Ashes omens: what Peter Pan, Eurovision and Taggart tell us about the cricket

There have been 72 Ashes series and 36 have been played in England. Of the series played in England the hosts have won 50% and Australia 38.9%. But the consequences of hosting the first match of the series at Edgbaston, as this year, is massively in the tourists’ favour – Australia have gone on to win 83% of the series and have never lost. If England hold the opening game anywhere else their win percentage leaps to 62.1% and they lose just 27.6%. This will be the eighth Birmingham Ashes opener, following 1902 (Australia won the Ashes), 1909 (Australia won), 1961 (Australia won), 1975 (Australia won), 1997 (Australia won), 2001 (Australia won) and 2019 (drawn series).

Ben Stokes should become the 49th Englishman to captain his team in two or more Ashes matches and the sixth whose surname starts and ends with the same letter (a phenomenon we’ll call SESL for brevity). He follows Andrew Flintoff, Mike Gatting, Tony Greig, Andrew Strauss and Norman Yardley. This is not a good thing: though Strauss and Gatting won the Ashes, England didn’t win a single Ashes Test under Yardley, Greig or Flintoff. No less than 83.7% of qualifying non-SESL English captains won at least one Ashes Test, but only 40% of SESL captains. For comparison, Australia’s Ashes record under their two SESL captains, Jack Ryder and Harry Trott, is slightly better than average, with a 46% win ratio compared with 40.1% under non-SESL leadership.

Edgbaston has previously hosted 15 Ashes Tests and in 13 of those at least one captain has been dismissed for a score below 10. When it happens to just one captain in a match, that captain does not win the Ashes. When it happens to two captains in a match, whoever scores fewer runs loses the Ashes. This is a