There go the Ashes …

An enthralling Test finished on Monday, 7,000 miles from Sydney and six or so hours after the end of the 2017 Ashes. India and South Africa, the top two teams in the ICC’s world rankings, played out the endgame of a low-scoring, topsy-turvy tussle in Cape Town.

“That’s one of the most thrilling Test matches I’ve played in,” said Faf du Plessis. “There was no boring Test cricket, it was a lot of action. And that’s why we absolutely loved this Test match.” Virat Kohli agreed. “I think it was great for Test cricket.” By the time that match was done, the Ashes had already begun to pass out of mind and into Wisden, slipping back as quick as a cold beer on a hot day.

It’ll be remembered as the Summer of Smith. But otherwise, no one will hang on too long to their memories of all those stretches of “tough, attritional cricket”, as Jimmy Anderson called it. Especially the stuff played in those two dead rubbers on deathly flat tracks at Melbourne and Sydney. The grind of those last two Tests eclipsed the few fleeting moments early in the series when it looked to be shaping up into a genuinely compelling contest; those 16 overs on the Saturday afternoon at the Gabba, when Joe Root and Mark Stoneman fought off the ferocious fast bowling of Josh Hazlewood and Mitchell Starc.

If those were the opening shots swapped at high noon, everyone spent the rest of the series digging in and firing from behind deep cover. England seemed to decide to try and bore out Australia’s batsmen. But Australia’s batsmen wouldn’t break. They retrenched into defensive cricket. Smith scored his runs at a strike rate of 48.51, Shaun Marsh 45.97, Usman Khawaja 43.35. Stately old Alastair Cook scored a lick quicker than all three. Even David Warner settled for a strike rate of 52.37. That’s 29% slower than the rate he normally scores at. But then England always set defensive fields to hinder him, with a deep cover, deep point, and two men out.

So overall, the series had the slowest, lowest scoring rate of any Ashes in the past 22 years. Darren Lehmann explained that Australia’s plan was to bat so long that England’s ageing quicks, Anderson and Stuart Broad, would be exhausted, while their own trio, Starc, Hazlewood, and Pat Cummins would have plenty of rest and recuperation between innings. So the series turned into rebuttal to everyone who has argued that modern batsmen, weaned on T20, don’t know how to bat in Test match cricket, that they have lost track of the slow and steady defensive tempo of that format of the sport. “It was,” Smith said, “a series of patience.”

The upshot was that we had six weeks of decaffeinated cricket. This wasn’t the stuff to keep you up through the small hours of the morning. According to reports, BT Sport’s audiences have been so small that once you strip out the people who fell asleep with the TV on before the start of each day’s play, hardly anyone seems to have been watching . The first Test clocked an average of 92,000 viewers a day. By the third, with England 2-0 down, the figure had dropped to 82,000.

The peak audience in those first three Tests was 340,000, which is less than half the figure for England’s victory in 2010-11, and over 200,000 down on the 2013-14 series, when they were whitewashed. BT says the figures don’t take into account their digital audience, which is reckoned to be another 15 to 20% on top. And many more will have followed it all on Test Match Special instead, especially since BT’s coverage, all banter and betting adverts, grew to feel so grating. But still, for the ECB, interest has been so low at home that the series looks like a variation on the old koan about the tree in the forest. If your team loses in Australia, and no one is around to watch, do you have to do anything about it?

Since the ECB chairman, Colin Graves, has just told the Telegraph that there “will be no specific review” of the series, and Trevor Bayliss has said that he “can’t see too many big changes” to the team, it seems it has decided on its answer. Graves made some windy reassurances about how England “have to look at it and see how we can improve so in four years’ time we are better placed to win than we were this time”. But you wonder whether the ECB’s worries really stretch much further than the ticket sales for the 2019 series back in England. So long as home advantage holds, both Boards will be happy with the status quo.

Because over in Australia, this soporific series has been one of the most commercially successful in history. The total attendance at the five Tests was just over 867,000, which is the second-largest audience in Ashes history, behind only the 1936-37 series that followed on from Bodyline. It dominated the TV ratings too. Du Plessis said that “as an advert for Test cricket” the game between South Africa and India had been “as good as it gets”. But the Ashes, buoyed by all the hype and history, hardly seems to need the selling.

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