Australia...you're standing in it

It was Ian Rush who said that he could never get used to playing football in Italy; it was like living in a foreign country. Something similar applies to playing cricket in Australia. The surroundings are reassuringly Anglophone, from the right-hand-drive cars to the voice on the speaking clock. But appearances can be deceptive.

Traditionally, Australia in Ashes cricket have enjoyed far greater advantage from their conditions than England have from theirs. Australia won 46 and lost 43 Ashes Tests in England, but their lead at home stretches 80 to 54 – empirical attestation of Len Hutton’s advice that a touring team must be 25% better than Australia to beat them in their own backyard.

On the eve of a series in which England seek to parallel Hutton's feat of retaining the Ashes, the challenge to the English cricketer coming here is worth articulating. Firstly, he finds that that the ball bounces higher and carries further, while also requiring more art to move sideways, encouraging shorter lengths and more cross-bat strokeplay.

Then he finds Australian cricket mores famously tough. Nasser Hussain says that he made an abiding enemy of Mike Gatting when he failed to walk for a nick behind while playing for Combined Universities against Middlesex in the late 1980s. Australian cricketers not only give no quarter, they expect none. When Mike Atherton stood his ground after a nick and was reprieved, he quipped to Ian Healy: ‘When in Rome…’

Good Australian cricketers always seem to mature more quickly than their English counterparts - in part, ironically, because they winter in England almost as a matter of course. This is chiefly in order to round their experience; also because sterling’s strength relative to the Australian dollar ensures a good payday. English players seeking to narrow the trade deficit in cricketers, meanwhile, have to grin and bear the contempt for the standards of their game. On the honour board at his club in Perth, Alec Stewart’s name bears the inscription ‘Midland-Guildford and England’. As Stewart explained in his autobiography: ‘Nobody rates county cricket.’

Factors to do with the country rather than the cricket are just as significant. Heat is inseparable from our cricket experience: the earliest written reference to cricket in Australia, in the Sydney Gazette & New South Wales Advertiser on January 8 1804, is in the context of ‘intense’ and ‘immoderate’ weather. When Australian players wear jumpers, as Mark Waugh used always to wear a sleeveless pullover, it is for luck rather than warmth. Our grounds, moreover, are getting hotter: increasingly built up, coliseum-style; they are no longer cooled by natural breezes, while our sharper light and darker shadows can pose problems for fielders, especially late in the day.

The Australian landscape is confronting. One of the Bodyline tourists is said to have written home: ‘Dear Father, This country is just hundreds and hundreds of miles of damn all, and then hundred of miles more of it.’ Australian fans need no introduction, their unabashed nationalism streaked with sentimentality, their bonhomie a kind of challenge. ‘Yeah, it’s a great country,’ a cab driver informed Jim Swanton sixty years ago. ‘Remember it’s yours as well as ours – and if you don’t enjoy it here, it’ll be your own ruddy fault.’

It is less accurate to describe specific Australian conditions, however, than to talk of their range. Just as no Test nation features venues further flung, none has venues so various, in their shapes, sizes, pitches, personalities and characteristic meteorologies. It notoriously took an eternity to standardise the rail gauges of Australia’s states; they never did attend to the cricket grounds. This is a factor, indeed, that has subtly inflected selections. First-class runs in Adelaide have generally been felt a tad cheap – thus Darren Lehmann’s long apprenticeship before international selection. First-class runs in Brisbane, especially before Christmas by an opener, have always been thought hard-won – thus Matthew Hayden’s recurrent opportunities, and his succinct description in today's Courier-Mail of the Gabba pitch as ‘your best friend one day and your worst enemy the next’.

Australian cricket, nonetheless, is undergoing some subtle shifts. For reasons not entirely unassociated with money, cultivating pitches in situ being seen increasingly as an expensive indulgence, conditions have undergone a convergence in recent years. Perhaps the most disorienting change has been the transformation of Perth, formerly the hunting ground of Garth McKenzie, Dennis Lillee, Terry Alderman and Bruce Reid, into a pitch conducive to spin. Seven years ago, Australia’s selectors worried that young Brett Lee might get carried away by its pace and bounce, and decided to delay his Test debut until Melbourne. Just a few months ago, the promising Victorian leg-spinner Josh Mangan decided that his best opportunity lay in crossing the continent.

Ricky Ponting and Glenn McGrath have both complained recently about the increasing homogeneity of local conditions – specifically, of course, the idea that Australia might be sacrificing some of its home ground advantage. A longer-term concern is that it could well take a toll on the variety of its cricketers. That Australia has a team of the talents at present is in part a testimony to the opportunities offered by its terrain.

Australia is not such an alien landscape for the visiting cricketer as it was. The country is more cosmopolitan; the tours are more metropolitan. Internal distances that used to tax patience and credulity have been diminished, and intercontinental distances are no longer so intimidating; it's impossible to miss the Barmy Army heraldry around Brisbane, while Andrew Flintoff commented during his press conference today on the ‘unbelievable’ number of Preston natives he has met while strolling round. Yet after five weeks in India, England have not been here long enough to acculturate the differences on the playing field. For all the endless discussion of injuries and optimum formations, do not underestimate the dimension of the series impossible to change: that Australia are at home, and England away.