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The joy of flogging weaker opposition

12th November, 2015
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Australia's two best batsmen are out of action for the foreseeable.(AFP PHOTO / GREG WOOD)
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12th November, 2015
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Last week, I wrote what you will probably agree was an eloquent and moving plea to help keep Test cricket alive and kicking. That was probably enough to save the game on its own, but I admit to a few flutters of worry when I saw the booming emptiness of the Gabba.

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Throughout the first Test you could hear the tongue-clicking of the commentariat over the prospects of a bleak and uninteresting summer.

Much of the fear over the health of the long-form game seems to revolve around the quality of opposition. The 2015-16 season, we hear, is imperilled by the fact that after New Zealand, who provided but flimsy resistance in Brisbane, we have the West Indies facing up in the blockbuster venues of Melbourne and Sydney.

And as we all know, the current West Indian Test team is less a well-oiled machine where every finely-tuned component is working together in irresistible harmony, and more a loose collection of rusted cogs rolling around the bottom of a wheelie bin.

So the question plaguing many of those who oversee the welfare of Australian cricket is: how do we get people through the gates to watch our boys beat up a wheelie bin?

I would not suggest that these people are insincere in their concerns, or that they do not genuinely have the game’s best interests at heart. I am sure they’re all folk of good heart and that when they say the West Indian series could do irreparable damage to Test cricket’s brand, it comes from the purest motives.

But what I would say is that these gloom merchants are forgetting something, and that is the simplest and most wholesome joy that sport can offer: namely, the joy of seeing a weak opposition torn to shreds.

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Remember when Steve Waugh’s mighty teams were trampling all over the rest of the cricket world? Remember how easy they made it look? Remember how pathetic other countries looked during those years?

Remember how brutally efficient the Aussies were? Remember how people said it was getting boring seeing Australia win so easily all the time? Remember how those people were incredibly wrong and actually it was great to see Australia win so easily all the time?

What could be better than watching the team, to whose star you have hitched your wagon sail to, grab victory after victory? That warm feeling a fan gets from cheering on their champions as they grind the enemy into a particularly humiliating variety of dust: it is the very spark of life itself.

The point is that all Test teams look to make their mark on history, but you can only be judged according to the quality of your opposition. Which means if you’ve got really weak opposition, you’ll be judged very highly, because you’ll win all the time.

Think of the most fabled Australian Test team of all time: Bradman’s Invincibles. Could they have rampaged across England in the manner they did if English cricket weren’t at a horrifically low ebb? Of course not! England was so weak in 1948 that they made Sam Loxton look like Keith Miller, and Keith Miller look like… I don’t know, some kind of Terminator or Batman or something.

The fact is, you can’t be invincible unless the team you’re up against is more than usually vincible. World-beaters are created only by eminently beatable worlds. What do Muhammad Ali, Usain Bolt and Serena Williams have in common? That’s right: they competed against a lot of real losers.

And let’s consider the alternative. We don’t have to reach back very far into the past to remember the nasty flavour of defeat. You might recall the black day earlier this year, when all 11 members of Australia’s Test team lined up to have Stuart Broad punch them in the face one by one. Or at least that’s how I remember it. What I’m sure of is that we lost the Ashes. And what I’m equally sure of is that it did not feel good.

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Other things that did not feel good: pretty much every series Australia played between 1984 and 1989. And who was responsible for more pain in that period than anyone else? The West Indies. Strutting around, bowling bouncers, smashing sixes, and feeding on the steaming carcass of Australian cricket.

Isn’t it time we got some of our own back?

Sure, you could say we’ve been getting our own back since 2000, crushing the Windies in a long stretch of embarrassingly one-sided hidings, and it might be good for the health of the game if the balance were redressed a little. But I say, when you’re on a good thing, stick to it.

Do you think Viv Richards ever thought about the health of the game when he was swiping our bowlers left, right and centre? Did Curtly Ambrose ever worry that ‘it would be boring’ if he kept on putting batsmen into therapy until the end of time?

Of course not. The Windies of the eighties won, and won well, and their people rejoiced in their dominance. And those who were there are probably thankful they got a chance to know what it was like, given that it looks like the Windies will never approach those peaks again. If despair is a fact of life for a West Indian cricket lover, at least they have the eighties to warm them at night.

And likewise, if Australia trounces all comers this summer, we will always have that to look back on fondly should fortunes turn again in future.

Or if Test cricket ceases to exist altogether, of course. When that happens, we’ll always have the West Indies tour of 2015-16 to place in the highlights package of our hearts.

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