Cricket is a topical subject these days, so I will keep this pretty short. Many of you might think I am way off anyway, but these thoughts have occurred to me over the last month or so.
Since the major blow up earlier this year, we have seen Australia play pretty poorly. I mean, I think a lot of structural changes have been made over the last ten years that are now coming to the fore to really affect our top cricketing results.
The structures of selection, the different types of cricket competitions, 12 months of cricket, the contracting issues etc – these all lead us to here.
I think it would have been handy had the recently released review really gone into depth about the whole Cricket system in Australia.
I mean anecdotally you could say that players are being selected for Tests on 20/20 form. Even form might be too strong a word… potential maybe?
Remember when we had a very strong Australian cricket team? Oddly, cricketers below the Australian cricket team were strong too.
Can someone imagine Stuart Law sticking around in the background as long these days, having scored the number of runs he was scoring? Boy. Nowadays, someone hits a good 70, and they seem to come into conversation for selection for Australia…
I don’t condone what was done against South Africa. But I will say, we are so far the only nation to punish the players involved so harshly, and properly really.
Hypocritically, some of those players who were hardly punished at all, had a lot to say on the matter.
I don’t care for arrogant cricket teams, or aggressive sledging etc. Do it. Don’t do it. It’s all the same to me. But Australia is not the only team doing it.
Australia is now one of many teams involved/caught in ball tampering. One of many teams, let’s not forget, so everyone else needs to get off their high horses.
Having said that, I think we are losing as a direct result of the mental toll of bearing the weight of guilt. Where we are now, is akin to hurting your little brother mucking around, so then you start playing really nicely, because you know you did wrong.
I think we have completely lost the ability to win, because we are all so horribly embarrassed about the ball tampering. We are apologetic, and don’t want to have a hard edge again, because we don’t want to be seen in that light again. That is it for me.
The ball tampering has really hurt our cricket in more ways that just reputation,though lord knows that was bad enough. To me, what it appears to have really done, is strip us of our moral high ground, which took with it the ability for us to really play hard to chase wins.
Now we seem embarrassed about the chance of possibly beating someone, so we collapse in a heap, and that is almost better than winning because then we can keep doing penance.
We appear to be in this kind of purgatory where we serve our penance for the debacle until goodness knows when. It’s easier for us to do that, than dig in and grit our teeth.
When will we have served enough penance? Never in some people’s eyes. So we might as well get hard nosed again, and start getting back into gritting our teeth.
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