How to win The Ashes Down Under

0:02Gabby Logan:This is a Global Player original podcast. England's men last won the Ashes in Australia 15 years ago. In fact, it's been a decade since England even held the Ashes.

0:13Steven Finn:Our guest today played a key role in both of those historic victories. Former England fast bowler Stephen Finn.

0:19Gabby Logan:The road between those victories, though, was a very bumpy one for Stephen. At the 2014 Ashes, he was declared unselectable and sent home after struggling with his mental health. and then he staged a miraculous comeback, taking eight wickets at Edgbaston in 2015.

0:34Steven Finn:So why does Stephen think this England side have got the best chance in 15 years to turn the tide and win down under?

0:41Gabby Logan:Welcome to The Sports Agents.

0:51Gabby Logan:The Sports Agents.

0:53Steven Finn:With Gabby Logan and Mark Chapman. Hello, Mark.

0:58Gabby Logan:Hi, Gabby.

0:59Steven Finn:So in a moment, former England fast bowler Stephen Finn. I know you've been chatting with him already, haven't you, in your day job?

1:05Gabby Logan:I talked to him, yes, I talked to him. I talked to him loads and he works with me on various things. He's really starting to get me to believe a little bit. I mean, it's going to be very, very hard. But I'm so, this is one of the great, this is one of the great sporting occasions. It is.

1:27Steven Finn:And I want to tap into your memories of the ashes. Now, you are much more a cricket person than I am. However, I'll kick you off with 2005. I gave birth to twins and I don't know if you've ever breastfed twins. It's a full time job, basically. And so that summer, my God, did I love my cricket? Because all I did was sit there. It was a hot, sticky summer. And that's also not fun, by the way. Take that image out of your head. And I sat there holding in what is called the rugby ball hold. my babies just kind of you know drinking very slowly uh but i didn't care because it was such and i don't know if you remember there were kind of repeats through the night so i would get up at three in the morning and there was always ashes coverage on so that is my ashes series hands down

2:11Gabby Logan:um i mean that was that 2005 is still one of the great ones i can remember that sunday morning of of the edge baston test and england needing that final wicket and just pacing up and down in front to the television all the time. Like an expectant father.

2:28Steven Finn:To bring it back to the theme.

2:30Gabby Logan:Waiting, waiting for that final wicket. England's striving for this last wicket. They've been doing that for a while. Harmson comes up and bowls and Kasparovic goes back and parries one as he caught down the leg side.

2:42Mark Chapman:There's an appeal for Kass. He's out. England have won. England have won by two runs.

2:50Gabby Logan:I also went, I went to the final day at the Oval with somebody who sadly is no longer with us, Keith Bunker, who was a sports producer and really helped me out very early on in my career and sadly died several years ago from cancer. And we went to that final day when England won, which was just one of the great days. Shane Warne being told on the boundary that he'd just dropped the ashes because he dropped Peterson, I think it was, at Slip. Peterson was incredible that afternoon or that day rather it was just a glorious glorious day to be at cricket and then I you know you you get for these series down under and we'll talk to Stephen about this about the first ball of a series down under and you sit there and you get so excited and right here we go and then Steve Harmison bowls his first ball at slip or whatever oh my god this is not gonna this is not gonna go well Nasser Hussain winning the toss and choosing to bowl at Brisbane and Australia racking up about 800 for one or whatever.

3:56Gabby Logan:So there are so many memories, so many moments that just stick there. But that day at the Oval was just...

4:03Steven Finn:Well, we did reminisce, didn't we, about the Ashes in a hilarious chat with Phil Tufnell. And he has written a book with his Ashes heroes documented in there. And there's 50 of them. That was earlier this month. So you can catch up with that and all our past episodes on YouTube, Global Player, or wherever you get your podcasts.

4:18Gabby Logan:I still just laugh to myself about that chat with Tuffers and the fact that even the Australian umpires were sledging him. You can get in touch, thesportsagents at global.com on email, messages on social media or via the link in the episode description.

4:32Steven Finn:Next up, three-time Ashes winner, Stephen Finn. Stephen Finn, welcome to the Sports Agents. We've been talking Ashes quite a bit lately, as you can imagine. Tuffers was on talking about his Ashes heroes. Your Ashes Files is out right now. It's a very different take on your personal experience with the Ashes. Now, Tophers was quite optimistic. I think you're quite optimistic, aren't you, that they can finally win another series down in Australia?

4:58Mark Chapman:Yeah, I am. And I see similarities kind of to the way that we went down there in 2010-11 in the sense that... We've got a lot of tall, fast bowlers. Well, we've got that and quick, fast bowlers. But I think on the other side of the fence, you need there to be a degree of turbulence in the Australian camp for cracks to start to appear because over the last 13 years since we went for the 2013-14 Ashes they've had a very settled team every time you go down there you almost know exactly to a man who you're going to face but there are a lot of question marks in the build-up to this first test match around the Australian team who what is the makeup of their top three how are they going to fit both their all-rounders into their lineup will they go with an all-seam attack in Perth their captain Pat Cummins isn't available for the first test at the very least so there's a degree of turbulence there that that makes me believe that Australia aren't as settled as they have been previously and I think that the attitude with which England play is something that one Australians will really respect even though they're getting a lot of stick in the papers and in the media down there at the moment I think when it comes to the cricket actually being played I think England standing there and puffing their chest out and not allowing themselves to be blown away by Australia as has happened in the last three away ashes series I think will serve them really well and they'll gain the respect of the Australian public for playing that way and I just think it's a great opportunity for England I really do see it as that the uncertainty around Australia

6:28Gabby Logan:is around selection yes the uncertainty around England is the majority of the top order can't seem to buy a run so it's slightly different isn't it because some of those Australians where there are question marks over selection i've actually had quite good domestic sheffield shield campaigns whereas england i know it's a different format in the white ball in new zealand but the

6:53Mark Chapman:some of some of the batters didn't look in great nick no they they didn't but like you say it's a different format a different country different conditions so yeah i'm not overly concerned about the fact that the the batters didn't score heaps of runs in new zealand clearly they're going to have to sharpen up by the time they do land in Australia and and they all get together and play that warm-up game they have against the Lions but all of this has to be caveated with this is one of the most difficult things for an England team to go and do there's a reason why only two teams have won there since the the 70s or 80s and we can't forget that England haven't won a test match in Australia since 2011 when we won that fifth test match in in Sydney 14 years ago 13 out of 15 Exactly.

7:37Mark Chapman:So that is the caveat that all of this comes with. Australia is an incredibly hard place to go and win. But I do firmly believe that this is England's best chance in 15 years to be able to win down there. Australians like to latch on to that statement and say, oh, you think you're going to win? You need to listen carefully to the language. This is England's best chance in 15 years to win down there.

8:00Steven Finn:You were 21 years old in that series, took 14 wickets in the first three tests. You must have just thought, oh, why has everybody just made this so hard? You're in that zone. It must have felt like your whole career was going to be like this and similarly players around you. So just can tap into the mental state of that team and why they were so successful, because it feels listening to you today and tough as a couple of weeks ago and anybody who talks about the mental side of these Ashes series, you know, you've almost got to win that battle first. You've got to somehow drown out the noise that's coming from the Australian public and press while creating your own narrative, which is quite, I mean, that's quite energy sapping in itself, isn't it?

8:41Mark Chapman:Yes, it can be. But I think you need that siege mentality of the team together taking on Australia and the Australian public. And I think that this team do have that siege mentality. The mentality that I had when I went on that 2010 tour, I was 21 years old and I was so naive about what I was walking into that I just went into it completely eyes wide open saying to myself, this isn't the last chance you're going to have to play in Australia. you hopefully you're going to have a long international career where you'll have other bites of the cherry and I went into it just thinking just try your hardest all you can do is try your hardest and if it's not your time or you're too young and you're too inexperienced then that's okay that doesn't matter and actually I went through the rest of my career trying to find that naive mindset again because that's when you bowl your best when you're free when you've got no baggage when you can just stand at the top of your mark take a deep breath and completely focus on what's happening at the other end.

9:40Gabby Logan:When you got thrown the ball then to bowl your first delivery, were you aware of any reaction in the crowd? What were you thinking as you stood at your mark and looked? Who was at the other end? I don't know.

9:55Mark Chapman:The first ball, I'd be lying if I said I could remember the very first ball. I can remember my first wicket, which was Simon Cattage, which came in my first spell, caught and bowled, where he leading-edged one back to me and I dived forward and caught it just off the ground and then toss the ball up. It's full and it's gone.

10:13Gabby Logan:Six foot eight, down at pace to catch a beauty.

10:17Steven Finn:Super catch, very hard. Six foot seven, six foot eight,

10:21Gabby Logan:the bend over down at those toes, stretch the hamsters. He managed to get down. He was alert enough that he could catch it. It's exactly what Steve Finn needed.

10:30Mark Chapman:So I can remember that very vividly. But in Australia, the grounds are so big that actually it's just a wall of noise. So the Gabba is 40 ,000, and you're stood there in the middle, a long way away from it with the ball in your hand. And you've got processes that you go through that allow you to get tunnel vision, to just focus on the 22 yards of the pitch, which then means that you could be in a net, you could be in the park, you could be anywhere. Through your processes, it helps you help make that feel the same.

11:00Gabby Logan:In 2010, 2011, not your first ball, but how much discussion was there about how important the first ball of the series was? And obviously, you know, you could go back to, I think Zach Crawley in the last Ashes hit the first ball for four, didn't he? Before that, Rory Burns was bowled around his legs, very first ball. I think the majority of people listening will remember Steve Harvester's first ball. I can't remember what the year was. That was 6-7. 6-7 down under that went past third slip. So actually your 2010-2011 was the first one down under since Harmi bowled at first slip. What was the discussion about that first ball?

11:47Mark Chapman:Because it does set a tone. It does set a tone. We didn't focus on the very first ball. We focused on the game as a whole and then breaking that game down into segments. And it didn't go great for us. Strauss got out in the first over, fourth ball. And that first over, so I went up, I was excited. I've watched the Ashes all the time when I was younger. I went up to the viewing gallery because you have to walk up through the crowd to the viewing gallery. And I sat there for the first over. I was like, great, this is amazing, Ashes cricket. And then Strauss got out, caught gully, fourth ball. And I was like, no, no, I'm going back to the dressing room.

12:19Mark Chapman:So I don't want to see or hear this live. So disappeared back down to the dressing room and effectively watched the rest of the test match from a TV, but on a slight delay. So the TV is delayed so you can hear the stomps and the bashing of the crowd above you and the stadium shaking and then you see what's happened on the TV. So Siddle took a hat trick that day and I was batting number 11. So the first wicket went, the ground shaking. The second wicket went, the ground shaking. And then it comes up on the TV and then people are climbing over each other to find their pads, to get their bat, their box, the whole lot.

12:57Mark Chapman:So it was pandemonium in there. So my first day of Ashes cricket was complete carnage. But what we always said we were going to do in those moments was that we were going to push back against Australia. And we did so. We fought back with the ball. Even though they got a big score, we still fought back. And then with the bat in the end of that first test, 517 for one, that felt like a win when we left the Gabba and we carried that into the next test match. So it's imperative that England do fight back against Australia because they'll be respected for it.

13:30Steven Finn:Are you able now to enjoy the Ashes? Because it does seem like it's got the highs and the lows of you as a person, of you as a cricketer kind of all tied up in it, as you'll read when you read the book. Not you read the book, obviously. I'm talking to others. I've read it a few times. Yeah, I imagine you have. I don't know if you know this, but it's quite emotional.

13:52Mark Chapman:Well, I cried during reading the audiobook, so I voiced the audiobook and I had to pause three or four times.

13:59Gabby Logan:I mean, you'd be surprised how many people probably claim to write a book and haven't actually written it and still don't read what they've put in it, I would imagine.

14:07Steven Finn:Are you able to, though, look forward to this series and enjoy the Ashes?