back home can console themselves by forgetting all about it and staying in bed late. But for England, adrift in Australia, there’s a hard rearguard ahead as they try to escape from the final two Tests with the team intact. Some will be playing for their places, perhaps even their careers. So far they have been beaten in every key moment by a team that have three faster bowlers, a more commanding captain and a sharper spinner. “They’ve outplayed us in all three games,” said Joe Root, and that just about covers it.

If the overall result was predictable – before the series started, all six of the Guardian’s cricket writers thought Australia would win – the performances have not been. Six weeks ago the key weakness in England’s squad looked to be the number of rookies they had picked. Well, Dawid Malan has been their best batsman, Craig Overton brought dash to the attack and stiffened the tail too, Mark Stoneman has batted with grit and James Vince with grace. Between them they’ve done enough, if not more.

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Instead, England are facing a whitewash because their leading players let them down. It’s not (just) that they lost to a better team, it’s that they never played their best cricket. That starts with Joe Root, a great batsman held back by the obvious promise of how much better again he could be. Since the start of the India tour in November 2016 Root has made it to 50 in 13 of the 15 Tests he has played but pushed on past 100 only three times – at Rajkot, Edgbaston and Lord’s. There are Hare Krishnas at the Heathrow baggage claim who have better conversion rates.

In that same stretch of time Steve Smith played 15 Tests, too. He made it to 50 in 11 of them and went on to score seven hundreds. Smith played a couple of defining innings in both of Australia’s key contests this year, in India and at home to England. His hundreds in the third innings at Pune and the first innings at Brisbane were the only centuries anyone made on either side and Australia won both games. Smith has emerged, now, as the best of Test cricket’s four bright young things, ahead of Root, Kane Williamson and Virat Kohli.

Since Root made his debut in the winter of 2012 he has scored more 50s in defeats than any other player in the world. There have been 15 of them altogether. All those pretty 50s, gritty 50s, brilliant as they are, don’t win Tests. Hundreds do, and England have never lost a match in which Root went on to a century. Trevor Bayliss says his team could “take lessons” from Smith’s “concentration and hunger for runs”. Root should. But he is in the middle of an intensive course in the art of captaincy and doesn’t have too much spare time to study crease occupation too.

The captaincy has seemed to weigh heavy on him because he has had so little support from his senior team-mates. Take his two vice-captains. Ben Stokes’s only contributions to this tour have been the never-ending questions about how the team cope without him. Stokes’s replacement, Jimmy Anderson, got dunked by Ben Duckett and had a public pop at his own coaches, which left Root having to deny there was a rift in the squad.

Anderson has, at least, held his end on the field, with 12 wickets at under 26 each. Which brings us to Stuart Broad, whose 2017 Ashes five-for has been stretched out across five innings and cost 309 runs. In the last five years Broad has bowled more overs in international cricket than any other fast bowler. There have been 2,310 altogether, more than a quarter as many again as Mitchell Starc and Josh Hazlewood. Like any precision tool he has been ground down by continual use. It has been almost two years since he took five wickets in a Test innings, a year since he took four.

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Frank Tyson, the quickest Englishman of them all, wrote that the “coming of guile to a fast bowler can be like the advance of creeping paralysis to the body”, that it “takes away the real desire and very reasons for wanting to bowl quick”. Broad, who has been struggling with heel and knee injuries, bowls like a man who is more worried about his dwindling supply of fuel than he is about how hot he can stoke the fire. Like Alastair Cook, who has made 83 runs at 13 each, Broad must be beginning to worry whether his form will ever snap back.

That leaves Chris Woakes and Moeen Ali, who have struggled to encroach on the series, let alone impose themselves on it. They’ve been on tour of the outer reaches of their own abilities as well as Australia’s cities. There will be a reckoning if England lose these next two Tests as Root asks himself who among his team-mates has the hunger and discipline England will need to rebuild for the summer ahead. He may reach some uncomfortable conclusions about the way he and his oldest team-mates have played these last few weeks.

• This is an extract taken from The Spin, the Guardian’s weekly cricket email. To subscribe, just visit this page and follow the instructions.