Learn English with Ouyang Yu: 'England have...Australia are...'

By Ouyang Yu


 England have a plan. Australia are making it up as they go. This could be an Ashes to remember. Wrong grammar?

ChatGPT said:

Your sentence is almost correct, but it sounds a little awkward because it mixes present-tense statements with a future prediction without a clear connection.

Here are smoother, grammatically natural options:

1. Minimal fix (keeps your style):
“England have a plan; Australia are making it up as they go. This could be an Ashes to remember.”

Using a semicolon makes the flow cleaner.

2. Even smoother:
“England have a plan, while Australia are making it up as they go. This could be an Ashes to remember.”

3. If you prefer singular collective nouns (more common outside UK sports writing):
“England has a plan; Australia is making it up as it goes. This could be an Ashes to remember.”

All are correct—choose based on your preferred style (UK vs. US sports English).

You said:
But this is the title of an article found today: 
ChatGPT said:

Yes — that headline is grammatically acceptable, even if it feels a bit uneven in style.

Here’s why it’s correct:

✔ 1. “England have…” / “Australia are…”

In UK sports journalism, teams are treated as plural collective nouns.
So “England have” and “Australia are” are standard and intentional.

✔ 2. Two short punchy sentences

Headlines often use compressed, dramatic structure rather than smooth literary grammar.
Breaking the thought into:

  • England have a plan.

  • Australia are making it up as they go.

is normal stylistic choices for news headlines.

✔ 3. “This could be an Ashes to remember.”

Also perfectly fine — headlines favour direct, simple statements.

So the headline is correct as written.

Your original sentence only felt slightly awkward because, outside a headline, readers expect a bit more connective tissue. But as a journalistic headline, it’s fully normal and idiomatic.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

002, from Poetry Remarks

By Ouyang Yu
Image
Mel C. Thompson Publishing, San Francisco, 2013, p. 23. [I said 'no page number' because my lower ear mark concealed it, my apologies. Then I thought: What a fantastic idea if there's no page numbers! I have a book that has no Contents although it timidly carries page numbers. See Two Hearts, Two Tongues and Rain-coloured Eyes . Wild Peony, 2002. In future, I'd make a poetry book with no Contents and no page numbers. Why make things so easy for people that they won't even bother reading?] This book is long out of print, so don't start thinking that I'm trying to promote something. I've only got one copy in the world and I'm not selling it.
Read more

LOWER DOWNS, RUBBISH AND LOW POETRY by Ouyang Yu

By Ouyang Yu
Beauty is so far from being the dominant principle of modern poetry that many of the most splendid modern works are clearly portrayals of ugliness - Friedrich Schlegel ( On the Study of Greek Poetry , 1797) Contemporary Chinese poetry has unashamedly turned from the sublime and sacred to the vulgar and profane. In April 1999 at the Panfeng Conference in Pinggu County, Beijing, poets split into two camps, the  zhishi fenzi  (intellectual) and the  minjian . 1  The poets in the intellectual camp (Wang Jiaxin, Ouyang Jianghe, Xi Chuan, Zang Di and others) were mostly well-published, anthologised, critically acclaimed, well-travelled and internationally well-connected. As university professor and poetry critic Cheng Guangwei noted, much of their poetry reflects the influences of Western literary masters such as Yeats, Rilke, Lowell, Pound, Baudelaire, Milosz, Pasternak and Brodsky. 2  The  minjian camp (Yu Jian, Yi Sha, Xu Jiang and others) critiqued these infl...
Read more

Self Publishing, a poem by Ouyang Yu

By Ouyang Yu
In a way, everything is self publishing. When you open your mouth to talk, you are self publishing because you don’t want someone else to speak for you even if he or she were the speech writer for Howard or Bush or Mao Zedong. When the rain decides to fall it is self publishing, on a regional scale, sometimes on a statewide scale. You can’t dismiss it as unworthily self publishing because it doesn’t fall on a national scale or international scale. Rivers in the world are self publishing on a daily and nightly basis. Even a little creek is self publishing when it winds its way through an industrial zone clogged with toxicity and waste. Birds never remain quiet because they don’t get paid for calling, their ways of self publishing that never is actually recorded in human history, not even in birds’ history, and when sometimes it does get recorded as in relaxation music they still don’t get paid and they still keep singing, their ways of self publishing. Some great self publish...
Read more