Gideon Haigh on how absences have shaped Ashes series past, with Ben Stokes set to miss 2017/18

In his first column for Sky Sports, and with the Ben Stokes saga rumbling on, Australian cricket writer Gideon Haigh examines how notable absences have shaped Ashes series past…

The battle of Waterloo was proverbially won on the playing fields of Eton. Will the Ashes of 2017/18 be recalled as surrendered in the dimly-lit streets of Bristol, in the vicinity of the Mbargo nightclub?

Seven years ago, Andrew Strauss led England to a rare retention of the Ashes down under and knows better than most how much must go right to curb Australian rampancy in their own conditions.

As England's director of cricket, he has proven a cautious incrementalist, prepared to trust his players as 'adults', including a promotion for the mercurial Stokes to within a Joe Root back spasm of the national captaincy.

Yet even in this micro-managing, macro-monied age, the best-laid plans can be set at nought by a minute's red mist. In his minute, Stokes allegedly threw 15 punches, which might as well have been aimed at himself once they were caught on CCTV.

Stokes, a talisman in the Ashes of 2015 and in his sporting prime at 26, was the sole member of England's team for which Australia had no effective counter, potentially as influential as Mitchell Johnson four years ago. Now Australia need not come up with one. England's steep challenge has become nearly vertical.

We identify the Ashes with great on-field achievements; it's easy to overlook how they have been shaped by absences. Sometimes this manifests simply in the veneer of a series.

Cricket Australia's promotional campaign for the last Ashes down under featured an outback photo shoot with David Warner, Mitchell Starc and James Pattinson. In the event only Warner played; Starc and Pattinson were both hors de combat, the last having played just four Tests since.

But precisely because they are great, the best players shift power balances. The Ashes of 1974/75 will forever be associated with the fearsome combination of Dennis Lillee and Jeff Thomson. Yet would they have had it all their own way had England's selectors not omitted John Snow and alienated Geoff Boycott, their matchwinners four years earlier?

1981 remains the summer of 'Botham's Ashes'. But would he have dominated an Australia reinforced by Greg Chappell, who world-wearily opted out of the tour, his appetite for cricket dulled by the sourness surrounding the underarm ball?

This is the downside of outstanding cricketers. They create dependences; they nurture cults. Even Botham grew burdensome as his career tapered in its last five years. After England retained the Ashes in the Boxing Day Test of 1986, he averaged 20.57 with the bat and 57.52 with the ball, a name ever noisier, a threat ever emptier.

Australia, moreover, has been a graveyard of reputations, perhaps the worst locale to undertake that one tour too many, as Walter Hammond found in 1946-47, Trevor Bailey, Godfrey Evans, and Frank Tyson in 1958-59, and Graeme Swann, Matt Prior, Tim Bresnan, Monty Panesar and possibly even Kevin Pietersen four years ago.

Stokes' absence, however, is more than a mere cricket story, for it is set to shape off-field as well as on-field perceptions. The most successful English team of this generation, Strauss's in 2010/11, succeeded by embracing Australia as a destination to enjoy.

Strauss is married to an Australian; coach Andy Flower had played first-class cricket here; half a dozen others had played grade cricket in various states. This time coach Trevor Bayliss is Australian. But, because Stokes' night out drew in several team-mates, he has placed his team under surveillance of mainstream and social media, including Bayliss, publicly indulgent of his players' relaxing out of hours. Multiple storms in tabloid teacups seem almost foreordained.

The irony is that Australia are themselves feeling absence, by attrition. Only three players survive from that heady whitewash four years ago, half as many as in the visitors' ranks. The batting rotates on the axis of captain Steve Smith and David Warner. The quest for a regular wicketkeeper and a useful all-rounder has returned pretty much to where it began.

Players have just come through a disaffecting industrial dispute with their administrators; the Ashes itself will be rivalled by the ever-Bigger Bash League. It says something of the touring party's thrown-together quality that an Australian team so inconsistent, and ranked fifth in the world, goes into the series as such solid favourites.

Yet that is the way of it, and it is not a blame lightly shifted. Truth be told, England having enjoyed a single series victory down under in 30 years, Australia had history on their side long before Stokes went on his rampage.

Now he is potentially that most valuable of figures in a debacle, a scapegoat, having undermined the careers of many of those he has played with and some whom he yet might. This is more than a standard sporting self-immolation; for Ben Stokes it may well be a personal Waterloo.

Gideon Haigh will be writing for Sky Sports throughout the Ashes series.