Can anybody out there in Oz kindly explain the rules of cricket to me?...just so's I can join in all the fun this summer...
You're quite right to ask Australian's rather than the English how the game's played... ;-)
As no Englishman will read this, I can give you the plain version of the Laws of Cricket... the main one is that mental anguish is to be applied to the English by any and all means whatever every two years.
Now... you know how cereberal they like to pretend to be... that means there's a certain art to really hurting them...
If you just walk out there and beat them 100 - 0 sort of thing, then they get all happy and sing and drink the night along as though it's just how things are meant to be... like at the Commonwealth Games in Manchester they just learned how to sing Advance Australia Fair and drank more... but there was no helping that...
So what you have to do is set them up*... give them confidence ... let hope sneak into their little hearts while you get used to the cold, wet, bleak misery of an English summer. If you make the decade for Bangladesh while you're at it, well that's just a bonus for regional cooperation with our SE Asian neighbours...
Now, sometimes giving them hope goes a bit wrong and they actually win somthing worth winning... like the rugby... but that was the first time in decades they got away with it (and a great bit of play right on the final buzzer sealed it). But normally it dosn't matter much if they have a better team, as they did then, we still win anyhow because they're used to loosing and we're used to winning.
Anyway, that's the abridged rules of Ashes cricket. Hope it helps.
Cheers, Max
*Only Bradman broke those rules when he decided it was better not to be beaten at all on an Ashes tour, but that was back in 1948 and Bradman was that sort of guy...
