The Ashes is going to be so hot! The first few overs of the washed out game the other night were so wildly exciting, such a heated, compelling contest, so deeply felt. It didn’t matter that the game was washed out, it was like enough had happened already, just the promise that was offered up of a game of such great immensity was enough. The Australian openers were back at their pounding best, taking Gough’s first over for 14 or so. The English were congregating at the bowler’s end trying to come up with a plan to stop them, it looked like they were panicing after just one over of the real Australia. But whatever plans came out of the snap meeting worked and England hauled the boys back in. Gough was taken out of the attack after 2 overs (In this day and age when its all about haircuts I was most disappointed that Gough so quickly lost the intimations of a mohican that he was sporting during his blistering 20 20 spell at the start of it all. He was smoking then, red in the face, steam shooting from his hair as it stood on end – since he lost the length, & he only lost about 1.2 cm, he’s been flat as a tack, flat as his shaved head – cricket is a game of the finest margins). Simon Jones bowled beautiful lines and to carefully set plans – it was exquisite bowling. Gilchrist was no match for this sort of application. As precisely as he bowled, Jones threw haphazardly and collected Hayden on the chest with an unnecessary throw in the very vague direction of the stumps. Unnecessary maybe but the action certainly didn’t lack in brilliant drama and consequence. It’s set a battle tone for the entire Ashes. Hayden was pounding his bat into the ground in fury, pounding his chest and waving his big arms. Jones was waving his hands about in apology as the English fielders converged on the injured beast to make sure it didn’t bound away to plot its revenge, or simply start tearing those sorry flailing hands from Jones’ body. The contests from here on in were just what you don’t need when you really need to go to bed. Harmison to Ponting from one end. Jones to Hayden-in-need-of-a-pillow at the other. It lasted a few overs before Jones claimed Hayden’s wkt and promptly began beating his own chest in victory. It was all damned fine Cricket. I expect blood in the Ashes – I want eyeballing, I want breathing down necks, I want the gloves to come off, I want the administration and the media to get over the idea that cricketer’s shouldn’t get angry and shouldn’t get into a good meaningful stoush. There was nothing untoward about the incident – it was all perfectly well directed towards building the intensity of the cricket to come. In the end the storms came to cool things down. What was so great about the washout was that it meant those tedious cricket writers had no opportunity to talk about how great the game was and write the Hayden-Jones incident off as gone and forgotten in the face of the pure cricket events that followed. The coming of the storms meant that the incident really took precedence over the cricket, it became bigger, inhabited the series – of course it always was just part of the cricket but now its been made clear. The game was rendered meaningless (as it already was in some way – both teams are in the final) so that pure intensities could come to the fore and feed into all that cricket still to come. So hot and sensible!