Matt Maher: England's Ashes defeat must be treated as the major failure it really is
Whatever happens in Sydney over however many days the fifth Ashes Test actually lasts, this has already been England’s most successful tour of Australia for 14 years.
At least, that’s one way of looking at it.
It’s the way, you suspect, Brendon McCullum might argue it. It’s the way you fear ECB chiefs Richard Gould and Richard Thompson, due to meet Down Under this week to begin picking over the bones of another Ashes away defeat, might be convinced to see it, not least if England were to win again and add another gleam of respectability to the final scoreline.
A 3-2 defeat is clearly preferable to 4-1 or 5-0 and the value of Test wins in Australia should not be downplayed, even if they are achieved after the series has already been decided.
Such was the hunger of the home side to achieve another whitewash, their two-day defeat in Melbourne last week was met with anger and embarrassment in many quarters.
Yet from an England point of view, there is also something instructive in such a reaction. It’s not the sort you would expect, if we are being brutally honest, were the situation reversed with England the ones to slip-up with a home series already secured.
One suspects we’d quickly brush it off, declaring the contest a meaningless dead rubber. It may say something about the current outlooks of both Australian and English cricket, one where winning is everything and the other where it is preferred but sometimes, you wonder, not completely essential.
Last summer’s 2-2 draw with India, for example, was largely painted as a great advert for Test cricket, rather than the huge missed opportunity for an England series victory it actually was.
It was a similar story two years earlier when Australia last visited, with the end of series focus falling mainly on England’s impressive character in fighting back to draw and bad luck with the weather, rather than the dire tactics and poor play which had put them 2-0 down in the first place.
