The problem with my Best Combined XI from the 2025-26 Ashes is that it only has VI players in it.

Travis Head opens the batting, and then we have Steve Smith as captain coming in at No.4. Alex Carey keeps wicket and bats six. The fast bowlers are Mitchell Starc, Scott Boland and Michael Neser. That’s almost a good indoor cricket team.

I hesitate to add more. There is too great a risk of choosing batsmen who accumulated runs but had minimal impact on the result (Joe Root, Harry Brook, Zak Crawley, Jacob Bethell). And if we include the next-best bowler (Ben Stokes or Josh Tongue, take your pick), we end up with the truly horrifying and morally unconscionable outcome of having more Englishmen than Australians in that hypothetical XI. Which would make me about as competent a selector as England’s.

The top-heavy nature of the contributions has been held out as proof that this was a low-quality Ashes series. I don’t agree that it was.

The most compelling Test series I’ve ever seen, the drawn 1999 Frank Worrell Trophy in the West Indies, often boiled down to titanic individual battles: Steve Waugh and Glenn McGrath versus Curtly Ambrose and Brian Lara.

But it was bit-part players – Colin Miller, Justin Langer, Ridley Jacobs and Jimmy Adams – who had just as much impact on the final result.

The Ashes tilted on the contributions of the weaker half of each team, who propped up the outright stars.Credit: Simon Letch

Even when it most seems like an individual game, Test cricket is a collective enterprise, in which the stars’ contributions interlock with team output in complicated ways.

In the 2025-26 Ashes, the swing of events, hour by hour and session by session, was usually competitive, sometimes thrilling, and never as predictable as it seemed........

© The Sydney Morning Herald