Britain has brexited. We’ve lost Prince, David Bowie, Alan Rickman and just this week, Leonard Cohen. Syria becomes more serious by the day.
The earth is literally tearing itself apart in New Zealand. And all sanity in the States has been trumped by a joker. You’d have been forgiven for thinking 2016 was done with us.
That there was some kind of mercy rule on disasters.
But when the Australian cricket team forgets how to play Test cricket, we might as well all pack up and go home, hadn’t we? There are certain things that we should be able to rely on, and the Aussies sticking it to the other blokes (or at the very least getting stuck in!) is one of them.
And yet, like a New Yorker watching the numbers in Wisconsin, one can only scratch their head and wonder if the world isn’t coming apart at the seams.
I don’t think I’m putting it too strongly. We’ve now lost five Tests in a row. Two on home soil. Three against Sri Lanka.
But it’s not even that, it’s the manner in which we’ve done it. We haven’t lost so much as capitulated. Imploded. Meekly surrendered. It’s as unthinkable as Superman handing Lois over to Lex Luthor just so he’ll go gently on him.
As Steve Irwin thinking better of picking up that snake ’cause it looks a little antsy. As Sydney property prices taking a breather so the little bloke can have a go for a while.
I for one am sick of it. And I’m putting the call out to say enough is enough. Our hearts are holding on by a bloody thread as it is in this year of disaster and devastation, and we just can’t have the Australian cricket team not fighting.
That’s the issue. No one really minds losing every now and again. We can cop that. But we’ll be blowed if we swallow capitulating. And I don’t know about you, but that’s what it looks like to me. Like not wanting it enough. Not caring enough. Not being willing to step into the fray come what may and just stick it out because you’re bloody well Australian!
We lost here in Hobart by about a million, but it was the manner more than the result that offends the sensibilities. We’ve taken beatings before – anyone who remembers the dark days of the eighties will attest to what it feels like to get routed by a battery of fast bowling. But this wasn’t Boony fending off thunder bolts with nothing but a beer gut and a box.
This was established Test batsmen swishing at wide ones, and prodding at length balls like they had spiders on them. This was not being bested by superior warriors, this was not having the stomach for the contest.
Geoff Lemon, writing for the ABC, looked up the exact stats on our batting collapses and came up with something that reads more like something from my Under 9’s team: “In its last three Tests, Australia lost 10-83 here at Hobart, 10-86 in Perth, and 10-83 again at Colombo. The match before that, it was 9-52 at Galle, then 6-22 at Pallekele. Five Test defeats in a row.”
And while he suggests that we should start to accept this as our new reality, I’m damn well refusing to. I think we should be taking to the streets! I think we should be voicing in no uncertain terms just how ticked off we are.
This is our national sport, our very identity as a nation, and a lack of starch in our batting feels as treasonous as a lack of pride in our diggers.
It’s not OK to play Test cricket like it’s Twenty20. It’s not OK to just fob looseness and rashness off as ‘trying to keep things entertaining’ as David Warner tends to do. That shot in the first innings was just… it was not even reckless, but careless.
It’s not OK to be expansive on a green top the first morning of a Test against the best bowling line-up in the world.
It’s not OK to not be able to batten down the hatches when the conditions, or the bowling, aren’t conducive to scoring. To forget that the first session of the first morning is the hardest time to bat and you just have to defend, leave and find the odd single until it flattens out.
It’s not OK to leave your skipper stranded on 48 by taking a single off the last ball of an over, when you’re the number eleven batsman.
It is offensive. And the smell is redolent of laziness, selfishness, the need for immediate gratification, and the myopic immaturity of someone waving a selfie stick rather than wielding the willow for their country.
Sadly, one can’t simply take the players out the back of the metaphoric shed. This is a systemic problem: You can hardly be expected to play swing and spin if you’ve spent every moment of your formative years on a road.
Nor when the powers that be have you prepare for a Test series with white ball whifty whoosh nonsense. And yet something drastic must be done, because we do expect it.
Whether it’s the CEO, the laughably ironic Director of High Performance, one of the 17 coaches, or the captain himself – someone needs to take responsibility, and stat. Something needs to be done to inject some of Steve Waugh’s red rag into our middle order.
Some of Dean Jones’ white armband. A bit of Rick McCosker’s jaw. Some grit. Some starch. Some stuff-you. And some kind of technique against the moving ball.
How it happens? I don’t know. But I know that if we, the fans, don’t up and make clear our displeasure right now, the death knell of Test cricket will soon be drowned out by the bells at its funeral.
We need to stand up for the nothing-short-of-Australian qualities expected of our Test batsmen, and reject utterly the flash and fickleness Twenty20 has inflicted on our beloved game.
We should call out right now this lack of discipline, heart, courage and steadfastness for what it is: an unforgivable lack of pride in the baggy green. And the real cancer afflicting the Australian cricket team.
Who’s with me?
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