England have the bowlers to take 20 wickets but its the batsman who worry me, Pietersen's form is a concern, Cook will probabley take about 4-5 innings to get a decent score and Strauss blows hot and cold. Thats why i'm going for the Aussies to win 2-1.

The only thing that concerns me is that many of the Australians are so hopelessly out of form at the moment - when it doesn't matter. Am just hoping that they don't start getting into form next Thursday...

I agree entirely....The Aussies are in a bit of a state.....If they are honest, they don't really want Ponting to be captain of the team. They wanted to get shut of him in 2005, but haven't because they have this bizarre policy that any sacked skipper has to be dropped from the team and with Ponting being their most reliable bat, this simply cannot be done.

The first test is massive....If England get off to a flyer then there is every chance the Aussies could disintegrate, just like we did back in 1989 (and in many Ashes series since!!).

Ah 1989...my first summer as a cricket fan. I remember well hearing all the hype, pre-series, Ted Dexter's "Brave New World" of English cricket with Gower restored to the captaincy. The Aussie squad then was the same as now, a bunch of relative unknowns led by captain cranky (substitute Allan Border for Ponting). They had virtually no bowling attack and had brought over 30odd year old injury crocks Terry Alderman and Geoff Lawson.

First Test at Leeds, Steve Waugh gets his first Test century, Mark Taylor who nobody had heard of, got a century (and went on to get centuries in practically every game that series), the Aussies smash us, and the tone is set for the series. Alderman absolutely destroyed us, he was the Aussies best bowler in England IMO.

I went to the game at Old Trafford where we lost the Ashes and it was 16 years before we got them back...the day we'd lost them, they announced that Mike Gatting was taking a rebel tour to South Africa that winter and him plus loads of the current England players, Emburey, Jarvis, Robinson, Foster, were banned from Test cricket.

This meant the biggest sweeping the cupboard clean ever, we picked a completely different team for the next Test with a young Devon Malcolm with inch thick glasses and a load of new faces who were going to be our team for the next generation. Everybody was excited to see what would happen....give the young lads a shot, they couldn't do any worse we said. The Aussies won the toss and batted, and by the end of the first day, the openers were still in, with huge scores to their names....

I remember reading an article on that '89 series a while back....We apparently set a record for using the most number of players in a series....Something ridiculous like 20 odd players, including players who were to never be seen again after making just single performances.

(Just checked a few sites, we used 29 players!!!.....including 'greats' like Barnett, Capel, Curtis, Igglesdon, Newport, Stephenson!!!)

Ah those names bring back memories...
Kim Barnett - wasn't he the guy who used to shuffle around the crease while the bowler was running in, then take a step back to leg before playing his shot....not quite sure he had a watertight technique for Test cricket!

David Capel - possibly the first of the "new Ian Bothams"...to be followed by Chris Lewis, Dermot Reeve and Dominic Cork

Tim Curtis - decent county pro but not top class. Reminds me of Martyn Moxon who also played in that series.

Alan Igglesden - actually he was a good bowler IMO, him and Newport could swing it. Newport was similar to Martin Bicknell in that he wasn't that quick. Igglesden was a bit faster, I reckon he could have been like Jimmy Anderson today. Unfortunately he was injured a lot.

John Stephenson - I cannot believe he played Test cricket, always thought he was rank average even at county level.

On the plus side a few players did emerge out of the gloom that summer - Robin Smith, Jack Russell and Angus Fraser, all of whom were good Test players. In fact I remember the tour to the W Indies which followed, when we were supposed to get smashed 5-0 by the W Indies in their glory days, as being one which was quite successful for us and we took it to them. For the next few years under Graham Gooch we were quite good, we got to the World Cup Final in Australia.

Good to see Bell get in the runs in the last couple of days. Should make Pietersen buck his ideas up. Time for our selectors to grow a pair and be ruthless.

Pietersen will score runs when it matters. I'm gonna launch a bit of cash on him being top England run scorer for the series. Should get a good price due to his woeful current form.

The be all end end all of test cricket (bar daft declarations). If you don't take 20 wickets, you don't win tests. Sods Law (and wirth England's history of doing it) we're going to have the odd batting collapse, which will deem a low total. Our bowlers HAVE to deliver (no pun intended) if we want to keep the Ashes. I just hope our bowling line up is strong enough (Tremlett/Monty and a largely untried Finn)

Quote ="Moe syslak"Pietersen will score runs when it matters. I'm gonna launch a bit of cash on him being top England run scorer for the series. Should get a good price due to his woeful current form.'" check www.oddschecker.com tab on cricket it gives all the ashes odds.. pietersen is a 7/2 shot england win

Quote ="Moe syslak"Pietersen will score runs when it matters. I'm gonna launch a bit of cash on him being top England run scorer for the series. Should get a good price due to his woeful current form.'" check www.oddschecker.com tab on cricket it gives all the ashes odds.. pietersen is a 7/2 shot england win

Fair assessment of those players, Sally......Though you didn't mention the debut of a certain FEC amongst your emerging future stars!!

What was startling back then, was how fickle and how amateur the whole selection process was....Players were picked and discarded at a whim. Many a promising career was ruined by poor selection policy.

I often think how successful somebody like Neil Fairbrother could have been at Test level if they had only been around today when, at last, we seem to pick the side in a well thought out manner??.....Fairbrother was similar to somebody like Bell or Collingwood, in that he undoubtedly had talent but needed nurturing correctly and not just expected to produce from day one. Instead, I seem to remember him being selected for his debut against a formidable Pakistan attack, being sent in to bat in gloomy conditions, with about 2 overs left of the day, getting an almost predictable duck and then being dropped on the back of it!!

I'm not saying he would have been a world beater, but for any player, what sort of message are they getting when something like that happens??.....Its quite funny that some people today complain of players getting too long of a stay in the side, but its no coincidence that since we have more consistancy in our selection, so our results have dramatically improved since the days of 20 odd players being used in a series!!

I agree with you on this and it didn't change till Duncan Fletcher came in. Back in the 1980s and 1990s loads of players were continually cycled through the team because they'd have a bad couple of games for England, get dropped, go back to their counties and dominate county cricket again, then when someone in the England team got dropped they were back in. The newspapers used to have a lot of influence over selectors because they would demand players who were doing well in the county game, got picked, and then as soon as they were in the team, they would start criticising them and move onto demanding someone else.

Fletcher had a different approach, he came in, looked around the county game and decided on a group players who he thought had potential, even if they weren't ripping up trees in the county game, and he stuck with them - Vaughan, Trescothick, Flintoff, Collingwood, Harmison, Simon Jones. None of them were ever near the top of the county averages, and Fletcher got criticism early on for having his 'favourites' who he stuck with whether in/out of form when the press were launching bandwagons for Ian Salisbury and Ramprakash etc to be recalled. Ben Hollioake was also in Fletcher's 'in group' and I wonder if he could have come through like Flintoff did had it not been for his early death.

I wonder what would have happened if Fletcher had taken over in 1989 rather than 1999, England had a lot of young talent coming through at that time, some made it (Atherton, Stewart, Hussain, and later Gough), some had good spells but were not helped by being picked and dropped at strange times (Smith, Hick, Fraser, Malcolm, Tufnell), then there was Ramprakash who was the most obvious example of a player who needed a vote of confidence behind him and could have been an awesome player. In Fletcher's book he talks a bit about this, he said he reckoned the most technically perfect batsmen of the era were Tendulkar, Kallis and Ramprakash, and he had needed a long run and selectors confidence behind him to let him relax. He could have been our best player of the era. I reckon if Fletcher had been in ten years earlier, we would have played Malcolm every game because Fletcher liked the idea of strike power - IMO Malcolm was a much better bowler than Harmison was. Instead we had him taking 9-57 against South Africa then Ray lllingworth trying to change his technique saying "we've got to get Devon to swing the ball". Even Fraser, who was probably our best bowler abroad, always seemed to be the guy we brought back when the bowling attack had been getting hammered, he would do well, then disappear at the start of the next series.

With good management I reckon we could have had a very good team in the 1990s although it has to be said the overall standard of Test cricket back then was very high, when you think how tough Australia, Pakistan and West Indies were.

Where it all went wrong for Fairbrother was when he played 3 Tests against the Kiwis in 1990 when he was in the form of his life, had just scored 366 for Lancs, and on flat pitches against a NZ attack which only had Hadlee, he got a run of low scores. That was his time to cash in and earn a run in the Test side, because after that England brought back Gower as the left hander in the middle order. They did at least keep him in the ODI side and he made a lot of good 50s for England in ODIs. You are right he could have been given more backing but I reckon if he'd have made some runs against the Kiwis that would have given him a chance. After he got dropped then it got hard for him to persuade the selectors to pick him again, because he had been demolishing every county attack going in 1990, and had a shocking run for England, so if he scored runs for Lancashire again they would just think "well he's done this before and wasn't up to Test level, what's new now..."

Still one of my favourite ever Lancs players (especially because he's a Wire fan) and no English player in the last century or since, has got a higher first class score.

Yes, Fairbrother was a favourite of mine.....His brief Test career was disappointing, though I do recall him hitting a gritty 70 or 80 odd on a tour of India in 1992/93 when we got battered 3-0.

His international career was quite similar to Michael Bevan of Australia....Both huge talents, both seemingly found out at Test level, but both top class at the one-day form of the game.

Your summing up of the English game in the 90's was pretty spot on too.....Despite all our failings, it certainly can't be blamed on the actual talent we had available. Like you said, various selection brain-farts seemed to be responsible for allowing an entire generation of genuinely talented guys be wasted.....The treatment of Hick/Ramps/Smith being a prime example. 3 extremely gifted players who suffered at the hands of Ray Illingworth's pig-headedness.

who makes up the selectors? it is something i have always wondered.

is it explayers or people from the ECB? or both?

Not 100% sure, but I believe the selection committee is made up of 4 people....

1. Geoff Miller, head selector, former player from 70's & 80's.

2. Andy Flower, Team coach.

3. Ashley Giles, ex player.

4. After a bit of looking about the only name I can find for the 4th man is James Whitiker, former player from the 80's & 90's.

I'll be happy to have some of that corrected....

That 92/93 tour summed up the inconsistent selection policies of the day.

When we'd got thrashed in the 1989 Ashes, and a lot of the players got Test bans for signing up for Gatting's rebel tour of SA, all the talk had been of using this opportunity to rebuild the England team with the obviously good young talent coming through, Graham Gooch's "young lions" had shaped up pretty well against a top W Indies team that winter. They also set up the England A side as a touring team to groom some players for the full Test team. But over the next few years, gradually they started turning back the clock again, Gower got recalled, we had ageing guys like Wayne Larkins and Eddie Hemmings having short term spells in the team.

By 1992 there was a good group of young players emerging in the county game, Graham Thorpe, Dominic Cork, Mark Ilott, and David Millns. These guys looked well worth a shot in the Test team. But then ICC announced that all the players who had gone on Gattings rebel tour had their bans revoked so instead of the younger players it was straight back to Gatting, John Emburey and Paul Jarvis for the India tour. They recalled Neil Foster against the Aussies the next summer as well.

The other really strange thing at this time was that whilst the young lads who looked like they had real talent, sat in the 'A' team for years (and in the case of Millns, never got a call up), there were a lot of one off selections of county pros in their late 20s, who had 'earned themselves a shot', and were given a token game or two. Richard Blakey was taken as the keeper for that India tour, and was miles out of his depth. Paul Taylor from Northants was another very random selection. There was an odd situation with Taylor a couple of years later, when Atherton was captain, when Atherton and Illingworth had a big fall out because Illingworth insisted on recalling Taylor (a steady county bowler but never a Test bowler) instead of Fraser who Atherton wanted....so Atherton just refused to bowl him more than a handful of overs and effectively played with 3 front line bowlers, so Illingworth had to drop him for the next Test because he knew Atherton wouldn't use him! But he wouldn't pick Fraser because that would have been backing down to Atherton, so instead he picked Gough (which was one of Illingworth's good picks).

The odd thing about picking the older county pros who'd 'earned a shot', was that whilst most of them did nothing, the ones who were successful were also dropped straight away. Neil Mallender bowled us to victory against Pakistan on debut, and was dropped to bring Jarvis back, and never seen again. Peter Such got wickets against the Aussies in his early Tests, and disappeared quickly, although he strangely reappeared again about five years later. Richard Illingworth and Peter Martin came into the team out of the blue, performed pretty solidly, and then disappeared. I think a lot of players were selected as token gestures, without the selectors ever having the intention of keeping them for more than a few Tests no matter how they did.

I was talking to my cousin the other day who's now a naturalised Aussie and living in Sydney (has been for 40 years).

He's always been so sure that the Aussie's were going to win The Ashes every time they're played but this time he reckons England will retain them. I've never known him to be defeatist when it comes to England v Australia but he reckons their players are just not good enough.

I hope he's right.

Terrible first day for England, being skittled out for just 260 on a good batting pitch, letting such a average bowler like Peter Siddle rip through them, if the Aussies get around 400 or more in there 1st innings its game over, the bowlers have a massive job on there hands on day 2.

Fairbrother had a decent chance with England IIRC with 10 matches and 15 innings. The problem for him was of not delivering. He had 9 innings where he scored single figures, only 2 innings above 30, with a 83 against India being a highlight. His first 4 innings for England contributed only 5 runs.

Good start

Agreed, although the point which Angry Pirate makes is valid about when they played Pakistan in 1987 and sent him in the dark rather than sending a nighchman, it wasn't helpful to a young player starting his Test career. However Fairbrother did seem to be in the England fold in that he was in the One Day side for a while, I remember him getting a great century against the W Indies in a Texaco Trophy match, and he was a big player for us in the 92 World Cup, I think he was our best batsman in the final. The difference between Fairbrother and guys like Hick and Ramprakash was with those two, the doubts weren't about them having the technique for the top level, it was about whether they had the mental side to it, so the constantly being dropped and recalled and dropped again and recalled again weren't helpful. With Fairbrother the doubts were whether his technique was up to Test cricket, and in the chances he did have, he didn't make a good case, so I think it became case closed and he was just kept as a ODI player (in the end he did have a good international career). The same thing happened to Michael Bevan with the Aussies, who probably would have come good in Test cricket but for the fact it was so competitive getting into the Aussie middle order at the time (even Stuart Law only had one Test innings, he got a fifty and never played again!). Bevan's big chance was the 94/95 Ashes, but all the doubts were if he could handle fast bowling, and Devon Malcolm got him in all sorts of trouble, he got dropped, Greg Blewett came in and got a hundred, and it was case closed for Bevan and he too ended up as a one day player.

true the aussies have the upper hand and we need quick wickets.just got a feeling we are gonna toil for a good 2 days in the field which takes the game well away from us...is there any rain on the way,only chance of saving this test unless the bowlers do a good job

Let's not get too downhearted. We do have a good bowling attack, and we don't hold the Aussie batting line up in the same awe as the last decade or so.
A few batting failures by some players with "not great" form, haven't helped matters, but this Test is far from out of our hands. We've still got every chance.

bloody new it...cant see us batting for nearly 2 days to save this test..sadly we`ve been outplayed for 3 days..rain is our likely saviour