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Australian cricket’s new breed are about to learn whether or not they can handle the harshest spotlight the international game has to offer – India.
Eighteen months out from a World Cup to be played on the subcontinent, an injury-affected and young touring party are preparing to confront the home nation in seven matches in 18 days, a hectic schedule made more challenging by the mess and noise of a country that can be at once intoxicating and infuriating.
On the face of it, the matches mean little, but the game’s shortened formats hold sway over the masses on the subcontinent, making for vast crowds, and the Australian team hierarchy is keen to learn how its younger players will cope under the pressures of travel, atmosphere and constant cricket.
Australian coach Tim Nielsen said the team’s second visit to India in the space of a year – after the Test side stumbled to a 2-0 series defeat last October – would allow the likes of Tim Paine, Jon Holland, Shaun Marsh and Doug Bollinger to prove their mettle.
“It’s a really good chance for the young blokes in the team to consolidate their own personal places and their own personal feelings about international cricket, and at the same time expose themselves to Indian conditions at an international level for the first time,” Nielsen said.
“I think pretty well everyone will have been there with IPL, Champions League or even Centre of Excellence tours, but there are a few guys who won’t have played any international cricket in India, let alone in front of 30,000 people with them all going crazy and screaming for their own team.
“It’s quite different from anything they’ll have experienced before. It’s a short, sharp tour so the workload, the travel and getting to the different venues will be hard enough work in itself and then playing in those conditions.”
Alongside them will be paceman Peter Siddle, whose unstinting efforts in last year’s Test series set him up for a year in which he rose from fringe player to key member of the national side’s attack.
The last Australian limited overs tour of India in late 2007 was dominated by the crowd “monkey” slur of Andrew Symonds affair, later to evolve into an unfortunate sequel at the SCG that indirectly contributed to the end of Symonds’ international career.
It was an episode that demonstrated how things can go awry in the volatile circumstances often thrown up in India, and despite the frequency of Australian tours there remains a certain element of culture clash that will never quite disappear.
As much as the Australians can be expected to face difficult circumstances, so the Indians, who struggled to poor results in the recent Champions Trophy, will gain strength from playing at home.
But for all that, the tour is not without its advantages.
As an early scouting trip ahead of the World Cup it is invaluable, while for 22-year-old Holland it offers the chance to familiarise himself with not just the Australian team but with the wealth of slow bowling knowledge available.
Last year off spinner Jason Krejza learned plenty in the company of Indian spin statesman Bishen Bedi in the Delhi nets, lessons he would go on to utilise while taking 12 wickets on debut in Nagpur.
It’s a chance for us to take him away and expose him to what expectations are at international level,” Nielsen said.
“It’s the travel, the training, the preparation, the crowds, the pressure, the expectation of the media and all those things.
“So it’s a great opportunity to throw him in there to see how it all works, expose him to the likes of Ricky Ponting and Mike Hussey and our senior players, and work closely with Nathan Hauritz.
“The other thing is there are a lot of spinners in India and we’ll use every opportunity we can to get different people to speak to him and just talk about the art of spin bowling with him so he keeps adding more ideas.
“One of the benefits when you tour India there are a lot of world class spinners who have played a lot of cricket over there and they understand their conditions and the art of spin bowling very well.”
Ahead of a packed home summer and tours in the new year, Nielsen foreshadowed a good deal of rotation across the series, particularly among the pace bowling battery.
Mitchell Johnson will be carefully managed to ensure he gets neither too much cricket, which saw him fatigued during the past Australian summer, or too little – an over-correction that dogged him for most of the 2009 Ashes series.
“Just because of the turnaround and the time between games we’ll have to really manage them, and make sure we’re careful,” Nielsen said.
“I don’t suppose we ever go away with a pre-conceived plan that someone’s going to play this game or that game, it’s more knowing that we have the depth of talent there to ensure if we do find players are tired or sore or have niggles, that we don’t find ourselves short of players and have to keep using the ones that are sore and hurt them for a long term injury.
“I’ve got a pretty clear idea in my head of how I’d like it to pan out, we want to give our top-line three or four fast bowlers as much cricket as possible without blowing them out.”
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