This is the Friends of History Debating Society. I'm John Batchel in Southern New England,

learning cricket thanks to my guide and coach, Jeremy Sackis. He's in New South Wales. We've talked

about it for a year. It's here. Ashes has begun. There'll be five different cities, the first

one, Perth in Western Australia, all England and all Australia. All the

trash talking is behind us for the opening round. The debate over, is it going to be hitting

or pitching? Are the conditions going to be conducive to pitchers who are fast or who spin? How about

batters going for the fences? Well, the fence.

Jeremy, the contest is over and somebody had to win, even if Bose played badly. What happened?

Well, John, I can happily say that we have won and Australia has won decisively. In fact, we have won by what is called eight wickets.

So that meant that when Australia won, just yesterday afternoon,

we still had eight people that could have gone up to bat to get more runs.

But once you get one more run than your opposition, it's irrelevant.

Basically, you've won the whole test.

You can just go home.

So, John, I mean, I'm

closing right now, but it is fantastic because given that, you know, we really didn't know how

this first one would go, I'm just absolutely happy now to say that Australia has definitely

convincingly won it. All right. England talked about showing up with muscle going for the long ball, did they?

They did, and it spectacularly backfired on day one. And honestly, John, the start of this ashes

was like nothing I've ever seen before. In fact, a lot of long-term cricket commentators

are also saying the same thing. So what happened was England, when we had the coin tossed to decide who would bat and bowl,

England actually won and they decided to go into bat,

...