The Ashes Daily: England beaten in Adelaide as Australia retain Ashes.

0:00Nas:Oh, that's a start, that is from Crawley. Chris Wokes nails it for four. The Ashes alive and Test cricket alive.

0:08Ath:Ice in his veins. Pat Cummins has led his team to a famous victory. Yeah, go! Down, he gets it for the top.

0:17Nas:England's captain, Ben Stokes, while he is there, England have hope. Put the beer away, put the champagne on ice. 24 years of pain in Australia. Finally they're beaten at home by England.

0:31Ath:OK, it's ten past three in the afternoon. Adelaide time, fifth day, third test match. And exactly an hour ago, Marnus Labashain clasped his hands around an edge from Josh Tong to wrap up the Ashes for Australia. It's taken them only 11 days. They still have the chance to push for a whitewash. But the first aim in any Ashes series is to, if you're holding the Ashes, retain them. and that, Nass, is exactly what Australia have done.

1:00Nas:They did and they did it well. England pushed them hard today but for me, today and this game has pretty much summed up England's ashes. They are playing and have been playing catch-up cricket. They've gone hard and gone well in the last couple of days but this Test match was lost at 160 for 8 when England batted first and since then they've been catching up and I would say the same about this tour. They came into it underprepared, first Test match and were a little bit surprised at the intensity of Ashes cricket. And since the very first day, they've been playing catch-up cricket again. So, fair play to Australia.

1:37Nas:Brendan McCullum said at the end there, out-batted, out-bowled, out-caught. Those catches from Marnus Labashain, unbelievable.

1:44Ath:I was going to say, it's a fitting end, really, because Labashain, it was a fairly simple catch for him to clinch that Ashes-winning moment. but his catch earlier off Will Jacks was, I reckon, his third stupendous catch of the series. There was the brilliant one at the Gabba out in the deep and then two stunning one-handed, left-handed catches here at Slip.

2:07Nas:Yeah, and from balls that were pitched up and found the outside edge. And it sort of summed up Australia's cricket. They were relentless with the ball. They just hit a length. I can't think of that many balls that were easy to cut or unless they went with the short pitch delivery that you could pull. I just think they were absolutely brilliant in all departments. There were moments where they lost six for 38 and they let England back, but England weren't good enough to pounce on that and weren't good enough to maintain pressure for longer. They were given an opportunity today with Nathan Lyon, you know, on a new ball just looming, and a new ball is good for the seamer, but it's also good for the off spinner, and Lyon has now ruled out the series with a hamstring.

2:48Nas:So they were given an opportunity today, England, and they've fought hard their tail, but as I say, the damage done earlier in the test match.

2:56Ath:We'll come back to today's performances from Jamie Smith and Will Jacks and what that means, but just to explain, it's about an hour after the end of play. We've heard a little bit from Brendan McCollum down on the edge of the pitch, and we'll pick up on what he's said. We're going to be speaking to Rob Key in two days' time when we'll put lots of questions to him, but the key thing that seemed to come out of McCollum's immediate post-match not press conference but post-match remarks was around the preparation he seemed to admit that they got it wrong ahead of the first test and probably ahead of the second test as well under prepared before the first and he maintains still kind of over prepared before the second yeah and

3:36Nas:it's something you've been speaking about throughout these last three or four weeks and it's not just you can argue about the quality of cricket they could have had may have had and that's why they try and keep it in-house but also it's the surfaces but it's mainly about the intensity of Ashes cricket. You're not going to mimic that by playing a little warm-up game at Lilac Hill. You have to play intense. If it's a state side, if it's Australia A, if it means coming from New Zealand, not sending it to those white ball, binning some of that white ball cricket they play, 50 over cricket, in a year where there is no 50 over World Cup.

4:10Nas:Come here early and play against anyone that gives you intense cricket on pitches that bounce. It's no surprise they start in Perth and then they go to the Gabba for this very reason that sides come and think they can or will bat at Lila Kill and they get found out on two bouncy pitches and then they come here and with two days last two days they play pretty well but that's too late.

4:33Ath:Yeah it's the bounce that caught the batsmen by surprise so the consequences of the lack of preparation that we've referred to the bounce that caught the batters by surprise in Perth and Brisbane and And the bowlers being probably not match ready, that's not the same as being fit. They're obviously fit, but there's a difference between that and match ready. I was looking back actually just earlier at the 1994 side that I brought here. And in the first three test matches, Darren Goff bowled 150 overs in those three tests. And I think the most that the bowlers have bowled here is Archer and Kars have bowled 80.

5:08So it's not as though they've had a huge workload, but they have looked kind of short of a gallop, haven't they?

5:14Nas:Yeah, and that shouldn't come as a surprise or news to this setup. I remember being at the Ove and we did that behind the scenes thing in the dressing room with Stuart Broad one morning. And they had those monitors and I asked Stuart about the monitors and what they actually monitor. And he referenced Australia. He referenced these bigger grounds. He referenced the amount of time you spend in the field. He referenced going from soft outfields onto drop-in pitches which are rock hard and the toll that takes on your body. and hence you need to be prepared physically, not just from network or from in the gym.

5:49Nas:You need to spend time in the field, 40 degree heat, and get used to it.

5:54Ath:Today, good innings from Jamie Smith, who found a bit of form at last. There are one or two question marks around him, but he's done enough today to cement his place for Melbourne. And Will Jacks, it's a strange position, isn't it? Because he's shown with the bat that he's very capable, both second innings at the Gabba, second innings here. But with the ball, he's not looked good enough to be the main spinner. So what are they going to do there?

6:18Nas:Well, you could argue he should just play as a batter who bowls a bit of offspin. So play at number three if you want in the next game. I wouldn't be playing Ollie Pope in the next game. I'd either play Bethel or Jax at three. I'll have to think about that carefully. And that's the other thing I'd have to say to this England. They've had four years to prepare for this Ashes series.

6:36Ath:The wind's picked up, by the way.

6:38Nas:You're going to blow your wig off. All the detritus. All the detritus. Lucky we haven't got broad here, actually. His wig would have gone by now. But what was I saying? About the spinner. They've had four years to prepare, and they get to Adelaide, and they've not picked a front-line spinner. Now, Stokes can look at that ball as much as he wants, and it was a good ball. But that, for me, is like when he got out to Nathan Lyon. But that, for me, is like a moment they're playing their best spinner, and we're playing a part-timer. And this pitch did spin on day four, day five. How did they get here, Michael Atherton, to a situation when they've had so much preparation?

7:12Nas:I mean, before a tour, how do they get to Adelaide and not play a front line spinner?

7:16Ath:Well, they've invested a lot in Shoei Bashir, but a combination of circumstances, his broken finger, the fact that he doesn't have a county team, the fact that there was no red ball prep, meant that he got to this game, because I think it was understandable to play Jax in the day-night game at the Gabba. I remember Australia left Nathan Lyon out there, so I agreed with that decision. But you put all those factors into play, and it meant that Bashir gets here, having had absolutely minimal cricket, and in the cricket that he had played against Australia A and in the Lilac Hill match, he hadn't bowled well.

7:52Nas:It's also a repercussion of picking some young left-field selections that are a bit raw, a bit naive, still learning their trade, picking them off a social media feed in Bashir's case. You think of Josh Hull. You think even Jacob Bethel, who hadn't batted in that position in county cricket. When you pick raw cricketers like that, and Rob Key came on our pod and said, oh, we get too worried about things like that. If they're young and if they're good enough, they're ready and we'll pick them at whatever age. But the problem with that is at that age, the peaks and the troughs are huge. They're massive difference between the two of them.

8:28Nas:If you pick Jack Leach for a tour, or you sort of know what you're going to get. When you pick Sherry Bashir...

8:33Ath:People always say that, but Jack Leach didn't go very well here four years ago.

8:37Nas:I'm using him as an example. I wouldn't pick Jack Leach. My point being is if you pick a cricketer like that, you sort of know what you're going to get. There's more consistency. His graph is like that. If you pick Bashir or Hull or Bethel, they go like that where they bowl really well against the West Indies at Edgbast and get a Pfeiffer with a bit of drop and a bit of spin and you go, there we go. but because they're not playing much Bethel Bashir then they go on this curve and then they're down here and he almost becomes unselectable something that's said about us look over there and see Stephen Finn standing something that was said about him he has become unselectable on a pitch

9:15Ath:that they needed him selectable and overall I mean for me we've been on a lot of ashes tours I think this is my my 10th and played in a few bad ones watched a few bad ones seen a couple of whitewashes. Actually, this has been as disappointing as any for me because I felt England had the cattle, had the tools to do the job here or to at least challenge. And I felt that there were weaknesses or areas to exploit in the Australian team. You know, they've been beaten here 3-0 in three test matches by a team that's only had Pat Cummins for one game, that hasn't had Josh Hazelwood for three, that hasn't had Nathan Lyon for one.

9:52Ath:And we've just seen him go off with a hamstring strain and he probably won't play the rest of the series. So, you know, when your record-breaking Ash's defeat here in 2002-03, that was against a truly great Australian team. And that is what makes it so disappointing for me here. And Ash's winning captain many, many years ago, Len Hunt, said you've got to play 25 % better than your best in Australia to win. What I feel about this team is that they've been 25 % below their best with bat, ball and in the field. And that is what makes it such a disappointing three games for me. Absolutely.

10:30Nas:If you'd told the England hierarchy here and back home that you're going to play against... Josh Ayswood isn't going to bowl a ball. Nathan Lyon's going to get injured. He's going to miss one test. Cummins is going to miss a couple of test matches. Smith is going to be out. They'd have gone, wow. We thought we had... I mean, Ricky Ponting, when we had him on the balcony at the Oval, he said, right, you've got a real good chance here. That was before all those injuries.

10:51Ath:Well, he described England's team as the best this century to come to Australia. I don't agree with that, by the way, because it's nowhere near as good as Strauss' team. But that's the point. They had the tools to make a challenge here.

11:02Nas:They did. And I quite like the fact that they've done things differently over the last four years, since the last Ashes Druby. I do like the fact that they've thought differently. They've planned ahead. If you carry on doing what you've always done, you'll get the same result. So they saw something. We need to do something different. I quite like that, that they've thought ahead, but actually if you've come here and looked at them in the last three weeks, four weeks, you'd have thought, really, is it that different from any other England side? They've not batted well, they've not bowled well, they've not caught well.

11:35Nas:Under key moments and pressure situations, they've buckled. So actually in trying to change, because every other England side, apart from that Strauss side, has come here and lost, and lost convincingly. Joe Root's now played 17 test matches in Australia, he hasn't won one. So that's why there was this rethink, but actually, even after the massive rethink and left field selections, and we must have pace and we must have batters that put bowlers under pressure, actually, we've ended up getting exactly what we've had on virtually every other Ashes tour, and that's what disappoints me, because I thought this time, with this opposition, it might have been slightly different.

12:12Nas:It has been no different.

12:14Ath:Well, well played, Australia. They've done the basics pretty well in this series, the fundamentals of cricket for long periods of time, and they clearly deserve their ashes wind. It's very windy here at Adelaide. There's all kinds of rubbish blowing around the stand, but we're going to clock off. We will speak to Rob Key in two days' time. We've got a couple of pods to do before the next game in Melbourne. Listening to Ben Stokes down there, at least he promised that his team would fly into the next two-test match. There'll be thousands of England fans coming to Melbourne and Sydney, and they deserve that, at least.

12:51Nas:Hi there, Emma Payton here from the Love the Darts podcast on Sky Sports. We all know that Christmas means darts and the World Championship takes centre stage for the next few weeks. So who is going to stop Luke the New Kalitler from defending his title? It is the biggest tournament ever and we'll be there to round up the action for you with daily podcasts from Alexandra Palace. So as you're eating your turkey sandwiches or picking out your favourite chocolate from the tub, why not keep up to date with all the latest news from Ali Pali by making sure you give us a follow. Just search for Love the Dance wherever you get your podcasts.