The 2015 Ashes series was the third in two years due to a schedule rearrangement designed to help England’s World Cup campaign the next winter (lol). If the clashes of 2005 and 2009 will be remembered as vibrant contests of punching and counter-punching, this was more like two drunks whaling on each other at closing time.
England of course won 3-2 in the end, keeping the Aussies without a series win on these shores since 2001. The two matches they won were by 405 runs, Steve Smith helping himself to a double hundred at Lords, and an innings & 46 in the dead rubber at the Oval. England won by 169 runs in Cardiff, 8 wickets on their lucky ground of Edgbaston, and decisively by an innings & 78 at Trent Bridge.
Stuart Broad’s 8 wickets on the first morning of that Trent Bridge match will be long remembered. Frankly it’s the only thing I could bring to mind about the whole series without looking it up. Everything that missed the middle found the edge, while every edge carried to hand. England grabbed them all, most spectacularly Ben Stokes’ effort in the gully. Broad’s impression of Edvard Munch’s The Scream captured the mood of the Australian dressing room at that point. Just when you thought you were all laughed out, the Oz media complained about a “doctored pitch”, which would make Joe Root’s 130 on the same day the greatest innings of all time.
The boy wonder was England’s Man of the Series and rightly so with 460 runs. Chris Rogers claimed the prize for Australia and promptly retired from Test cricket along with Shane Watson (we’ll miss him), Brad Haddin (we won’t) and captain Michael Clarke. Little has been seen of Yorkshire’s Gary Ballance since his working over at the hands of Mitchell Johnson, and none at all of Adam Lyth.
So, a fairly slapdash series in which comfortable first innings leads produced comfortable wins in all five tests won’t go down as an all time great. At least it did help England with their World Cup the following winter. Just imagine how bad they would have been if it hadn’t.
Here is an extended taster of this series. It was a first for Guerilla as we did the broadcast live from the Jetlag sports bar in central London specially for the Ashes. If you like what you hear we have a full archive of all the games we have ever covered along with over 400 of our jingles, some amazing, some not so. But it’s all there for your listening pleasure. Enjoy!
