The Ashes 2005 Was The Time When Cricket Became The New Football

Forbes

5 days ago

England cricketers Andrew Flintoff with daughter Holly, Kevin Pietersen (C) and Michael Vaughan (R) ... More celebrates winning the Ashes on the team bus during the Ashes victory parade in London, 13 September, 2005. England regained the Ashes yesterday after drawing the final Test match and winning the series 2-1. AFP PHOTO/GARETH COPLEY/WPA POOL/PA (Photo by GARETH COPLEY / AFP) (Photo by GARETH COPLEY/AFP via Getty Images)
The Ashes is one of the longest-running sports tussles in the world and will kick off for its 74th edition at Perth this November. The drama of the current series between India and England is stirring memories of the memorable 2005 Ashes when, after 18 years of humiliation at home and abroad, England finally reclaimed the famous urn from Australia with a 2-1 victory. For one golden English summer, cricket was the head of class in national sport.
Michael Vaughan's winning team paraded through a 25,000-strong crowd in Trafalgar Square on top of a double-decker bus in a celebration usually reserved for all-conquering football teams or the World Cup rugby-winning heroes of 2003.
In the deciding match of the 2005 Ashes at the Oval, tickets were selling for over £1,000 each while a penthouse flat with a view of the ground was taken on a five-day let for 20 times that price. Test cricket had never been this compelling since Ian Botham's 1981 heroics. He was the original 'rock star' that Ben Stokes wants England's Bazball squad to be now.
On the pitch, there were A-list stars aplenty in the 2005 Ashes. The late, great Shane Warne took 40 wickets, the South African-born, skunk-haired Kevin Pietersen announced himself with a thrilling array of shots, and Andrew Flintoff performed magic with both bat and ball to help England over the line. 'Cricket, played like this, could stand on its own two feet. Indeed, it was variously the new football, the new rock'n'roll, the new everything,' said ESPNcricinfo.
The market conditions for a glorious summer were there in England. There was no competition from an international or European soccer tournament or an Olympic year. The team had risen from the nadir of being bottom of the Test rankings in 1999 to second having won 14 of their previous 18 Tests. Fast bowler Simon Jones said that the team 'felt like Premier League footballers." When the EPL kicked off, it was in the middle of a brilliant third Test at Old Trafford, where 10,000 people were locked out on the final day to see a thrilling finish. Manchester United's "Theatre of Dreams could not have been more passionate.
Crucially, Channel Four's free-to-air coverage, hosted by the ubiquitous Mark Nicholas allied with the expert delivery of Richie Benaud, Tony Greig, Michael Slater and Mike Atherton, cut through with a peak audience of 8.2 million. An estimated 22 million people in the United Kingdom watched at least 30 minutes of cricket during that summer.
A year later, the 2006 series between England and Sri Lanka was the first episode of a new four-year, £220m Sky Sports deal with the ECB (English Cricket Board), giving the station exclusive live rights to all home Test matches and one-day internationals. The 2005 Ashes zeitgeist moment had passed. Live access was reduced to subscription although highlights were still available for free-to-air. 'On average, it is fair to say that Sky's audiences are running at around one sixth of those on Channel 4 - precisely what critics of the deal feared and the game's administrators ignored,' said the 2007 Wisden Cricketer's Almanack.
LONDON, ENGLAND - JULY 14: Harry Brook of England shakes hands with Mohammed Siraj of India after ... More Day Five of the 3rd Rothesay Test Match between England and India at Lord's Cricket Ground on July 14, 2025 in London, England. (Photo by)
Yet when Test cricket had the general public in the palm of its hand 20 years ago, the ball was slipped to the highest bidder to futureproof the grassroots of the game. The Lord's Test match between England and India showed what a magical game the five-day format can be with two teams going at each other with bat, ball and words. It deserves a bigger audience, a bigger narrative and exposure of new stars. Then again, there was something about 2005's age of innocence that had a reach difficult to recapture, that sense of a new, bold team against a brilliant, but ageing side in a nascent digital age that was just gaining traction.
The cricket Test match cake is shared unequally between partners, with only the Big Three of India, Australia and England attracting broadcasters, sponsorships and ticket sales when playing among themselves. For the rest, it's a loss-making business.
World Test champions South Africa have no home Tests until October 2026. Cricket South Africa simply can't fill the stadiums, and it's a similar story with the West Indies who were just shot out for 27 in front of a sparse crowd in Sabina Park. The ICC is now reportedly looking into a tw0-tier system of promotion and relegation in the next cycle of the World Test Championship.
The glory of playing for a country is being challenged by the new money that T20 cricket brings. The IPL is cricket's richest franchise league, worth a cool $12 billion. Cricketers are globetrotters now with over 20 such leagues like the BBL, PSL, and Major League Cricket in the States offering the kind of remuneration that is beyond national cricket boards.
The Hundred, English cricket's spin on the IPL, has now taken over the whole of August, a month where Pietersen, Strauss, Flintoff and company once wore the whites in front of a captivated households. Nothing ever stays the same, but the Ashes 2005 will forever be 'the greatest series' to many who saw what a box set drama Test cricket can still be.