England celebrate as they look to life without Flintoff

So, after a fantastically fought test series, England have regained the Ashes by defeating Australia at The Oval. England were in fantastic form during the deciding test and ran out comfortable winners inside four days.

It was a superb day for English cricket and a distinctly average one for Australian cricket. Ricky Ponting may well point to the statistics of the series – his team led the batting and bowling averages – but the fact is that when it mattered, England performed.

Australia lost too many key sessions to win the series and when they had their bad spells, England were as ruthless as the tourists were self destructive. In my opinion, nobody can argue with the outcome. Strauss and co were far from incredible, but they did enough and that
is all that matters.

This victory was even more sweet for England after they were written off by several former Australian players in the build-up. Mark Waugh and Ian Chappell were just two people who decided that England were too average to win at The Oval.

Well, this didn’t quite work out did it? England may well be an average side in terms of World Cricket at the moment, but Australia are even more so. I wonder what Mr Chappell will make of the fact that England got their selection bang-on while Australia got theirs totally wrong?

Anyway, let’s move on from this. The final thing I wanted to talk about in this Ashes aftermath was Andrew Flintoff. As everyone knows, he has now stepped down from test cricket and there is no doubt he will be missed by everyone involved at England.

He has produced some magical moments in test cricket and will probably go down as the most popular English player of all time. The truth is
though that England need to move on from Freddie. They need to learn to cope without him.

As much as Flintoff was important to England, I actually think that this will be easier than everyone thinks. It was fitting that Stuart Broad – the player who can step into the all-rounder’s shoes – was the man of the moment in the final test at the Oval.

Had Freddie performed as Broad did at The Oval, everyone would be saying how England won’t be able to cope without him. However, to have
Flintoff enjoying a relatively quiet test and to have his predicted successor producing the match-winning spell was just perfect. It means
that England can move on without Freddie and they can move on in good spirits after a second consecutive home Ashes victory.

It is now time for the Twenty20 and One Day International games, but it seems fair to say that the real battle has already been won.

Barmy Army!!

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