In Affectionate Remembrance of Australian Cricket...

...which was mercilessly put to the sword by England at the Adelaide Oval.

England have beaten Australia, in Australia, in a match that actually counts, by an innings and 71 runs, and we have a 1-0 lead in the series. Now re-read that sentence. I know. I can't quite believe it either.

Michael Atherton said that this was the best performance by an England team in 30 years, which since I'm not yet 29 makes this the best in my entire lifetime. Having watched most of it, I can easily believe that. We comprehensively thrashed them on four out of the five days, and if it hadn't been for the rain we could have wrapped this up with Monday off. From start to finish, our batting, bowling and fielding were an order of magnitude better than Australia's. There's only one word for it, this was a ROUT.

I was going to write a post a couple of weeks ago appealing for everyone to stop being so bloody English, stop thinking this series was going to be close and realise that actually we have the better individuals and the better team all round. I couldn't quite bring myself to write it, as I guess I was being too bloody English! If we can maintain our current form, this is the promised land for us. Our performance in Adelaide was so good, so ruthless, so utterly flawless in every department that we can with some justification look forward to challenging not just for the odd series but for nothing less than World dominance in the Test arena. In recent years we've beaten the West Indies, Australia, Bangladesh and Pakistan at home, beaten Bangladesh away and drawn with South Africa. Next year we face India and Sri Lanka at home and if we can win against them we will be right up there. Good times!

In the meantime, the nature of Australia's performances so far - and don't forget that our second innings at Brisbane is still going at 1137 for 6 - allied to the lack of any clear way back for them, leads one to think that it's not a matter of if England retain the Ashes, so much as a case of how much we win the series by. Right now, a cricket match between England and Australia is like a battle of the bands between Led Zepplin and McFly...