The Ashes: Chastened Australia players can stop hostile crowds crossing the line

England’s managing director of men’s cricket, Ashley Giles, has said that he would support Joe Root, the captain, were he to see fit to halt play in the face of discrimination or racism from the stands. The India team stopped the third Test in Sydney in January, in the belief that their players had been racially abused on two successive days. A small number of fans were ejected as play was halted for ten minutes. Ravichandran Ashwin, the spin bowler, said it was not a new experience for India players in Australia.

The allegations of institutional racism at Yorkshire by their former bowler, Azeem Rafiq, have also brought the issue into sharper focus.

For the first time since the 1970s, significant numbers of English fans will not be present to watch their Test team in Australia. Covid restrictions are onerous on Queensland’s borders, meaning the crowd will be dominated by locals keen to see their team repeat their recent crushing home victories over England.

The difficulty of entering the state from neighbouring regions such as New South Wales is likely to suppress the gate figures but Queensland Cricket says it expects more than 30,000 people to watch the opening day at the Gabba, a ground with a capacity of 35,000. Attendances on days two and three are expected to be in the region of 25-30,000. Full houses are possible as there are no Covid limits in the region.

The Gabba has a reputation as a hostile environment for visiting Ashes sides, perhaps because English fans prefer to hold off their visits until the festive Melbourne and Sydney Tests.

In a new ECB documentary, The Ultimate Test, Root recalled his experience of playing a Test in Australia for the first time in 2013-14. “I knew it was going to be brutal, I knew it was going to be hostile … it almost felt like genuine hatred towards me as an individual,” he said. “Absolutely it intimidated me. If I’d been asked about this five years ago, I’d have said no it didn’t. But it did.”

England’s probable XI for the first Test includes four players who have not appeared in Ashes matches in Australia before: Rory Burns, Haseeb Hameed, Jos Buttler and Ollie Robinson.

Australian crowds tend to take the lead from their players and the team are making concerted attempts to repair an image tarnished by several scandals. When England toured under Mike Denness in 1974-75 and were torn apart by the pace bowling of Dennis Lillee and Jeff Thomson, their bruised and battered batsmen felt Ian Chappell and his men incentivised their fans with their overt aggression on the field.

More than 775,000 people watched that series and the most recent Ashes in Australia, in 2017-18, drew 866,732, the second-highest aggregate attendance in the history of Anglo-Australian encounters down under. With people starved of sport during the pandemic, big gates seem assured over the coming weeks, even without England’s travelling contingent.

Root has said that the England management were trying to prepare the new faces in the squad — ten are on their first Ashes tours — for what was in store. “You can never really ready yourself for it [but] we’re trying to ready the guys as best as possible,” he said. “It is about trying to calm your emotions and just enjoying the experience.

“It is a great opportunity and a brilliant part of your career to be involved in. It is easy to say and sometimes not as easy to do. Throw absolutely everything into it, that’s all you can do as a player … show everyone how good you are.

“We always appreciate the support we get away from home. It’s phenomenal. I’m sure the Brisbane Barmies will do everything they can to support us.

“It’s an opportunity for us to get really tight [knit] and stand up to that and make sure it doesn’t affect the way we go about things.

“We just embrace it, enjoy the atmosphere and try and thrive off that sort of arena as much as we can.”

-The Times