Ben Stokes and the lads have now touched down in Australia and we’re giddy as anything ahead of the Ashes series, starting in Perth next Friday.
Haven’t you heard? This is England’s best chance of winning the Ashes in Australia since last bringing home the urn in 2010/2011, which sounds like a far more positive prognosis than it actually is given we (or rather they – you won’t find any bias on these pages, folks) haven’t won any Test match down under in the three visits since.
We are feeling rather more positive though. At the very least we (they) can claim the moral high ground that Bazball guarantees. Sorry that we (they) no longer fit into your neat win, lose or draw boxes having reinvented cricket. We’re (they’re) here to entertain. You’re welcome.
Anyway, here’s the England squad power ranking, from a man who’s won a competition to enjoy a holiday in Australia to the very best Englishman/New Zealander.
Stay tuned for the Australia ranking and for the updates after every Test match.
16) Will Jacks
On the face of it, a baffling selection, and arguably still baffling when you scratch a little deeper. Jacks is the second spinner having bowled just 74 overs in the County Championship in 2025, taking five wickets.
Picked ahead of Liam Dawson and Jack Leach on the basis of his quality with the bat makes some sense, but if he were to come in for an injured Ben Stokes, and we doubt whether that would even be the case, with England arguably more likely to add another seam bowler to the XI in that case, why not take Rehan Ahmed?
The 21-year-old drove Leicestershire’s promotion tilt, smashing hundreds for fun in their top order and taking regular wickets with his leg spin. The argument against his selection is his perceived weakness against searing pace bowling, which he’s sure to face down under, but what do England do if Shoaib Bashir is ruled out? Jacks the frontline spinner? We think not. A couple of months of carrying drinks.
15) Matthew Potts
29 wickets at 42.2 for Durham in the Country Championship in 2025 makes his inclusion both a damning indictment of English seam bowling and evidence of the excessive faith the selectors have in cricketers whose only real plus point is having played for England before.
He looks to very much be the sixth of the six seamers and we suspect his inclusion for any of the Tests would be a fairly clear indication of just how badly the tour is going.
14) Jacob Bethell
Our inherent pessimism means the more highly regarded an up-and-coming English cricketer is the more dramatically we expect them to fail, and we therefore fear more for Bethell than we have done for anyone it quite a long time. It’s the puffed out cheeks and sage nodding of heads when anyone is asked about his future that makes us particularly nervous; him becoming the youngest-ever England captain in September has hardly helped.
An average of 52 in three matches a 2000km stones throw away in New Zealand last winter was hugely impressive and proves he can perform at that latitude, which as we all know is a far more significant factor than the very different humidity, grass, boundary size, general pressure he’s set to experience on the Ashes tour, when he will be expected to come in after carrying drinks for at least the first two Tests and perform having played played alarmingly little cricket in the last year with a first-class average of just over 27.
READ MORE: ‘Sauntering’ Ben Stokes escalates Ashes phony war after brazenly walking through Australian airport
13) Ollie Pope
He’s ceded the vice-captaincy to Harry Brook which removes one of the key safety nets which has helped keep him in the XI in the past, and while Pope has an astonishing knack of pulling a decent innings out of his proverbial when he needs it most, it’s hard to imagine a tour which starts and ends with him in the team.
171 against Zimbabwe and then 106 in his first innings against India kept him in the side for the final four Test matches of the summer, which featured just one further half century. A paltry average of 15.7 against Australia and just 11.16 in Australia doesn’t bode well for a guy previously billed as a blend of Joe Root and Ian Bell who now appears to only have embedded that exalted pair’s weaknesses into his game.
12) Josh Tongue
He’s got something of a golden arm, often picking up wickets with a surprise good delivery or through batsmen looking to take the opportunity to score runs off him as a perceived weak link in the England bowling lineup.
Tongue is going to be expensive if/when he plays, but he impressed in the summer, taking 14 wickets across his three Tests, with his stat-padding ability to clean up the tail sneered at by many but quite rightly embraced as a key skill by Ben Stokes.
11) Zak Crawley
He’s scored one Test century since spanking the Aussies to all parts (except those frankly undignified bits square of the wicket) on his way to 189 at Old Trafford in 2023, and that came against Zimbabwe at the start of the summer.
There’s quite some pressure on the apparently commendably broad and lofty shoulders of a man who seems to have retained his spot at the top of the England order through his inauspicious run chiefly on the basis of how his 6ft 5in frame will aid him on the infamously bouncy pitches down under.
Crawley averaged 27.66 in three Tests on the last tour in Australia. Destined to smash the first ball of the series on the up for four through the covers a la 2023 before a tour of scratchy starts and big booming drives providing catching practice for the slip cordon.
10) Brydon Carse
He was hugely impressive in 2024, taking 27 wickets in five matches against New Zealand and Pakistan, and while he took just nine wickets in four Tests against India in the summer, it felt like he bowled significantly better than that and with a toe he was literally considering cutting off before wisely being advised by medical staff that having a full compliment of little piggies might be quite important for balance.
Carse is a bowler Stokes will lean upon to bowl a helluva lot of overs, very possibly without much reward, though we fully suspect the value in him ‘bowling a heavy ball’ and ‘hitting the pitch hard’ will be trotted out at least 427 times by TMS commentators as he grinds through hours of hard work in the heat before going “wee wee wee” all the way back to his hotel.
9) Mark Wood
Likely to be rather undercooked as his last Test was in August 2024 and he’s not played any cricket since February after surgery on his knee, with the warm-up games the only opportunity Wood will have to get into his stride. But he’s one of the only players in this squad to have fond(ish) memories of the Ashes in Australia having claimed 17 wickets at an average of 26.64 on the last tour, and if he can find some rhythm the Aussies won’t enjoy his express, skiddy pace.
As much as the thought of him at on end and Jofra Archer at the other fills us with sadistic delight, the risk of simultaneous burnout may well see them being rotated in and out of the team, at least for the first couple of Tests.
8) Shoaib Bashir
The warm-up in Australia will be his only cricket in the past four months by the time the first Test starts in Perth after he missed the final two Tests against India with a broken finger. He became the youngest England cricketer to take 50 wickets against Zimbabwe earlier in the summer at just 21 and certainly has the temperament of a much older bowler. Bashir’s awareness of his limitations and and strengths has been particularly impressive.
We’re very much looking forward to the battle between him and Travis Head, who we suspect will lead the Aussie charge to hit him out of the attack.
7) Gus Atkinson
After eight wickets in the final Test match against India after returning from injury, we put it to you fine folks that England would have won that series had Atkinson been fit throughout. 63 wickets in 13 Tests is absurd and his average of 22.01 is the sixth-lowest of any current Test match bowler behind Scott Boland (16.53), Axar Patel (19.34), Kyle Jamieson (19.73), Jasprit Bumrah (19.83) and Kuldeep Yadav (21.69).
He’s not played any Tests in or indeed against Australia which could just as easily be a good thing as bad as they won’t know what to expect.
READ MORE: The 5 key battles that will define the Ashes: Root v Smith and more
6) Ben Duckett
Arguably the biggest success story of the Bazball era and him being one of the poster boys for that gear-grinding reinvention of cricket, along with a very fine 2025 thus far which sees him averaging 60.2, will make him a key scalp in the minds of the Aussies.
He failed to make an Ashes hundred in 2023, scoring 98 and then 83 in the two innings at Lord’s without much else besides, but Duckett has the game – with his love of cuts and pulls – and crucial awareness of his weaknesses to thrive in Australia. A leave once in a while might serve him well.
5) Jamie Smith
We dread to think just how fatigued, bedraggled and entirely sick of cricket Smith with look by the end of the final Test in Sydney given how entirely f***ed he was after five Tests against India this summer.
The combination of him keeping wicket, being very good with the bat – he averages 48.86 across his 15 Tests – and England scoring their runs all too quickly before the opposition play proper (boring) cricket in response, means he spends a hugely disproportionate amount of time with his pads on; ‘involved in the game’ far more than typical human concentration allows.
That said, we suspect he will have a lovely time counter-attacking after several batting collapses, scoring 50s at a rate of knots to bring about innumerable, unavoidable and ultimately insufferable comparisons to Adam Gilchrist.
4) Harry Brook
We’re all thoroughly looking forward to the apologetic disapproval of Jonathan Agnew and the other punditry crones when Brook’s masterful stroke play turns a hopeless situation into a winnable one for England, before he plays “one too many shots” to go from hero to villain in the time it takes for one of his falling-over scoops to plummet from the sky and into the keeper’s gloves. “Oh, Harry,” they wistfully cry.
Brook is second in the ICC Test batting rankings behind Joe Root having averaged 53.9 this year, and Australia got a fair taste of his game-changing quality in 2023 when he averaged just over 40 in the home Ashes series. He’s England’s ace in the hole.
3) Jofra Archer
We’re not sure there’s anything more gratifying than the thought of Australian batsmen pacing the changing rooms while watching the speedometer tick up and up as Archer gets into his stride and sends 90+mph balls whistling past noses or – God forbid – crashing into grills.
Stokes managed him really well during his comeback series in the summer and a full Ashes of peak Archer could very well make the difference, with that spell against Steve Smith in 2019 still quite clearly living rent free in the minds of any of the teammates who saw him duck, weave and wear his brutal deliveries.
2) Joe Root
In our long list of desires for the tour this winter, just below a first Ashes win in Australia for England since 2010/2011 would be Joe Root leaving the hosts with no option but to admit that he is a world class cricketer and currently the best in the world, and therefore undeniably superior to Steven Smith.
The ‘never done it in Australia’ argument on the basis of him never scoring a century in 27 innings down under serves to expose the Aussie arrogance we know and love, but is also hugely frustrating in so far as there’s no comeback. If that’s the metric these conceited so-and-sos are basing his status on, and of course it is as it’s the only way they can suggest he’s not the best of the best, then there’s nothing us Rooters can say.
But there is something Roooooooooot can do. And after scoring 16 centuries in 42 Test matches since to take him to the top of the ICC rankings, we can only see him ripping the monkey off his back and throwing it in smug faces of those who still dare to doubt him.
READ MORE: Joe Root is an Australian Ashes century away from cricket immortality
1) Ben Stokes
His record in Australia isn’t anything to write home about – he averages 28.61 with the bat and 40.94 with the ball – but then a) no-one in this England squad has a very good record in Australia, b) he’s the captain, leader, legend, and c) we don’t think it’s too strong an assertion to suggest England may as well not bother playing these Test matches without Stokes in the side.
The confidence dip for England and surge for Australia should Stokes get injured would be momentous. The Aussies continue to suffer from PTSD after what he did to them at Headingley in 2019 and should be almost as concerned as to what he can do with the ball after he was England’s standout threat vs India this summer.
He’s also a brilliant captain and while we have few doubts that Brook is next in line and the correct choice as vice-captain, we don’t see The Gabba or the MCG as hugely appropriate nursery grounds for him to hone his skills.
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England Ashes power ranking from Will Jacks to Ben Stokes
