Key events
“I, for one, have very fond memories of that 2004 summer (and not just because of the Edgbaston dressing up trophy that still adorns my living room),” says Tom Hopkins. “Peak Freddie, efficiently chasing down (for the time) some stiff targets and a growing sense of ‘hey, we could actually do something against Australia’. I guess sometimes shadows can be cast forwards in time.”
I guess even when it’s about the destination, the journey can be all sorts of fun. The win in South Africa, when England were nowhere near their best, would have been the highlight of previous decades.
Team news
Sri Lanka have picked the extra seamer, with Vishwa Fernando replacing the left-arm spinner Prabath Jayasuriya. Kusal Mendis also returns in place of the out-of-form Nishan Madushka.
England Duckett, Lawrence, Pope (c), Root, Brook, Smith (wk), Woakes, Atkinson, Stone, Hull, Bashir.
Sri Lanka Karunaratne, Nissanka, Kusal Mendis (wk), Mathews, Chandimal, Dhananjaya (c), Kamindu Mendis, Rathnayake, V Fernando, A Fernando, Kumara.
Sri Lanka win the toss and bowl
Now then, this’ll be a good test for England’s openers.
It’s dry (for now) and overcast at The Oval, a bowl-first day and no mistake.
Wanna play for England? Well you’d better start averaging 60 with the ball in first-class cricket. Josh Hull, 20, follows Shoaib Bashir in being picked on attributes rather than averages. And what attributes they are: 6ft 7ins, left-armer, bowls high 80s mph, swings it into the right-hander. In the parlance of our time, his ceiling is enormous.
Hull has just been presented with his Test cap by Andrew Flintoff. If you want to feel really old, he turned 1 during the 2005 Ashes.
Preamble
There are certain things that don’t come naturally to English people. Eye contact, relaxation – and winning every Test in a home summer. That’s for those ruthless MFs down under. In home seasons of at least five Tests, there have been 17 cases of teams winning every game:
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8 Australia
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3 South Africa
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2 England, West Indies
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1 India, Sri Lanka
England’s two clean sweeps were in 1959, when they thrashed a poor India side 5-0, and 2004. Michael Vaughan’s team beat New Zealand 3-0 and West Indies 4-0, an achievement for which they probably don’t receive enough credit. The 2005 Ashes casts a long shadow.
England hope the 2025-26 Ashes will do likewise. That’s been the focus of this summer, which makes their five consecutive wins even more notable. Easy to say they should always beat West Indies and Sri Lanka at home, but before this summer they’d done so only twice in their history: 1928 and 2004. (We’re not including the two-Test series of 2009.)
The weather has helped. Or rather, had helped. There’s a yellow warning for rain at The Oval today, so there could be a delayed start. The forecast, though never utopian, gets better as the match progresses so there should be plenty of time for a result: either a demonstration of England’s new ruthlessness, or a reminder that they will be forever England.
