Best team won

Press, Volume CXV, Issue 33739, 11 January 1975, Page 36

Best team won

(N.Z. Press Assn—Copyright) LONDON. Australia deserved to win the Ashes after its performance in the test series against England, the “Dally Mail” said yesterday. “The Ashes, won in this very city by sweat and ingenuity, and some spilled blood, were yesterday gift-wrapped in tissue and obsequiously returned to tihe country most fitted to hold them,” the newspaper’s cricket correspondent, lan Wooldridge, wrote from Sydney. “Australia’s aggressive parttimers out-batted, outbowled, out-thought, out-caught and out-

fought us, and they did it with two now moribund test matches to spare.” “As Mr W. C. Fields might well have observed: ‘What time does the hotel get back to London?’ “Watching the last feckless act, which should clearly be defined as surrender as opposed to defeat, made you wonder what men like Bailey or Compton or Trueman would have thought of it afi. “Perhaps they would have concluded, as do the Australian newspapers in every bombastic edition, that the old country has lost the heart of a fight.”