Who won the Ashes, really?

Who won the 2017/2018 Ashes series?

(The Ashes, for those who don’t know, is possibly the most famous sporting contest on the planet.  It is a competition taking place every two years between England and Australia.  The game in question is cricket.  For those unfamiliar with cricket, please press the backspace icon a few times and Google ‘Kardashians’, this will be a far better use of your time than reading the following).

Of course, there are those that will say that Australia won the Ashes.  There are those also that will say that England lost the Ashes.  There is, after all, an important difference between the two matters.

What is undoubtedly true is that England’s tour Down Under was trouble-prone.  There were players that could not join because they had got into a spot of bother back home (famous sports stars get into ‘a spot of bother’ rather than being ‘charged for assault’ just like middle class students involved in vandalism are involved in ‘high spirits’ or if you go to a decent public school; ‘japes’.) and the performance on the pitch was not great.  Hovering over all of this was the unique cricket pastime of ‘sledging’ or as non-cricketing types call it ‘abuse’.  Any cricket fan will recognise the title of this Blog (although it is named G&P for quite different reasons) and will have drawn their own conclusions about which category certain Aussie and English players.

So, Australia retained the Ashes.

But BBC Radio 5 Live won the Ashes.

Here’s why.

The coverage was magnificent.  There is nothing like Test Match Special.  Arguably, the best thing to ever happen to TMS was for the BBC to lose the rights to televise cricket and then for digital radio to come along.  This meant live and uninterrupted coverage of play in Australia throughout the night, bookended by anticipation and analysis.

The BBC rightly committed programming time to exploring the phenomenon of nocturnal radio.  But it boils down to this:

If you are watching television through the night there will come a point about three in the morning when your entire body craves sleep and you feel as if somebody has replaced certain parts of you with grit.  You trek up to bed late/early and get up a few hours later feeling shocking.

Not so with radio.  One places the radio by the bed, turned down low because distractions are falling away as the midnight hour advances, and then you listen throughout the night.

Of course you don’t.  You are soundly asleep by 12:05 but occasionally stir as you subconsciously process the fall of wickets and any streakers.

You awake refreshed and ready for the day.

Radio coverage is far, far better than television coverage because the quality of the commentary is so much better.  TMS is an institution and can afford to only accept the greatest talents.  Ideally, one should apprentice until one is about 80, and then one may consider oneself a TMS fixture.

The thing about TMS is it knows that it is shepherding souls through the darkness half a world away, and it takes this privilege and responsibility seriously.

On this tour, with the performance of the England team, there was an element of pastoral care to be considered, as the commentary team did not want to wreak untold psychic damage to the unconscious subconscious attentive minds.

Moreover, this was happening over the Christmas period.  The best Christmas present that the TMS team gave the listening public back in England at the commencement of the Boxing Day test was hope.