Martyn Moxon: Let’s celebrate Ashes glory, but tougher tests await England

The first 18 overs of the Trent Bridge Test were quite amazing.

How do you write that script?

To bowl Australia out for 60 was truly sensational.

Stuart Broad and England deserve a huge amount of credit.

Australia have imploded, and it’s hard to understand what’s gone wrong with them from Lord’s, where they had such an emphatic victory, to now be in disarray two games later.

But, as I say, you’ve got to give England a huge amount of credit.

They’ve done brilliantly well to win back the Ashes.

People talk about Australia’s batsmen struggling in unfamiliar conditions, and that’s definitely been a factor, but in Shield cricket in Australia the ball still moves around.

Brisbane can move off the seam, and so can Tasmania.

I can’t imagine that all the pitches they play on over there are dead flat.

For me, some of the poor batting comes down to this feeling now that you can’t afford to play out a maiden over.

It’s the modern way, I suppose, that if people aren’t scoring runs, they can get really panicky and want to try and impose themselves. That’s been the undoing of a lot of batsmen in this Ashes series.

Some players, of course, have got the balance right – most notably Joe Root. He’s got that balance between a solid defence and attacking when he can.

He’s been a joy to watch throughout this series.

I’m incredibly proud of what he’s achieved. It was only 18 months or so ago that Joe was dropped from the Sydney Test, and now he’s the No 1-ranked Test player in the world.

It’s testament to his character, and the fact that he’s brilliant at working out what he needs to do to be the best that he can.

He’ll have come away from Australia a little bit down, but he’s assessed for himself what he needed to do. He got back in the team and he’s nailed it.

England have done particularly well to bounce back after that defeat in the second Test at Lord’s.

I heard Paul Farbrace, the England assistant coach, saying that he thought they had a little bit of luck on the opening day of the third Test at Edgbaston.

England lost the toss when they’d probably have batted, and the ball did more than both sides expected. England still had to bowl well, but they exploited conditions to the maximum and Farby said that, from that point on, they really believed they could win the Ashes.

If that morning had gone against them, it might have been really hard to come back from.

Now England go into the fifth Test at the Oval next week, and it will be interesting to see what they do.

Clearly, they’ll want to win 4-1, but it’s potentially an opportunity to get Adil Rashid into the team and to have a look at him prior to the Pakistan series in Abu Dhabi in the autumn.

That series, along with the series in South Africa that follows it, will be the true test of the improvements that have been made, but, for now, let’s celebrate the Ashes success and congratulate England on a job well done.