Unforgettable England summer ends with cricket in great shape

From a glorious World Cup to a tight Ashes series, this game does not get much better
Will Macpherson16 September 2019

For some time, it felt like England's summer of 2019 would never end. So much toil had gone into planning for so many games that it was hard to look beyond an epic block of cricket.

It began cold and solemn in Dublin, where on May 4 Eoin Morgan and ­Ashley Giles explained that Alex Hales would not be playing for England after failing a drugs test.

Via a sparring series against Pakistan, a World Cup of ups and downs culminating in an extraordinary final three weeks, a maiden Test against Ireland and an awesome Ashes series, we wound up on Sunday at the Kia Oval - where it had kicked into life with that Ben Stokes catch on the opening day of the World Cup - for one final frolic.

And so, 134 days after England’s summer started - they played on 44 of them - the cricket ended. The sun shone brightly on Sunday, but Monday dawned grey and steely.

At the end of it all, after England won a tied World Cup Final on a technicality, the Ashes were drawn, too, with Australia retaining the urn.

The result - the scoreline was 2-2 - is a rare and strange thing. An Ashes series has not been drawn since 1972, which was the only other time it was tied 2-2, and was an outcome that both teams might have taken, but will also really annoy them.

These rivals annoyed each other, too, but not enough to prevent them sharing beers in the home dressing room on Sunday night. It was the last, lovely image of a summer full of them.

Australia achieved their basic aim and deserve to retain the urn, but they have still not won a series in England since 2001 and blew a golden opportunity to do so.

They will remember this series fondly, but not like England will their 2010/11 triumph Down Under. They planned brilliantly for the series but got the team and toss wrong at The Oval. The rest followed.

Getty Images

For England, they will reflect that they spent much of the series clinging on, did not have their greatest-ever bowler other than for four overs of the First Test and, after the exertions of the World Cup, 2-2 would have been an acceptable result against any other team.

It will be a source of great satisfaction that ­Australia did not win and that they have still not lost a home series since 2014.

We cannot pretend that these are two great Ashes teams, but they are studded with great players and produced a great series, the best between these best of enemies since 2005, because they were pretty evenly matched and flawed.

Ball dominated bat, except for that of Steve Smith. There was some extraordinary catching and some ordinary dropping. The umpiring and the reviewing, on the whole, were poor.

Getty Images for Surrey CCC

It has been a series bursting with ­stories and battles, both those that lasted the length of the series or simply a brilliant passage of play, concluding with Jofra Archer and Matthew Wade on Sunday.

There was Smith’s outrageous comeback and his journey from roundly booed to standing ovation; David ­Warner’s awful comeback, unpicked brutally by Stuart Broad; Stokes’s coming of age; the sustained brilliance of Pat Cummins and Josh Hazlewood; Archer’s electric emergence; the heroism of Rory Burns, Marnus Labuschagne and Jack Leach; even the simple sight of Tim Paine lifting the historic urn.

All those close to the English game hoped that this was the summer we could make cricket great again - and it worked. England, whether winning or losing, have made for such compelling viewing that it has been impossible for people not to get involved.

Getty Images

They are very much the sort of team that wins a Test after being bowled out for 67, or ends four years of ODI dominance by making a decent fist of going out in the group stages of their home World Cup, then tying a Super Over in a tied final on their first appearance on free-to-air television in 14 years.

Talk about seizing a moment. Dull days? They are few and far between.

Word filters through of millennials getting back into a game that drifted from them after 2005 and kids playing in local parks. The game has been on the front (for the right reasons) and back pages of the nation’s newspapers.

The Oval is a location most associated with farewells, being the traditional venue for the final Test of a home series.

England say goodbye to Trevor Bayliss, a fine coach and better man and maybe a couple of players, too. Most of all, though, they say goodbye to the all-consuming, unforgettable summer of 2019. Cricket will be all the better for it.

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