England finally ended their 15-year drought in Australia by winning the fourth Ashes Test at the Melbourne Cricket Ground. The match itself has since been deemed as a farce, with a bowler-friendly pitch producing a two-day Test. However, former India captain Sunil Gavaskar has said that the way in which the batting lineups on both sides collapsed showed how it is increasingly difficult for batters to play the long-game in red-ball cricket, having come to being used to scoring quickly in the white-ball formats.
Gavaskar also took a shot at England captain Ben Stokes for his comments earlier in the series, while stating that the win in the fourth Test shows that the visitors would’ve been better served had they played some first class cricket before the series started.
“England’s win, even though it came in the fourth Test with the series already lost, does prove once again that the more you play, the better you will get, especially in unfamiliar overseas conditions,” said Gavaskar in his column for SportStar.
“The point, therefore, is should England have played a few more First-Class games before the first Test? The ‘ares’ do not agree with the ‘has-beens’ here.”
The fact that England hadn’t played a single full-fledged first class game in Australia before the start of the series was something that was criticised by a number of former players from both sides of the Ashes divide.
Their only long-form game before the first Test in Perth was a three-day warm-up match against the England Lions, before which Stokes responded to the criticism from former players. “The next three days is balls to the wall for everyone. No easing into it. There’ll be a good run out for everyone. We’ve not been preparing for this tour over the last three weeks, we’ve put a lot of thought and process into this for a few years now.
“There’s quite a few factors that play into why we can’t prepare how the has-beens maybe prepared in the past. The landscape of cricket has changed and that affects preparation and how you are able to do it. But we are very confident and comfortable with how we prepare because we leave no stone unturned.”
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Stokes said after England lost the Perth Test by eight wickets in two days that he regretted his choice of words at that moment. “I got the words I said there completely wrong,” said Stokes. “Has-beens is a horrible word. It’s the only thing that managed to come out of my mouth at that moment. God, I’m going to be one of those one day. But it’s not at all what I meant by that.”
