How are the Ashes in both countries?

Australia really start to dominate England consistently, and so England build up the rivalry even more in their heads. But the Aussies are just not that into them.

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I have one of the most unique viewpoints on Ashes cricket than almost anyone ever has. I grew up in Australia. I was born there, as were my parents, grandparents and great-grandparents. On top of that, I specifically came from a cricket family, inside a cricket culture.

The first time I saw cricket being played, it was by men on Saturdays. It took a long time to go beyond the local club cricket environment, and I eventually ended up as a Shield cricket fan.

This was the era where the Victorian Bushrangers existed, and wore shorts. After that, I started to notice international cricket more.

But again, it was very weird. It wasn’t the Ashes that brought me in. It was Australia playing Pakistan. Then it was Australia playing the West Indies. And then eventually, I realized there was this other thing called the Ashes that everyone else seemed a lot more excited about.

When I was 23, I went around the world to follow cricket and I backpacked around the 2003 World Cup.

Again, it was really nice for Australia to beat England, but we were brought up thinking that Australia should beat absolutely everyone. So England were just part of Australia’s new global domination. In fact, the English team wasn’t particularly strong, or something that we even thought about all that much.

But in 2008, I started to work in cricket. Of course, at this point I moved to England. So the first 28 years were pretty much exclusively as an Australian cricket fan, who also loved international cricket. The next 17 years, though, has been working in cricket, but also while living in England.

And it means I have a very different way of looking at cricket than most people do, specifically the Ashes. I have actually lived on both sides. I know what it is like to be an Australian fan. I know what it is like to hang out with English fans. I also know what it’s like to spend time with Australian and English cricket media.

I’ve done all of these things multiple times in my life. So one thing I always wanted to explain was how much more England care about the Ashes than the Australians.

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Of course, a lot of the stuff we do on this site involves numbers, and this video is going to be exactly the same. The difference is that only a small amount of numbers that I mention today are true. The rest are taken completely and utterly from my arse, because they don’t exist.

But let’s suggest even the made up numbers today are going to be from 45 years of pretty active research in the field. And the idea really is to show just how much more England seem to care about the Ashes than Australia ever have.

I basically suggest that more than half of English interest in the game is specifically for the Ashes. But let’s just look at Australia’s for a moment. It’s not that they don’t like the Ashes. It still takes out quite a bit of their mental space when they’re thinking about cricket. It’s just that England probably have almost double the amount of interest in this series that the Australians do.

And so Australian fans are generally interested in lots of little things, while England are pretty much into one big thing.

I would say that the English summer, certainly for some fans, is a really, really important thing. Especially as they travel to quite a few games. You’d also have to factor in traditional things like the BBC and everything else. So I think it takes out a fair chunk.

Then you’ve got international cricket. It’s not particularly a big part of it. But you have to remember that for a lot of countries, their home summer is generally a lot more important than international cricket altogether.

But now, let’s just look at the last bit of this, because I think it can all be summed up in one word. County cricket.

There has definitely always been this huge audience that really likes county cricket. And not all these people who like county cricket have any interest in international cricket. They might have some in the English summer, and they’ll have a passing interest in the Ashes.

There’s obviously overlap in some of these groups. But compared to Australia, you’ve got a big chunk of fans caring a lot more about one series or domestic cricket than everything else.

So what about the Aussies?

India is nowhere near the size of the Ashes yet, but it is certainly growing. Some of these series have been so incredible; the nonsense on and off the field, the quality of cricket and Virat Kohli have played a huge part in this. All these different things have happened, which have meant that India is now a much bigger series than it has ever been before.

South Africa’s not at that level, and part of it is because of when they play and everything else. But again, the South African series have been really, really interesting over a long period of time. Since readmission, you would have to say that Australia versus South Africa has probably been the most consistently good series of any in the world.