Diligent batting will decide the Ashes amid a bowlers' paradise

SIMON HUGHES: Joe Root and Tim Paine epitomise the respect between England and Australia heading into the series which will be decided by the finest of margins

“Nasty, brutish and short” was a rather dark description of life in the 1650s in a famous poem, Leviathan, by Thomas Hobbes.

Some of the Ashes captains of past eras could also fit this description -  men like Lord Harris, Warwick Armstrong, Douglas Jardine, Don Bradman himself and more recently Ian Chappell, Allan Border and Steve Waugh (well, they were nasty on the field, anyway).

Nasser Hussain conformed to some of them too, though lowly, hapless England needed an uncompromising approach at the time.

That is not a description of the two captains who go head-to-head tomorrow in the 71st Ashes. You couldn’t get two nicer men than Joe Root and Tim Paine. You really couldn’t.

Root is the guy who goes to a local deli in Perth, unaccompanied, the night before the crucial third Ashes Test to buy groceries to cook his family dinner. Note the word ‘cook’ - not grab a takeaway or buy a microwaveable lasagne. He was the man who, in the heat of battle, politely challenged Shannon Gabriel’s suggestion that he might be gay.

Paine once willingly ate a witchetty grub at a charity function I hosted when others declined, and his on-field banter with Rishabh Pant during last winter’s series against India was almost chivalrous, inviting him to come for dinner and play for Hobart Hurricanes in the Big Bash and even offering him babysitting money if he stayed in and looked after Paine’s kids. 

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The legacy of the Ashes is in respectable hands. As Justin Langer has suggested, there are unlikely to be any demerit points accrued amongst his players during this series. They are going to be on their best behaviour. They are still in recovery mode. Not that it will stop Jimmy Anderson and co from trying to wind them up at any opportunity. 

Root was the first in the nets at England practice on Tuesday and one of the last to leave. He works incessantly hard at his game, aside from all his captaincy responsibilities, but still has the decency and patience to sign countless autographs, pose for selfies and stand and chat to random observers.

He thinks the series will be very close, that top-order batsmen on both sides will find it tough going against a collection of fine seam bowlers armed with the Dukes ball from 2017 and 2018, and will hope that England’s plethora of middle and lower order game-changers will ultimately tilt the balance in their favour.

With five Tests in little over six weeks it is going to be a horses-for-courses series. It is likely that the express bowlers like Jofra Archer and Mitchell Starc won’t play at Edgbaston and both captains will place their faith in nagging seamers. This means another outing for Peter Siddle alongside Anderson, Stuart Broad and Chris Woakes for England. It's the summer-season of 30-year-olds (headlined by Tim Murtagh). 

^{Peter Siddle is set to beat Mitchell Starc to a berth in the first Test team}

In the latest episode of The Analyst Inside Cricket podcast, Australian treble-winning coach Andrew MacDonald - recently announced to lead Birmingham Phoenix in next year’s The Hundred - suggests Australia will also spring a surprise in the batting order.

MacDonald believes they’ll select wicketkeeper Matthew Wade, who hasn’t played a Test for two years, as a specialist batsman. Wade scored over 1,000 runs in the Sheffield Shield last winter (averaging 60) - the first time it has been done since Australia adopted the Dukes ball for the second half of the first-class season.

He has also made three hundreds in England this summer (two for Australia A in limited-overs matches against county sides, one for an Australian XI against England Lions). If he plays it could mean Australia have four left-handers (Dave Warner, Usman Khawaja, Travis Head and Wade) in their top six. Broad, in particular, might just love that. 

^{Chris Woakes finished with career-best figures against Ireland}

It is usually said that bowlers win Test matches and ultimately, series (they have to take 20 wickets).

In this series, an array of the highly potent seam and swing bowlers will probably cancel each other out. The emphasis will be on the batsmen to eek out enough of an existence to give their pacemen sufficient runs to play with.

In essence, whichever top order can blunt that wicked new ball for long enough will prevail.

It will be nip and tuck, but Australia have placed a huge amount of focus (sending batsmen to play county cricket, bringing an A team over here in June) on winning a first-ever Ashes series here since 2001. With England’s attention only belatedly deflected from the World Cup, they might just achieve it.