Our summer club season just began last week. Now at the beginning of each season, I set myself some sort of goal. Two seasons ago, I began an experiment to reinvent myself as a front-line legspinner/tailend batsman .

When Australia lost the 2005 Ashes, the scapegoating and finger pointing was immediate, fierce and frantic. Billy Bowden

When you get hurt in a relationship, it’s tempting to close yourself off to prevent future pain. Similarly, the human reaction for any Australian fan given the state of the 2009 Ashes is to give up hope that we can somehow chase a further 466 runs over the next two days without losing ten wickets. It would be a world record run chase on a wicket that already looked like a 5th day pitch on day 2.

The 2009 Ashes has swung backwards and forwards so many times, you can get whiplash if you’re watching too closely. Australia dominated in Cardiff but couldn’t close the deal.

The 4th Test was hailed as the 2009 Ashes decider. Of course it wasn’t – it never was going to be barring an English victory. But now, we come to the 5th Test which most definitely is the decider

Over the last week, a dossier on the English cricket team by Justin Langer was leaked to the press. Here are some of the highlights: “England players work very hard on shining the ball after the lacquer is gone. They use Murray mints religiously to get it to shine up.” “Because they play so much cricket, as soon as it gets a bit hard you just have to watch their body language to see how flat and lazy they get…