Before the beginning of the 2005 English cricket season began, a resurgent English cricket team had won four Test series in a row, going unbeaten through the 2004 calendar year. The start of the international season saw England defeat Bangladesh 2–0 in their two-match series, winning both Tests by an innings. This was followed by a tri-nations one-day tournament that also featured Australia. However, all eyes were on the Ashes. Australia still started as favourites, but England, for the first time in years, were expected to put up a real challenge to Aussie supremacy.
Indeed, so they did, despite losing the first Test by 239 runs. England came back to win the second and fourth Tests, and draw the third and fifth, to win the Ashes for the first time since 1986–87. Andrew Flintoff dominated with both bat and ball for England, scoring 402 runs – more than any Australian – and taking 24 wickets – more than any Australian bar Shane Warne. Warne also had a spectacular series, with 40 wickets at a bowling average of 19.92, and 249 runs, but most of his efforts came in losing causes – such as making 42 with the bat in the second innings of the second Test.
In domestic cricket, Nottinghamshire won the County Championship, for the first time since 1987, and Durham enjoyed promotion in both the shorter and the longer form of the game. Surrey, the 2000 and 2002 Championship winners, were relegated in the Championship, and played in Division Two in both the Championship and the National League in 2006. Hampshire Hawks won the 50-over knock-out C&G Trophy, but were relegated in the National League, which Essex Eagles won in emphatic fashion, as they lost only one game and had a 14-point gap to the runners-up, Middlesex Crusaders.
The Australian women also toured England at the same time as the men, and England won the Women's Ashes 1–0 after two Tests. However, the Australian women won the ODI series 3–2. To round off the season, investors in partnership with Leicestershire arranged an International 20:20 Club Championship, which Pakistani side Faisalabad Wolves won.
Read more about 2005 English Cricket Season: Roll of Honour, Links To Competition and Team Specific Coverage, April, May, June, July, August, September
Famous quotes containing the words english, cricket and/or season:
“The English are polite by telling lies. The Americans are polite by telling the truth.”
—Malcolm Bradbury (b. 1932)
“The thing that struck me forcefully was the feeling of great age about the place. Standing on that old parade ground, which is now a cricket field, I could feel the dead generations crowding me. Here was the oldest settlement of freedmen in the Western world, no doubt. Men who had thrown off the bands of slavery by their own courage and ingenuity. The courage and daring of the Maroons strike like a purple beam across the history of Jamaica.”
—Zora Neale Hurston (1891–1960)
“The season developed and matured. Another year’s installment of flowers, leaves, nightingales, thrushes, finches, and such ephemeral creatures, took up their positions where only a year ago others had stood in their place when these were nothing more than germs and inorganic particles. Rays from the sunrise drew forth the buds and stretched them into long stalks, lifted up sap in noiseless streams, opened petals, and sucked out scents in invisible jets and breathings.”
—Thomas Hardy (1840–1928)