O.T/ cricket the ashes

At the risk of being a killjoy I think there has been a bit of over the top hype about the current England team. Yes winning the Ashes home and away is a great achievement and I am enjoying it as much as anybody else but some of the discussions in the broadsheets have been along the lines of this England side being one of the 'great' cricketing teams, IMO its a long way off that. It's a good unit very well coached and prepared, and they maximise their ability. The bowlers bowl a disciplined line and length but we lack top quality strike bowlers even compared to guys like Gough, Flintoff and Simon Jones when fit. Guys like Anderson, Tremlett and Bresnan are roughly the same quality as Hoggard, Caddick and Mark Ealham. As for the batsmen I think its hard to truly judge how good they are. They have filled their boots in this series but I would not go overboard about Alastair Cook, you have to put in context what the bowling was like. There was no Glenn McGrath probing a relentless line, their only threatening bowler Johnson, sprays it all over the place...Hilfenhaus, Siddle and Watson are run of the mill and not really Test quality (when you think guys like Kasprowicz, Fleming and Clark used to be the Aussies 'lesser' bowlers, they were still aggressive accurate bowlers who could get top batsmen out). The Aussie spinners in this series have been an absolute joke, the likes of Ian Salisbury and Chris Schofield come to mind. Cook has set all these records against them but lets be honest if you rewound the clock a few years, we could have sent Hick and Ramprakash over there and they would have killed this lot, I honestly reckon Ramprakash even now in his 40s would have had a couple of centuries on this tour. I think Cook will always struggle against bowlers who swing it and bowl an accurate length, I wonder how he would have one on if Anderson had been in the Aussie attack.....look what the Pakistanis like Asif did in the summer. Yes he's a good player with the ability to concentrate for long periods. Is he better than his predecessor Trescothick? For me no.

I would put this England team about the same level New Zealand got to in their peak under Stephen Fleming a few years ago when they were about 3rd best in the world, they had a really good workmanlike unit who could see off most teams but when it came to facing real quality they didn't have enough great players to win. I think if you put this current England side against the Aussies of four years ago it would have been probably 3-1 but the scoreline would have been the other way. Quite a few of the players (Strauss, Cook, Pietersen, Bell, Collingwood, Anderson) did play against those Aussies and were well out of their depth losing 5-0, and that was with Flintoff in the England team.

Winning this series is a good achievement but I think we will have to wait for history to see how it compares to 1986/87 in terms of how these Aussies turn out. 86/87 was a great achievement because we beat what was actually a very good Aussie side that we had played before it peaked, it won the World Cup a few months later, and that team had Border, Boon, Steve Waugh, Jones, Hughes and Reid in it, who would go on to crush lesser England sides in the future. Will this current Aussie team prove to be a team of greats who weren't quite ready, or a one off selection of guys not up to the job who soon drifted out of contention....I reckon the second.

To give a rugby league analogy I reckon us winning this Ashes series is like Warrington beating Bradford at Odsal. It's always something you see as a good achievement, but if we tried to argue that this was an all time great Wire side on the strength of beating the current Bradford side at Odsal it would be a hard sell...