The Sun
England administered such a savage beating that some people are actually starting to feel sorry for Australia. That’s right, sympathy — pity, even — for a cricketing nation that gloatingly thrashed the living daylights out of us Poms for almost two decades. But such is England’s superiority in this Ashes series that the cry has already gone up: ‘Come on, Cobbers, give us a game.’
There is an increasingly macabre fascination about whether England can complete a 5-0 whitewash. Blimey mate, there are still three matches to go. But, unless Australia can find a way of challenging England pretty damn quick, this series is going to turn into a humiliating mismatch.
The Guardian
less than a fortnight into England’s and Australia’s conjoined 10-Test Ashes mega-summer it is already tempting to wonder if all this might have been, if not quite a mistake, then perhaps a classic case of too much of a good thing.
Certainly as England ambled their way through Australia’s single-ply batting order … it was hard to avoid the sense of a fatal diminishing of intensity, perhaps even the first stages of an inexorable descent into glazed and sated cricketing somnolence.
“Two Tests into the back-to-back series it is starting to look like what it is: a decent team and a poor team playing each other 10 times in a row for no clear reason beyond their own grand and illustrious shared history.”
The Daily Telegraph
The defeat leaves Australia and the series, as a contest at least, in a parlous state. When England’s cricket teams were routinely getting skewered in the Ashes between 1989 and 2005, mischievous Aussie administrators used to suggest playing England over four-day Tests.
Well this one finished just inside that limit, so perhaps it should be put back on the table, with the hope it might bring them an odd draw, at least until they find their feet again.’
The Times
The Ashes are done for another series: just nine days, but there has been enough cricket in that time to know that the task of winning three consecutive Tests to overturn a 2-0 deficit is beyond Australia. Only once in Ashes history has that happened, and these Australians are no history boys in the making. Not in the winning sense, at any rate.
Australia did not just lose a Test match yesterday, they lost some self-respect, conceding the second-biggest winning margin (in terms of runs) to England in Ashes history. Only once before, in Brisbane in the 1928-29 series, have Australia been beaten by a bigger runs margin than the 347 runs they lost by here.
A shellacking, annihilation, a walloping; whatever you want to call it, this was it. One side was playing cricket, the other not, as was said in a different context many years ago.