Independent Reactions To English loss

“The Ashes were so close that England could touch them. But after less than an hour of play on the fourth morning of the third Test yesterday, during which time they lost five wickets and the match, it must have felt that the urn was on another planet.

Or if not quite that far away, heading towards Australia at the speed of sound. England will wonder how it could happen like this. Coming into the match they were dominant, 1-0 ahead in the series after a thumping win in Adelaide and all was well with their world.

The opening stages of the Test went exactly according to plan and form. It is usually the local breeze known as the Fremantle Doctor which influences matches at the Waca, but this tricky little blighter was absent throughout. Instead a human whirlwind, Mitchell Johnson by name, swept in and blew England away.”

Stephen Brenkley in the Independent

“Sharing a plane with the Aussie team travelling to Adelaide was rather like stepping on to a galley transporting a legion of the damned.

You had to be in the country to truly gauge the level of national dismay, which spawned not only the dropping of the nation’s most productive seam bowler, Mitch Johnson, but a widespread yearning for the return of something tangible, even portly, to remind them of the time when Australia were the world’s No 1 team, but unfortunately Shane Warne had more compelling business, not least the courting of one of the enemy, Liz Hurley.

So Johnson was required to get off his cricket deathbed, or psychiatrist’s couch, and produce one of the most stunning instant comebacks in the history of big-time sport. Ryan Harris, called up desperately but to no avail in Adelaide, had to remove some of the splattered egg superimposed on the faces of the Aussie selectors by The West Australian newspaper.

Both obliged, brilliantly, and Hussey again proved that Greg Chappell’s much ridiculed band of selectors may have produced the most crucial stroke of wisdom when they refused to consign Mr Cricket to the boneyard of once-obdurate batsmen.”

James Lawton in The Independent