- Video
-
Club Roar
Captured a great grassroots sporting moment? We want to see it!Content Collections
The Roar Community
- Join
- Login
For once Australia’s cricketers should be grateful for their insane schedule.
After a T20 series win against South Africa, the memory of that scalding Test defeat to Pakistan might fade faster than it has any right to.
Last time Roar Radio filled an ABC commentary void was for 2013’s Test whitewash in India. Watching ball by ball, we’ve had plenty of opportunity to see Australia slowly dacked on slower decks.
The United Arab Emirates spanking was entirely deserved.
As per my Roar Radio co-commentator Andy Lane’s semantic explorations on air, two of something is not a series, it’s a coincidence. A tour including two Tests immediately marks itself as an afterthought, not to mention a slight to an opponent deemed unworthy of more time. It’s the clearest indicator of an international obligation shoehorned in.
Two Tests allow no momentum, no chance to fluctuate. A result in the first game means the series is gone for one side, unassailable for the other. All tension dissipates, most of the interest follows suit. One win apiece ends in anticlimax, not anticipation.
This aside, Australia showed no interest in actually working to win the series. For all the talk of spin preparation and the consultancy of Muttiah Muralitharan, no one got around to actually, you know, preparing in the conditions at hand.
They played one warm-up game with about 32 players a side, rotating the entire squad like Kanga cricket so everyone had a go. The aforementioned tour of India was limited to two short warm-ups in the space of the first week.
Of course we understand the financial implications. Sponsorship and broadcast rights sell per match, not per day. It’s more lucrative to stage three ODIs than a single Test.
We know the opponent is key. India tour and we sell the broadcast to Indian networks. Bonanza. We tour England and they sell the rights. Bonanza. Return series are set up as quid pro quo. Other Test nations generate lower returns or losses.
We know the side’s time is valuable. We know that warm-up games cost money, both directly and in the form of other saleable games. We know that money is generally deemed pretty good by people who run anything.
But Cricket Australia’s name is Cricket Australia, not Selling Cricket from Australia for the Maximum Possible Return at All Times. James Sutherland is not running a hedge fund. The point of the thing is the game with the paddles and the dismissal sticks and the leathercircle. If playing that game sometimes requires subsidy, that’s no excuse for not doing it properly.
CA may have scrimped a couple of valuable weeks with their tiny tour of the Emirates, but they’ve fallen short in supporting national cricket. They treat Asian tours as necessary evils, things we tackle begrudgingly, infrequently and get done as quickly as possible to minimise embarrassment. In which case, at least the 2013 team had the decency to lose their games in three days.
Once those tours are done we can immediately dismiss the results as anomalies from the alien moonscape of Asia, talk about how no one can expect to win on tracks that favour the home side, then walk back out onto bouncy Australian pitches to get back to beating visiting teams and talking ourselves up as the best in the world, closing our eyes and blocking our ears any time a news item threatens to remind us of anything between Turkey and the Philippines.
Without time to prepare for the conditions, our players looked clueless. Mitchell Johnson was threatening with the new ball, David Warner attacked with enough conviction to score heavily, and Steve Smith managed the challenge with flourish.
As far as creditable performances went that was all she wrote.
That was compounded by muddle-headed selections picking a wacky novelty team for the second Test – another feature of the two-Test series is the desperate swipe for salvation rather than a steady progression of player management.
Said Steven O’Keefe of his opposing left-arm spinner Zulfiqar Babar, “He does things that we’re traditionally taught not to.” Different conditions called for different techniques.
“You can’t really kick the dirt with that, you’ve got to adapt to those conditions, and unfortunately we did that too slowly. Personally I know if I had that time again there’s a few things I’d change with my bowling.”
Instead of giving him adequate time to learn those lessons, Australia’s selectors had him learn them in the heat of his debut Test match, then immediately dumped him from the side.
Ok, you can argue they wanted Mitchell Starc’s reverse swing for the second Test. But then they wanted a spinning all-rounder to support Nathan Lyon. Simple, right? With three front-line pacemen you replace the seam-bowling all-rounder at No. 6?
Nope. A team whose key weakness was failing to bat long periods instead dropped a No. 3 batsman who’d made a slow century in the warm-up game, and brought in a T20 glitter-man. That made two all-rounders in the top six, both picked for their bowling. Between them they delivered 32 overs of Australia’s 225.
Forget the idiots getting up Glenn Maxwell for playing like Glenn Maxwell – that’s not his fault. His unsuitability for that match is entirely down to the selection table.
Pakistan meanwhile picked a green attack and backed them, giving the lion’s share of the overs to the spinners Zulfiqar and Yasir Shah with two Tests’ experience between them. No changes were made. The side couldn’t have been more stable.
Zulfiqar, hard as nails, had his hand torn open batting against Mitchell Johnson, bled all over his bat, then taped it up and came out to bowl Australia to defeat. He didn’t blanch at the challenge.
Take the way Pakistan batted against Johnson’s ferocity: happy to eschew scoring, staying behind the line of the ball, ducking where possible, wearing the inevitable hits, and waiting until he went away. 31 overs for 39 runs in his first innings suggests the unplayable, but it was Pakistan’s batsmen who were in control.
Contrast that with Australia’s batting, always urgent, always pushing – playing back to be trapped on the stumps, lunging forward to be caught at bat-pad, never able to find a place of calm and absorb sessions of bowling. With Australia at the crease you felt a wicket was around the corner. Pakistan hammered every corner flat.
Of course a lack of preparation is not unique – Asian teams leave their players underdone when touring Australia, and are as routinely bossed. It took India’s all-time greats to even push Australia close. But it’s a ridiculous program of short-changing oneself: in not affording time to prepare, boards only guarantee their market an inferior product.
Australia needs to stop looking at Asian tours as some weird occasional infliction that breaks out between World Cups and home summers. Winning requires preparation, a long-term focus that prioritises these series and allocates fixtures and resources accordingly.
Give them the precedence you give the Ashes. Make them the key targets for players. In short, treat these series like they matter. I look forward to the day when administrators start doing so, rather than squeezing their eyes closed and hoping for the best.