How England's Ashes Rivalry with Australia Shapes a Cricket Fan's Life

Ten years, eh? Ten years since Harry wore that Nazi costume. Ten years since we last shopped in Littlewoods. Ten years since someone forced Christopher Eccleston into being Doctor Who. (Alastair Cook not sure of giving up captaincy after Ashes)

Ten years since that Ashes summer. An entire decade. And England haven't lost at home to Australia since. J Alfred Prufrock measured out his life with coffee spoons; England cricket fans do it with Ashes series. (Why Stuart Broad wants an Aussie to win the Ashes)

They are the invisible punctuation in our life stories. When did Granddad die? Was it under Denness or Greig? Of course it's our 14th anniversary - it was the year Mark Butcher scored that century! Our own narratives are held steady by anchors the shape of replica urns. (Ashes 2015 triumph will be my best achievement: Cook)

Because it's endless, the Ashes rivalry. It is always there, and always the most important date in a cricket lover's calendar. This all-important contest with no significance beyond its own. This sporting history that makes no sense to anyone beyond a small island nation and its former open prison. And we fans stay locked in the dance. We keep up the romance. We are Bill Nighy/Judi Dench, our ageing hearts giddy with each look at the fixture list. (Mitchell Johnson keeps Australia on top v Kent)

Do we oversell the Ashes? Catch me any other year and I'd say no. And then, probably, Die, heretic! But recently we have had this sequence of them. This glut. Even friends who loathe the sport - who are as likely to know who England are playing as they are to know how the Nasdaq finished yesterday - have noticed the unusual preponderance. "It's the Ashes again? Already?" one remarked, despairingly, the other day. (Steve Smith lets his 'bat do the talking')

Squeezing three wars with Australia into three years has revealed them at a new angle, like that moment you see an Instagram of the back of your head and it sets you wondering who the hell you really are. You start thinking: when did my irrational, visceral hatred of the green and gold begin? Is it OK if I'm related to loads of Australians and my best friend works in Melbourne? How can I keep it up when Michael Clarke seems such a decent guy? (Ashes 2015: How Australia and England shape up in each department)

Then you start looking at the stats. And wondering. How many times have there been really tight Ashes series? Out of 35 post-war Ashes series, only eight have gone down to the wire (with the Ashes themselves still at stake when the final Test began). The teams have rarely been as evenly matched as they were in 2005 (and may - please God - be this year). Throughout Ashes history one side has always dominated the other for long periods. The Ashes has never been an especially open contest, a prize handed back and forth. One team tends to go in as decent favourites, and the regaining of the urn has usually required years - decades, in some cases - of siege.

The closeness of the series is not all that makes it special. Ashes matches have provided some of the hardest fought games in cricket, and some of the most exciting reversals in sporting history. They have created legends and instilled memories no fan would be without. I would rather be forced to watch reruns of the Steve Waugh years for the rest of my life than give up a single session of what has come before.

But perhaps it is good, now and again, to take off the rose-tinted, corporate-sponsored 3D Glasses. Ashes history is often intoned like a pantheon of tales dedicated to the cricketing gods - but it can also read like a diary, recording a sequence of often disappointing relationships. Yes, there were the ones we'll never forget - 81, 05 - and the ones who were lovely in their own way, but just couldn't live up to them (sorry, 09). There were also a couple of right dicks who gave us the runaround or treated us like crap (good riddance 94-95, 01). Then there was that time we thought we had finally found The One, and even our families got excited at the prospect, only for it to end in heartbreak. Oh, 1997, how you hurt us.

In more recent years, of course, we got used to winning. We got fussy over our victories. This was a luxury that, until the late 2000s, had been the preserve of Australian friends, who watched whitewashes with glum faces, disliked Matthew Hayden, and complained about Shane Warne relying on his flipper. We couldn't understand them back then, but now we got it. We didn't particularly like our 2013 winning team either. We had grown fat on victory, and if the wins weren't to our taste, we had found we could take them or leave them.

The life cycle of an English cricket fan is a strange one. In most arenas age brings wisdom and a sense of perspective. But as we mature, the increasing weight of our experiences just tends to make us grumpier and less tolerant. Why else would followers of a game that has fought through the horror of two world wars, the outrage of apartheid, weathered Bodyline, match-fixing and terrorist attacks, still keep working themselves into a nasty lather about Kevin Pietersen?

As for the Ashes, each result merely makes the next more vital. The rivalry extends and deepens. We'll cherish 2005 and live in hope of another. But whatever we get, we add it to the canon, and shape our story around it.