Cinders

I scribbled something suitably misanthropic about the Ashes at Cricinfo this week, but whenever I am grumpy on this subject, I feel slightly sheepish, as though I have betrayed an important cause. The feeling is hard to describe; its a bit like the guilty pangs you experience at the pit of your stomach when you sneak into McDonalds (although not quite the same as the bowel-troubling pangs you feel having dined at McDonalds) or the creeping embarrassment of being caught watching the X Factor.

Perhaps it's not a principle that I'm betraying when I grumble about all things Burnt-Wood-In-Urn related, but the boy who looked forward to the arrival of the biennial intercontinental cricket confrontation almost as much as Christmas, birthdays, or school holidays. I've tried restarting that part of my brain, but I doubt if even electro-convulsive shock therapy, or several weeks LSD-assisted hypnotherapy would reawaken my Ashes enthusiasm. It's a shame, but there it is.

The question is why should a relatively rational cricket lover, with a long history of enjoying the Anglo-Australian dust-up, take against it so? These are the possibilities:

1. Patriotism I don't really do. I've nothing against people who want to wave flags, daub their faces, or pretend to enjoy that dirge about an alleged deity intervening to safeguard the well-being of an elderly monarch. But it's not for me. Celebrating the place where you were born because you were born there seems as daft to me as celebrating your family because you are related to them. There's nothing wrong with it, per se, but then you can say the same thing about tinned sardines, and I don't like those either.

So, as it has dawned on me in adulthood that I am not one of life's patriots, it is a logical extension to assume that I wouldn't care less whether one nation beat another nation at sport. There is a lot of truth here. My disinclination to care about the Ashes coincided with the end of the 2005 version. At some point during the Oval Test, or perhaps during the post-Oval stalemate celebrations in Trafalgar Square, I awoke, as from a vivid dream, and began to notice that there were an awful lot of flags about, that I was beginning to feel slightly nauseous at the opening strains of Jerusalem, and that I didn't really belong at this party.

2. The other possibility is that 2005 changed everything. My first Ashes was 1986/87, but my only recollection of that was my father writing down the score for me and leaving it on the kitchen table before he went to work, and grainy VHS footage of the one day series that followed it, featuring that dramatically naff 1970s style intro, a cartoon duck, and the inimitable Tony Greig and Bill Lawry.

From then on, it was Australian domination, series after series, to the point when it seemed that beating Australia at cricket was as impossible, yet as utterly essential, as beating Stephen Hendry at snooker or knocking down the Berlin Wall. Endless summers of disappointment, beginning in June with fanciful hopes, and ending in August amid recrimination, rebel tours, and five new players per Test, had caused a build up of repressed psychological anguish that would only be released if we beat Australia, Warne and all. After that, anything was going to be an anticlimax.

So it has proved. 2007/07 was a shambolic tribute to England's hilariously dysfunctional tourists of the 1990s. 2009 was a scrappy contest between two awful teams, hyped to the point of absurdity by an Ashes-obsessed cricket media. 2010/11 was the high water mark of Ashes drivel. A well-drilled, well-prepared England team beat one of the worst Australian collections ever to have expectorated on their palms in anger (although not without capitulating completely in Perth) and this was hailed by the English press as though Strauss had successfully returned from a mission to Mars, bringing Elvis and Jesus with him.

And maybe this is a media problem. The endless previews, the compulsion to add the A-word to every cricket feature, the painfully unfunny exchange of Twitter bon mots between former Ashes cricketers, all swirl together in a toxic, tedious cocktail that leaves you with a dull, aching sensation between the ears and the overpowering desire to emigrate to a non-cricket planet for the duration.