The Guardian Sport Blog
The news you were waiting for: Australia really are in decline Defeat against India by 320 runs suggests that this once-dominant team is finally slipping into a cricketing recession
Posted by Mike Selvey Wednesday October 22 2008 00.04 BST
Is there a metaphor for the fortunes of the Australian cricket team in the global economy, I wonder? Think of all the boom times, when opponents were routinely dispatched with such ease that it must have become tedious. It was certainly no time to be a Pom turning up in Australia, hearing as we did each time the patronising plea "Jeez mate, I hope you blokes can put up a bit of a show this time."
Well, remember the good days because there will be fewer of them in the future - the recession is here and it would not have needed Robert Peston to forecast it. The quality of the Australian player base seems to be eroding as fast as the Suffolk coastline while Cricket Australia is said to be so devoid of funds (not yet bankrupt but heading that way, I was told recently by someone who would know) that they need to cling on to the coat-tails on any Indian deals they can to stay afloat. They are in hock to Lalit Modi now.
The defeat in Mohali should have come as a surprise to no one, only its magnitude. India's victory by 320 runs was the largest, in terms of runs alone, inflicted by them on anyone in 76 years of cricket history, and 98 runs better than their previous best against Australia, three decades and a thousand Tests ago. Only five times previously have Australia fared worse than this week.
Of course this does not immediately render the wearers of the Baggy Green as a bunch of duffers. These things are relative, and it is only the second defeat suffered by Australia in 27 Test matches (I don't count the International Cricket Council exhibition thing in 2005, I'm afraid) since the Ashes series of that year.
But there has been a trend: 18 matches won and one drawn up to the start of this year; three won, three drawn and two lost (both to India) since then. The old Australia, or even a fairly recent one, would have taken the first Test in Bangalore and steamrollered a win. They could do it in their sleep. Instead they allowed India off the hook. Zaheer Khan, was it, who commented that he had never witnessed an Australian team play so defensively? That would have hurt.
The reasons for the decline are for the most part self-evident. No team can afford to lose a whole bunch of giants in such a short period and expect things to stay the same: Steve Waugh, Shane Warne, Glenn McGrath and Adam Gilchrist are irreplaceable. Justin Langer and Jason Gillespie are both not far behind. It is possible to go back further and point to the retirement of Mark Waugh as the moment that a downturn began for when it is the fractions of percentage points that make a difference, the loss of the finest slip fielder of them all must by definition lead to a lowering of standards.
Without those ingredients, and with nothing close to replacements, it was always going to be necessary to re-evaluate the way games would be played. Gilchrist for example, the great get-out-of-jail card, allowed batting bravado higher in the order. With Warne and McGrath, successive captains rarely lost control. These are pragmatic times for most teams and Australia are back in the pack with the pragmatists.
It must be such a struggle for Ricky Ponting, who inherited the family business on the downturn. The impetus and aura from a decade of superiority has kept things rolling, but the captain is surely too long in the game not to have had an underlying concern. Many of them have manifested in the last few weeks on the subcontinent: the flawed character that has been seen in Andrew Symonds; the lack of a credible spin option (Cameron White's delivery into a different postcode, as his team lost control in Mohali, could have happened to anyone with sweaty hands but it is still a pratfall); Matthew Hayden's bullying dominance heading for an inevitable end; Ponting's own struggles particularly against the inspired youngster Ishant Sharma.
Injuries are kicking in and further disrupting, and while the Indian seamers have reverse-swung the ball wickedly there is little evidence that Troy Cooley, the Australia bowling coach, has revealed to his own pacemen the secrets that he was employed to impart. The edge seems to have gone from Brett Lee too, his well-publicised spat with the captain the other day just further grist to the mill of a side in turmoil.
There are still two Tests to go against India and the chance remains that Australia can turn things around, but you would not bet on it. Ponting simply has not got the bowling and it will need more than runs to take this series. A dose of realism rather than blind optimism garnered from deeds of the past would help as well. A month or so ago, another outfit, pre-eminent in its field, thought itself omnipotent. And look what happened to Lehman Brothers.
-- My humanity is in feeling we are all voices of the same poverty. - Jorge Louis Borges