London was packed out today with thousands of fans cheering the England cricket team through town to Trafalgar Square, after they regained The Ashes with yesterday’s deciding Test against Australia.
I don’t think anyone can remember cricket being on such a high in this country and there’s probably a lot of reasons. First, England have come up with a really good team with some outstanding individual players and they’ve managed to beat the deadliest enemy, Australia, in a series for the first time in nineteen years. This is on the back of series wins in South Africa and the West Indies.
The 20Twenty competition has brought a whole new audience to the game, with matches lasting under three hours on a summer’s evening, matches between counties have been sellouts, unheard of.
And the players themselves seem real down to earth guys. They had a big night out celebrating last night and looking at the state of them today you could tell most hadn’t been to sleep and were still half-pissed, especially Flintoff who slurred his way through a bunch of tv interviews.
It was so funny to see them roll up at 10 Downing Street to meet Tony Blair. He’d obviously thought what a great photo-op, but the boys had had plenty of hair of the dog during the couple of hours on the bus and the tv pictures of them in the No10 garden, slumped on chairs, heads between knees, ties all over the place and Tony Blair standing amongst them with his fixed grin thinking ‘oh shit’, was priceless.
When Blair said to captain Michael Vaughan, ‘long night was it?’, Vaughan slowly nodded his head for about twenty seconds before coming up with ‘yeah’, brillant.
David Beckham went for a manicure the day before the England football team lost a World Cup qualifier to Northern Ireland, a team ranked about a 100 places below them, last week. I don’t think people relate to the pampered footballers the way they used to and that could also benefit cricket.
Last thing on The Ashes, man of the series for me, Shane Warne, without a doubt. Kept his team in it almost single-handed sometimes, fantastic bowling, was very good with the bat, took a load of stick from the England fans and always laughed with them. Showed great sportsmanship throughout and where was he today, supporting his Hampshire teammates in their county match, top man.
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