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“The England boys richly deserve their MBEs and OBEs and I was delighted when I heard on the TV I was going to get my own Sun gong!”

- attributed to Gary Pratt, The Sun, 30.12.05

Rupert Murdoch’s well-known daily comic book, The Sun, was right on the ball last week when England’s specialist twelfth man Gary Pratt missed out on an MBE.

I think it’s fabulous how the Blair Government has opened up the honours lists to people who would never have been contemplated in stuffier times. Congratulations indeed to Sir Tom Jones (though I’d still like to know if David Furnish is now to be called Lord John, or even Lady John, following the recent betrothal). But I think they’re going a bit overboard in rewarding national sporting victories.

A dangerous precedent was set when England won the 2003 Rugby World Cup, and now we have the 2005 Ashes squad all getting gongs. There’s an OBE for Michael Vaughan, and MBEs for the other eleven who played in the Tests against Australia (Bell, Collingwood, Flintoff, Giles, Harmison, Hoggard, G Jones, S Jones, Pietersen, Strauss, Trescothick). Also getting OBEs are coach Duncan Fletcher, chairman of selectors David Graveney, and team manager Phil Neale.

Let’s just look into this a bit further:
Ian Bell has an MBE for scoring 171 runs in ten innings at an average of 17.10;
Paul Collingwood has an MBE for playing one Test, scoring 17 runs and bowling seven overs;
and Wheelie bin Giles has an MBE for scoring 155 runs at 19.37 and taking 10 wickets at 57.80!

And who missed out?
There were the players selected in the twelve or thirteen-man squads who were not required in any of the final elevens: Chris Tremlett and James Anderson.
There were the substitute fielders: James Hildreth, who caught Ricky Ponting in the First Test, and Gary Pratt, who infamously ran Ponting out in the Fourth, and the others whose names I do not have at hand but were most definitely part of England’s Ashes campaign.
There was the remainder of the England management team: Troy Cooley among others…

And really, was Andrew Flintoff’s contribution worth a mere MBE? And while Clare Connor has been elevated to an OBE for leading the women’s team to victory in their Ashes, what of her team-mates?

And let’s face it: is winning the Ashes really on the same level as winning a Rugby or Football World Cup? Let’s be realistic here.

And then there’s all the players in all those Ashes-winning sides of years past who never got a gong: let’s rustle up some examples - Arnold Sidebottom (1985), Ken Shuttleworth (1970-71), Don Kenyon (1953), Tommy Mitchell (1932-33, the Bodyline series)… I could go on.

As the Trescothick Era of English Cricket dawns in Multan today, it’s worth noting that the Guardian have published a book of their infamous OBO (over-by-over) logs of the 2005 Ashes. The whole lot by the looks of it.

Complete with a preamble and a, er, postamble by Rob Smyth, I think this would be great reading for someone familiar with the events of this year’s Ashes but who didn’t, or couldn’t, follow the Guardian shenanigans on the net.

What’s more, I make a cameo appearance on page 320!

“Is It Cowardly To Pray For Rain? The online Ashes chronicle of a nation’s office-bound nervousness” by Mike Adamson, James Dart, Sean Ingle and Rob Smyth (Guardian Books, Abacus, 2005) ISBN 034911983X Paperback. Recommended retail price £7.99.

(NB: if you buy a copy of the book from amazon.co.uk by following the link alongside this article, I receive a commission)

Three items about cricket on America’s NPR (National Public Radio) over the past couple of weeks.

A couple of brief post-Ashes mentions on September 17: one on Weekend Edition Saturday (links to RA and WMA clips), and one on WBUR’s Only A Game (direct link to the RA clip). Neither are terribly complementary about the length of Test matches. However, neither makes the observation that your average PGA tournament is almost as long.

More positive is the report on Tuesday evening’s All Things Considered about cricket in northern California. (Link to page containing RA and WMA clips.)

My thanks to Robert for pointing some of these out for me.

ANDREW DENTON: What are you going to do with the rest of your life?

MARK LATHAM: Well I’m very happy being a home dad and the arrangements we’ve got at home are fantastic so why change a winning formula?

ANDREW DENTON: When the boys are 16, 17, 18, when they’re getting out of the house, what are you going to do?

MARK LATHAM: I’ll be carrying their cricket bags…

[studio audience] LAUGHTER

MARK LATHAM: …As they play for Australia and try and reclaim the Ashes.

LAUGHTER

MARK LATHAM: It may, it might take that long before we get them back you know so…

ANDREW DENTON: And when they’re…

MARK LATHAM: I’m investing heavily in their cricket skills.

ANDREW DENTON: And when they’re 22 and tell you to please bugger off dad, I want my own life, what are you going to do then?

MARK LATHAM: I’ll watch them on tele…

- Mark Latham interviewed by Andrew Denton, Enough Rope, ABC-TV, first aired 15.9.05

A week is a long time. Period. As I sit down to start doing a post-mortem of the Ashes post-mortems, I shake my head at the cricketing analogies coming forth in some of the most bizarre places. (Latham, it should be recalled, became in 1980 the first cricketer in the history of the Sydney grade competition to be suspended for abusing an umpire. But that’s not the reason why he’s been in the headlines this past week.)

This post-Ashes paper rout is going to be a serialisation that will take me days. So be it. This is today’s instalment.

Mark Latham isn’t the only person who blames everyone else for failure under his leadership:

You would expect world leaders of the stature of George Bush and Ricky Ponting to understand that the buck ends with them, but track their recent performances and you realise, no.

- Barbara Toner, The buck stops somewhere else, The Guardian, 17.9.05

Mention of the buck stopping somewhere else brings up the master of that art, John Winston Howard. You could blame the Australian journalist for raising the following question five minutes into a press conference (Real Video) at the United Nations on September 14 concerning a round table discussion at the World Summit. The fact is that he loves the Australian media serving him up these powder-puff questions when they should be grilling him on his destructive doublespeak on UN matters.

FEMALE AUSTRALIAN JOURNALIST: Mr Howard, on another international matter, was Tony Blair in the meeting and did he give you any stick about the cricket?

JOHN HOWARD: No he didnt give me any stick and he sort of accepted my congratulations. He enjoyed every bit of it. He was very happy, he was very polite. He said the Australian team behaved as we would expect them to in a very gracious fashion, and he was very pleased and I dont blame him, they’ve waited a long time, and… can’t really complain. He was good humoured about it. Just about every Prime Minister from a cricket-playing nation had something to say about it. It was the principal word of discussion. I was surrounded by the Caribbean representatives during the photograph and President Musharraf said last night that Pakistan was playing England soon and he would see that his team avenged Australia. So it was all very good-humoured and underlines the fact that it’s been a wonderful series for the game and that’s very important for those of us who love it so much.

(The transcription is mine. If anyone watching the video can ID the journalist in question I’d be greatful.)

The Guardian’s online over-by-over coverage of the final day of the Fifth Test has come top of website editor Emily Bell’s Guardian.co.uk Top 5 for this week. Among the edited highlights reproduced from that tumultuous day was my remark about Kevin Pietersen and the dead raccoon under his helmet.

Emily’s column is online on the Guardian website today and on page 32 of the print edition - which I believe is the first time I’ve been named in print in their paper.

The original OBO is here, and it’s curious to note that the subs for today’s paper moved my remark from the 67th over to the 72nd.

Yes it’s always good to have an historic sporting triumph to keep civil unrest off the front pages…

Congratulations to you and the whole team on your fantastic series win.

It’s been sport at its very best, played in a wonderful spirit between two exceptional sides, and has gripped the whole country.

With so many people following this extraordinary series ball by ball, I’m not sure our economy could stand many more days like today - or our nerves any more excitement.

But by bringing the Ashes back after so long, you have given cricket a huge boost and lit up the whole summer.

Congratulations to everyone on an unforgettable series and a fantastic win.

With best wishes
Tony Blair

Ah yes, sport and politics can be such a hilarious mix sometimes.

Here’s an extract from the hansard from the House of Reps session in Canberra earlier this evening. By way of background, the Dramatis Personae of this vignette are as follows:

Bob Baldwin - portly Liberal member for the NSW seat of Paterson;
Kim “Bomber” Beazley - Leader of the Federal Opposition. Jokingly blamed John Howard earlier today for losing the Ashes.
John Howard - Currently in New York to undermine the United Nations World Summit on the Millenium Development Goals. Reportedly followed the end of the Fifth Test via a specially arranged uplink to his hotel room (which sounds to me like a laptop logged onto BBC Five Live).
Weasel - Prime Minister of Australia since 1996.

Warmest congratulations to you, the England team and all in the squad for the magnificent achievement of regaining the Ashes. This has been a truly memorable series and both sides can take credit for giving us all such a wonderfully exciting and entertaining summer of cricket at its best.

ELIZABETH R

- The Queen of Australia, among other countries, displays her partisanship in a congratulatory message to Michael Vaughan

I wasn’t kidding when I compared the end of The Oval Test to the closing ceremony of the Olympic Games. Today feels like the day after the end of an Olympics. Montreal 1976 to be precise.

It was a drama, thriller and comedy rolled into one, though not a tragedy. Nothing much is genuinely tragic in sport, least of all an end of 16 years’ one-way traffic.
- Gideon Haigh, The Guardian

Here’s the CBBC Newsround overview of England’s victory.

More links and observations as the week progresses. It’s what will be said in the weekend papers that I think will be most interesting.

Surely this means pm howard will lose the next election.
- Nick Whittock, Ashes

I have just witnessed what can only be described as Test cricket’s equivalent of the lowering of the Olympic flag, folding it up and carrying it away. After players left the field for bad light with Australis requiring 337 to win from 18.2 overs, umpires Rudi Koertzen and Billy Bowden returned to the field, marched down the pitch, turned around, looked at the sky, looked at each other, marched down to each wicket and lifted the bails.

England have won the Ashes. Congratulations to a team that fully deserved it. I’ll do a post-mortem in the morning (or more likely afternoon). My Midwinter-Midwinter votes for Day Five were: 3 pts - Kevin Pietersen; 2 pts - Shane Warne; 1 pt - Ashley Giles. That makes Shane Warne my player of the series, and I expect to hear in the morning that he will have the inaugural Compton-Miller Award as well.

I love that impromptu finish to the game, a masterful achievement from the umpires in turning farce into slapstick. I bid you goodnight with the news that Phil Jaques has carried his bat for Australia A against Pakistan A.