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Will the real Aussie cricketers please stand up?

David Warner walks off the field. (Photo: AP)
Roar Pro
12th July, 2015
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The first Test has come and gone. The Poms were brilliant in all aspects in conditions in which they specialise and against an almost unrecognisable Aussie side.

But this is just the first Test and it is not all doom and gloom. This team is too good to be walloped again and again like in 2013.

However, some unnerving things have come up in the past few days, which we could almost say were ‘un-Australian’ in terms of our cricketing traditions.

1. David Warner
Is it really Warner opening the batting with Rogers? Where is the swash-buckling, cavalier Dave Warner that we know and bowlers so fear.

Recently he has publicly stated that he wants to be more responsible, mature, circumspect and so on. Danger signs there – it would never work.

The guy is too talented to be playing a Geoffery Boycott-type role.

2. Mitch Johnson
The last Ashes saw the deadliest version of Mitch. Putting fear of God in the Poms and even causing couple of retirements was the name of the game.

Where’s that i-am-coming-for-your-head short ball now? Agreed that the Cardiff wicket was the last thing that Mitch would have wanted, but his loss of form is longer term than that.

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Having observed him even last summer against India there was hardly a short ball bowled in anger. Again, given that those were some of the slowest and flattest wickets ever seen in an Australian summer, maybe we are reading into it too much.

Is the Phil Hughes incident still hanging in there somewhere?

3. Selectors
Shane Watson and Brad Haddin should have been done and dusted much earlier.

Even greats like Steve Waugh were told in no uncertain terms about the end of their careers. Surely the duo needed to be dealt with quite sometime ago. Unlike the subcontinent teams where the greats tend to hang on until they themselves move away, Cricket Australia used to pride itself on its team-first attitude.

It is baffling the lack of courage that the selectors have shown. Clearly they are hoping this lot will carry them until this Ashes series, after which they might have earmarked the start of a new era.

Winning or losing don’t matter unless and until they are playing in true baggy green tradition and attributes. It’s going to take a positive and attacking attitude – which are normal traits for Aussie cricket – to turn this around.

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