Self-Help Was Key For Athey and '86/7 Party Set

By the time England take the field at the WACA for the last Ashes Test to be played at the home of Western Australia, anyone not aware that they have only ever won once on that ground will just not have been paying attention.

- Peter Hayter

Doubtless, Joe Root and his players will also be fed up to the back teeth of hearing that England’s solitary victory there took place 39 years ago, before any of the current squad had drawn breath, and then against a team so denuded by defections to Kerry Packer’s World Series Cricket that it starred such Ashes greats as Rick Darling, John Maclean and Alan Hurst.

The magnitude of the task facing Joe Root’s players is clear from the size and scale of the seven successive Ashes defeats they have suffered there since the sequence began in 1991.

For, in chronological order, Australia have won by nine wickets, 329 runs, seven wickets, an innings and 48 runs, 206 runs, 267 runs and 150 runs.

Needless to say, six of those magnificently bad seven were taken in the process of losing the series and even Andrew Strauss’ history boys were thrashed there in 2010-11, before regrouping to end up 3-1 winners.

What a pleasure, then, to catch up this week with a member of the last England side to come away from Perth with the riches of a draw, the No.3 batsman who flew to Australia for the 1986-87 tour as a spare opener and returned an unsung hero in England’s “can’t bat, can’t bowl, can’t field triumph”, the redoubtable Bill Athey.

And to hear how, in the dark ages before the rise of the coaches, their success was based almost exclusively on the principles of DIY.