The Spin | Ashes has lost focus with scandals engulfing ECB and Cricket Australia

After months of scandal, two already ordinary teams now look like something more tawdry and tarnished

The Ashes are coming, the Ashes are coming. And yet, if you were paying attention to cricket over the past couple of weeks, you may identify with a lack of enthusiasm. You may identify instead with a weariness, a wariness, a general swirling malaise. Australia and England, that pair, where those leading the game and those leading the teams have been draping themselves in the inverse of glory.

The two captains, as per the pre-series marketing, have dwindled to one captain, meaning that 100% of the remaining captains and 100% of the former captains in this series exist under a cloud. Australia’s anointed repairer of reputation, Tim Paine, resigned his commission via the national tradition of a teary public apology after his homespun erotica attained belated publication. England’s blameless golden child, Joe Root, has always been fiercely claimed as the property of Yorkshire, and thus must remain so, as a teammate who, Azeem Rafiq said in his testimony to a parliamentary hearing, was oblivious to racist chatter.

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