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As with so many contests this year, the last days of December offered a classic exhibition of Test cricket. They also offered a classic exhibition of lazy, self-serving, and empty commentary from journalists and fans alike.
In the couple of weeks leading up to the India series, the same lines were trotted out like riding-school ponies.
That Ricky Ponting and Michael Hussey were in a form trough.
That they were ageing players.
That there were younger batsmen challenging for a place in the team.
Articles were written about managing their retirements. About who would replace them. Ponting, it was speculated, could rely on his career achievements to justify seeing out the summer. Hussey, said the general consensus, was batting for his career.
And when he was unluckily out first ball in the first innings in Melbourne, the mutterings around the stands all followed the cue. That that might be it for Mr Cricket. That India’s DRS aversion might have finished him.
Wait just a minute. Are these people stark blithering mad? Do they wear tea kettles on their feet and strap a fish to their heads to ward off rain?
Just how long had Hussey’s terrible, woeful, career-threatening Mariana Trench of a slump been going on? Four Test matches.
Four Test matches.
In case you missed it, that number again is four.
Ponting’s run of struggles can be counted in years. Hussey’s was about six weeks. His form in the series immediately preceding it could attract that most abused of cricketing adjectives, Bradmanesque.
Yet somehow the two batsmen were lumped together, almost treated as the same person, due to the only stat they do share at present: age. Ponting just ticked over to 37, Hussey will join him in May. Yet Rahul Dravid was Test cricket’s top run-scorer this year aged nearly 39. He has shown that the number in that column need not influence those in any others.
Hussey’s last 12 months have been similarly impressive. While the talk was about “a couple of lean series”, each of those series was only two Tests long. Seven innings. Four against South Africa away, and three against New Zealand at home.
For those who’ve blocked it from memory, two of those South African innings spanned the Cape Town Test, when Australia’s 22 individual innings returned 16 single-figure scores. South Africa managed 10 single-figure innings out of 15.
In the second Test Hussey made 20 and 39, helping add crucial runs with Brad Haddin in the fourth-innings chase.
His duck against New Zealand in Hobart came amid another collapse, and when wickets are crashing every second over, against good swing bowling on damp green pitches, it is simplistic to point to one batsman’s score amid the carnage as a personal failure.
That day Hussey got the proverbial peach from the day’s destroyer Doug Bracewell, a fast full inswinger that swerved late in the Tasmanian gloom and pinned him in front of leg stump. Any batsman in the world could get out to that first ball.
In any case, we can still agree that the record shows poor returns from four matches in November and December. But what happens when we go to the series before that?
Sri Lanka in August. In five innings, Hussey made 95, 15, 142, 118, and 93, at an average of 92.6 for the series. He was man of the match in all three Tests, an unprecedented achievement. And he brought Australia home a series win on foreign soil.
And before that? Last summer’s Ashes, another campaign many would like to forget. Except Hussey, perhaps, who scored 195 in Brisbane, 93 and 52 in Adelaide, and 61 and 116 in Perth to set up Australia’s only win of the series.
Four hundreds (one of them nearly a double), three 90s, and two other half-centuries, in the space of eight Tests. Australia’s leading Test runscorer in 2011.
Nor is it just the runs he makes, but how he makes them. His coolness in a crisis, his constant thinking. He bats brilliantly with the tail, adept at getting the best out of them. So many times, Hussey has masterminded the heist.
His second-innings 89 this week in Melbourne showed these qualities – the way he counterattacked so brilliantly when walking out at 4/27, the way he batted long with the bowlers to put the match out of India’s reach. The way he put aside thoughts of his first-innings first-baller to notch the match’s highest score.
But I was writing this article in my head even before Boxing Day began. Hussey didn’t need a big score in that match to show up the case against him for the bunk it is.
The frustrating part is how easily this bunk proliferates. A media outlet glances at a few low scores, and decides he’s under pressure.
They’ve already got that story running on Ponting, so it makes sense to add Hussey to the tale.
When you consider the vast amounts of copy assembled by outlets on a daily basis, it should be no surprise that the bulk of the process is done by rote. Martin Flanagan may write articles, but news-wire writers do not. Publishers increasingly see their sources not as journalists but as “content providers”.
There is little incentive to add extra effort. So in terms of stories, there are standard themes that these writers return to time and again. Like television chefs, they love turning to one they prepared earlier.
News writers are always searching for adjectives, too, to add some superficial interest to their prose. Those adjectives must follow the chosen theme.
Thus, phrases like “out of form”, “under pressure”, or “struggling” become obligatory appendices to a certain player’s name, just as “besieged” or “embattled” are attached to certain politicians. The more outlets take that line, the more others take their lead, simply because that fits what has now become the public narrative.
And the more that happens, the more punters start to convince themselves that it’s true, and that they came up with that opinion all on their own. They parrot the lines they’ve heard or read. Often it’s as innocuous as wanting to participate in a conversation.
Let’s be honest, not everyone follows the cricket with the geek-intensity of some of my colleagues, and perhaps that’s for the best. But everyone likes to proffer an opinion. As in many facets of life, those who know the least often have the loudest voices.
Hussey was never about to be dropped, any more than Australia was about to be invaded by Japan in 1942. But the alternate narratives are far more entertaining.
They contain drama, pathos, nostalgia, a reminder of the tenuous hold that even the good and the worthy have on so many things.
They contain tension and worry and strife, the vicarious thrill of a near miss.
They also show a disregard for the truth. It is grossly unfair that Hussey could be said to have a career on the line, and that he has had to cope with the added pressure that brings.
The problem with such narratives is that they can self-fulfil. Repeat the most basic untruth enough times and people will start to believe it. The Leader of the Opposition has made it an art.
This past fortnight, we saw Hussey become an easy column-filler. His innings yesterday will have donated the next segment.
Without having read today’s reports, I know they will assert that Hussey has just saved his career – a career that should never have been in question. A nice by-the-numbers narrative emerges: struggle, doubt, crisis, ultimate redemption.
Until the next match, when another name will be dropped in instead. Like flat-packed furniture, the story comes prefabricated.
Hussey has survived the campaign, and in a few months, most people’s memory of it will have withdrawn to that part of their brains where they keep car key locations and boring people’s names.
But it is important to note that narratives have power. Words describe the world in which they are formed, but can ultimately start to form the world they describe.
The lesson is simple, and worth inscribing over your heart. Simply, that any time you hear the accepted narrative, it pays to do a bit of thinking for yourself.