A 21st Century Worst XI for an Ashes Down Under

8 minute read

Everyone loves a Combined XI. Yeah, sure, it’s usually a Best XI, but in these parts we deal in Worst XIs because they’re funnier. This particular one is specifically for an Ashes series played in Australia. How many of England’s upcoming tourists will feature in it? And will any Australians make the cut?

A quick rundown of the rules here: 21st Century performances in Oz only, both tourists and Australians are eligible, and the player must have appeared in at least three Tests. (Anyone can be a one-Test wonder. We want to reward consistent underperformance here.)

Start as you mean to go on. There is therefore no better player to begin with than Rory Burns, who, in the 2021/22 Ashes, contrived to get bowled behind his legs by a left-armer off the very first ball of the series.

Burns was given five more innings to make amends, but didn’t. The first innings of his final Test saw him run out for 0 in the second over. His final knock of 26 was however the second-highest of the innings and boosted his away Ashes average to the towering height of 12.83.

It’s striking that Burns’ opening partner in this Worst XI should be the very man who opened the batting with him in that series. Haseeb Hameed has managed to fit an awful lot of ups and downs into his 28 years. We reckon there are some significant ups still to come, but this was unquestionably one of the downs (as Ashes tours to Australia so often are).

Hameed made 27 and 25 in the first Test at Brisbane, but never reached such heights again, following that with a run of scores that went 6, 0, 0, 7, 6 and then 9. Impressively/damningly, the 7 was the third highest score of the innings in question, when he was the first of Scott Boland’s six wickets for seven runs in the Boxing Day Test at the MCG.

An Australian! But unfortunately not the one you want in a knockabout piece like this.

Regardless of whether he would have gone on to have greater success or not, we’d all have loved to have seen how things went for Phil Hughes because he was an unusually fascinating batter to follow – a classic example of your greatest strengths also being your greatest weaknesses (chiefly scything/slicing the ball through point). There was a constant tension in that which could break either way. In 2010/11 it tended to get him into double figures but not much further and he averaged 16.16, which is a little lower than Stuart Clark’s batting average in home Ashes Tests.

Okay, we’re back on track now with what is already the third representative from England’s 2021/22 campaign. What a tour!

Incredible to think that Zak Crawley was head and shoulders above Burns, Hameed and Pope because he hit that fifty.

Aaaand another. It’s worth reminding you all at this point that the 2021/22 tour was of course played right in the thick of COVID-19 and hot on the heels of a T20 World Cup. “You are burnt out from the start,” was assistant coach Paul Collingwood’s assessment of how the players coped with it all.

“The harsh reality of what we were expected to do was: two years of bubbles, finish the home season and then go to a World Cup where, for six weeks the bubble was even tighter, then do two weeks quarantine and go into the Ashes with two days of on-field practice. We were sitting ducks. We really were.”

As an absolutely central player in all formats, Jos Buttler was hit as hard as anyone, which is at least partly why his Test career trickled out like urine past an enlarged prostate. Buttler’s last four Test innings were 3 off 11 balls, an unbeaten 5 off 14 balls, an eight-ball duck and 11 off 38 balls. It was the match before where he’d emptied the tank though.

In Australia’s first innings of the day/night Adelaide Test, he took a couple of decent catches, neither of which will be remembered because he also dropped the timeless sitter pictured above. Then he made a duck. England were 169-5, over 300 behind, when he edged Mitchell Starc to slip. “That was predictable,” reads the damning Cricinfo ball-by-ball commentary of the moment.

Determined to make amends in the second innings, Buttler set himself to see out the final day and secure an unlikely draw.

As you’ll know from the three previous inclusions in this team, England’s batting had been honestly pretty much incompetent up until this point in the series (and beyond). Buttler’s 4h18m knock therefore shaped up as a rather herculean effort. Channelling AB de Villiers, he made just 26 runs off 207 balls. Even in defeat, it would surely have gone down in the annals as one of those brave-yet-doomed defiant rearguards if it weren’t for the fact that it came to an end because he trod on his stumps.

Buttler didn’t even have the worst time in that defeat. Captain Joe Root had to go for a testicle X-ray after suffering a second ping of the swingers, just a few hours after the first.

> Jos Buttler took some fine catches and made a double ball hundred but all we’ll remember is the terrible drop and when he trod on his stumps

These articles always seem like a good idea right up until the point they start claiming the ones you love. A batting average of 19.88 with a highest score of 40 and a bowling average of 115.00 wouldn’t earn you the all-rounder’s spot in any team other than this.

That bowling effort in particular is spectacular because it wasn’t a small sample size. Moeen got through 169 overs in the 2017/18 series, during which he took only five wickets. That resulted in a strike-rate of a wicket every 203 balls – half as often as Joe Root and Paul Collingwood have managed in away Ashes Tests.

Two wicketkeepers? Buttler will have to play as a specialist batter, because Geraint Jones obviously can’t.

Jones’s wrong-headed recall for the 2006/07 tour infamously climaxed with a pair as England surrendered the Ashes in only the third Test. That pair was secured either side of Australia’s 527-5 declared and the second duck saw him run out off a ball where he could quite easily have been given LBW. Stellar stuff. He never played another Test.

> Grim final Tests: 8 players who went out on a massive low

While his average is superior (albeit in much the same way that Attack of the Clones is superior to The Phantom Menace), Chris Woakes edges out Sajid Mahmood – who managed 5 wickets at 52.80 – on the basis that he underwhelmed in more than twice as many matches.

We suppose you could argue that Mahmood’s batting average of 3.00 gives him the edge, but it’s not like Woakes made a 50 in any of his seven Test appearances Down Under.

Richard Dawson was only 22 when he played in the 2002/03 Ashes, but somehow, despite being a spin bowler, his career was already past its peak. He’d taken four wickets in his debut bowling innings, in Mohali, but his best performance after stepping into the breach for the injured Ashley Giles was probably the 0-21 he took in the third Test in Perth, when Nasser Hussain entrusted him with all of five of the 99 overs England were obliged to bowl.

Dawson had previously managed 2-143 in Adelaide and went on to take 2-121 in Melbourne, before finishing with 1-113 in Sydney where he bowled the delivery from which Steve Waugh reached his famous last-ball-of-the-day century. It pretty much goes without saying that he never played another Test, but sadly his first-class career rather tapered off as well.

You want tall, quick bowlers when you’re touring Australia – but possibly not this one (except in this team). Harmison is one of the most significant fast bowlers England has ever produced – especially to us – but in Australia all he really delivered was an infamous wide and a lot of admirable perseverance. (“My whole body was nervous,” he said of the former. Then again, in a separate interview, he also floated the possibility that it could have gone behind him, so it could have been worse.)

In a one-day match just before the 2005 Ashes, Harmison dismissed Adam Gilchrist, Ricky Ponting, Damien Martyn and Matthew Hayden in his first five overs before coming back later to chip out Mike Hussey for good measure. Faced with these same batters in the first Test of the 2006/07 Ashes, he took 1-177 off 42 overs. Carrying that momentum into the next Test, he took 0-111 off 29 overs.

Somehow undaunted, Harmison took 4-48 in Australia’s first innings at the Waca, but England still couldn’t secure a first innings lead. He followed up with 1-116 in the second.

“When we went to Australia in 2006-07, only four players turned up,” Harmison told Cricinfo. “And of the three or four senior players who didn’t turn up, I was probably top of the tree.”

Another Aussie! The only 21st Century Australian bowler to average more than 40 in home Ashes Tests (given our three match qualification).

This story is of course the other side of England’s 2010/11 batting onslaught. England fans remember waking up to find Alastair Cook and Jonathan Trott still batting, but of course someone was still bowling too. And it was usually Ben Hilfenhaus. (The one match Hilfenhaus didn’t play, at Adelaide, he was replaced by Doug Bollinger, who fared even worse, taking 1-130.)

Hilfenhaus did at least escape punishment in the second innings of the Melbourne and Sydney Tests – but that was only because England had finished batting by then. What a weird, weird series.

> 2019 Ashes Worst XI – who gets into our composite team?

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