The remains of the English cricket team

Australia had issues, but England managed to be so much worse than them.

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Shoaib Bashir is tall. He may, in fact, be the tallest man on earth. I only say that because we were told about his height so much. Of course, no one - not least the English cricket team - thought he was the finished article, or some sort of spin beast to tame Australia.

But the mythical height that he had would be handy on the hard Aussie surfaces against the many southpaws. He would bounce the ball and spin it away. Of course, Shoaib Bashir’s bowling average in Test cricket is 39.

In first-class cricket, it’s over 50. And when England got to Australia, they just weren’t that into him, right? I don’t think they felt comfortable with him in the nets. He suddenly didn’t feel like the ideal choice. But the question had to be, why did they think this would ever work anyway?

Overseas spinners in Australia average the most in the world and have done for a very, very long time. Great tweakers turn up and are abused on these wickets. So, why would you choose a high release work experience kid and think that’s going to work?

It was always a very odd choice. At the last minute, they seemed to pivot and decide to go in a different direction.

After three matches, Shoaib Bashir has not played in a single game this Ashes and England have not won a single game. When it comes to picking Bashir or not, it just really didn’t matter. Because, like most Ashes, form and everything else for England just didn’t matter.

After deciding not to use spin at all in the first Test - which to be fair, was one of the best decisions that England had made all series long - they decided to bring in Will Jacks, a batting all-rounder who bowls a little bit of spin.

You might think he can bowl okay. But no one’s saying he can’t bowl. What we are saying is in first-class cricket, he takes less than a wicket per game. He very rarely bowls, and he also averages more than 40 in first-class cricket.

So whether they brought Shoaib Bashir or Will Jacks, they were bringing over a spinner who was already a part-timer or a work experience kid. And then they said, please just go and bowl in the toughest place for your kind in the world. It was never going to work.

This was a massive weakness that England had before they even arrived in Australia. But of course, it was not the only one.

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England’s top three was put together a little bit with champagne and cigars, or actually maybe it was more sticky tape and bubblegum. Like it was assembled, and it was kind of there, because for a long period of time they never really got anything out of their top three.

It was essentially one functioning opener who never, ever left the ball, and two guys struggling a bit. To be fair, in this Ashes Crawley has made some runs. Sadly for England, though, they’re not the kind that you need from someone like him.

They want the match-altering knocks, which is the actual point of keeping Zak Crawley around. He could score really quickly and upset the bowler’s rhythms. Unfortunately for England, so far it’s been three failures and three cameos, which if the other two players had stepped up, might’ve been okay.

But Ollie Pope has really been struggling. In fact, since the start of the series, he’s been working his way back out of form as much as anything. By the time he got to Adelaide in the first innings, he was kind of chesting the ball, like he wasn’t picking it up at all. This is a guy who hasn’t made many runs consistently against the top teams in the World Test Championship. It was always gonna be a struggle for him. And to be honest, it’s been worse than we thought.

So the one guy in the top three that they were really relying on here was Ben Duckett, who for the last few years has been one of the best players in the top three in world cricket. He doesn’t leave. He plays his own way. He’s got this sort of idiosyncratic way of playing, but it’s really good and he’s made a lot of runs.

And because he’s so short and left-handed, and Zak Crawley is so tall and right-handed, it’s an incredible partnership that these two guys have together. The problem here is that Crawley has held up his end, and Ben Duckett just hasn’t managed the runs.

So we thought that the top three for England might be a weakness, and the top three for England has, in fact, been a weakness.