Cricket Omens: Insights into the Ashes from Peter Pan, Eurovision, and Taggart | Ashes 2023 | The Guardian

There have been 72 Ashes series and 36 have been played in England. Of the series played in England the hosts have won 50% and Australia 38.9%. But the consequences of hosting the first match of the series at Edgbaston, as this year, is massively in the tourists’ favour – Australia have gone on to win 83% of the series and have never lost. If England hold the opening game anywhere else their win percentage leaps to 62.1% and they lose just 27.6%. This will be the eighth Birmingham Ashes opener, following 1902 (Australia won the Ashes), 1909 (Australia won), 1961 (Australia won), 1975 (Australia won), 1997 (Australia won), 2001 (Australia won) and 2019 (drawn series).

Ben Stokes should become the 49th Englishman to captain his team in two or more Ashes matches and the sixth whose surname starts and ends with the same letter (a phenomenon we’ll call SESL for brevity). He follows Andrew Flintoff, Mike Gatting, Tony Greig, Andrew Strauss and Norman Yardley. This is not a good thing: though Strauss and Gatting won the Ashes, England didn’t win a single Ashes Test under Yardley, Greig or Flintoff. No less than 83.7% of qualifying non-SESL English captains won at least one Ashes Test, but only 40% of SESL captains. For comparison, Australia’s Ashes record under their two SESL captains, Jack Ryder and Harry Trott, is slightly better than average, with a 46% win ratio compared with 40.1% under non-SESL leadership.

Edgbaston has previously hosted 15 Ashes Tests and in 13 of those at least one captain has been dismissed for a score below 10. When it happens to just one captain in a match, that captain does not win the Ashes. When it happens to two captains in a match, whoever scores fewer runs loses the Ashes. This is a near-immutable law, broken only by Allan Border. In 1993 he scored three and won the Ashes anyway and in 1989, when he and David Gower both scored eight and one of them had to win the thing.

In April, Disney released Peter Pan & Wendy, a live-action reimagining of JM Barrie’s classic story starring Jude Law. This is marvellous news for England, who are always inspired by the story of a boy who never grew old (Jimmy Anderson particularly so, it seems). The story was originally performed as a play and though it opened at the Duke of York’s Theatre in London on 27 December 1904 (England won the Ashes in 1903-04) most of the 145 performances fell in 1905 (England won the Ashes in 1905). Barrie’s novel was published in 1911 (England won the Ashes in 1910-11) and the script of the play was published in 1928 (England won the Ashes in 1928-29), before Disney released their original animated adaptation in 1953, with the UK premier taking place during the fourth Test (England won the Ashes in 1953). While sequels and spin-offs have been less auspicious, all sorts of faithful retellings (including the ITV two-hour drama broadcast in 2015 – England won the Ashes in 2015) have transported Australia’s chances of victory to never-never land.

“The Crucible,” wrote Arthur Miller, “was an act of desperation” – and any follower of the Ashes knows all about those. The play is on at London’s Gielgud Theatre and England have never lost the Ashes while there has been a production running in the capital. The Crucible premiered in January 1953 at the Martin Beck Theatre on Broadway (a non-qualifying production, but for the record England won the Ashes in 1953) and then debuted in London between April and June 1956 (England won the Ashes in 1956). It was running at the Old Vic throughout the 1965‑66 Ashes (drawn series), starred Mark McManus – better known to generations of TV viewers as Taggart – at what is now the Harold Pinter Theatre through the summer of 1981 (Botham’s Ashes, won by England), and its last Ashes-coinciding summer resurrection was at the Young Vic in 1985 (England won 3-1).

Sweden won the Eurovision Song Contest in Liverpool in May, with Tattoo performed by Loreen. This will be the fourth time England have hosted the Ashes and the UK hosted Eurovision in the same year and they have not lost any of those series (the 1968 and 1972 series were drawn and 1977 won 3-0). It is the second time England have hosted the Ashes in the year of a Sweden victory after 2015, when Mans Zelmerlöw won in Vienna with Heroes and England’s own heroes took the urn 3-2.