As Australians deal with the fact  that our cricket team isn’t very good, Crikey Sports thought it timely to reflect on the history of the contest dating back to 1877 — when our English overlords began to rule over us — discounting the “good years”; the early 1920s, the Bradman years, half the 1950s, most of the 1970s and from 1989 until 2009.

Overall it’s been a pretty good run, now we can sit back and watch England humiliate us for at least the next few Ashes series.

My latest wordle (my first was last week) is constructed from captains who won an Ashes Test (the more Ashes Tests they won as captain, the larger their name appears). For England, the name Mike Brearley and WG Grace loom large, while for Australia Bradman, Border and Armstrong figure strongly.

While composing this two things struck me:

  1. The amount of English captains names Mike or Michael. It’s a little bit freaky actually.
  2. Take out Ponting’s 5-0 white wash of England in 2006-07 (where, let’s be honest, a monkey could have captained that star studded team against a pathetic English rabble) and his name would be minuscule.

Anyway, here we are:

wordle_captains_oz2

wordle_captains_england