Nowhere to hide

On Monday afternoon, as England’s batsmen were shifting through the gears to transform their second-innings score from substantial to iconic, a bad day for Ricky Ponting got just that little bit worse when he spilled a sharp chance in the slips with Alastair Cook on 222. It was Australia’s fifth drop out of five for the innings, and the Barmy Army (to the bongs of Ben Ben) instantly chimed in with a sympathetic response: “Bad Luck Rick Key. Catch The Next One!”

That same sentiment might well have crossed Ponting’s mind the following morning, when he and the Australia squad assembled at Brisbane Airport to set off on their three-hour flight to Adelaide. Aside from a glut of newspaper journalists from both England and Australia, whose reaction to the run-fest was all too visible to the players as they milled around the departure-lounge newsagents, the 10.55am flight also happened to be carrying the High Command of said Barmy Army, including their cheerleader Jimmy Saville with his trademark stovepipe St George’s Hat.

Jimmy and his cohorts were impeccably behaved, it must be said – after more than a decade of following England around the globe, they are as used to the rigours of touring life as the players themselves. But nevertheless, their presence on the same flight confirmed the fact that, sometimes, there’s just no place to hide – especially when you’re travelling en masse in those garish grey and orange training kits that Cricket Australia have settled on for this series.

Being gawped at in domestic terminals is as much as part of a cricketer’s life as dealing with the chants from the crowd during matches, and Ponting’s demeanour remained as grizzled in the departure lounge as it had been on the pitch at the Gabba. He relaxed a touch once he’d settled into his seat, away from the autograph-hunters and phone-camera-wielders (although he wasn’t quite as relaxed as the Test Match Special veteran up at the front of the plane in first-class) but nevertheless, when the bloke in the opposite aisle is reading a newspaper with the headline “Clueless” on the back page, it’s not really an option to switch off entirely.

Unless, that is, you’re Tom Fordyce of the BBC, who had to slam down the lid on his scathing write-up of Australia’s performance when Michael Clarke started reading over his shoulder. Talking of Clarke, while his back condition remains a worry for Australia, he gave a partial demonstration of his mobility during a toilet trip that involved some expert clambering from the window seat to the aisle. He didn’t quite bend his spine as forcefully as he had when Stuart Broad was targeting his lid at Brisbane, but neither was he the hobbling old man that one of the British photographers had spotted out the back of the pavilion on the second day of that Test.

One final thought from the travel day. During the journey from central Brisbane to the Airport, I got into a long chat, as you do, with my taxi driver, Glenn, who, upon learning that I was a cricket journalist, turned green with envy and whistled, with some justification: “Wow ... You’re an asshole!” However, after getting that out of his system, the root of his subsequent rant was that every two-bit punter in the land was suddenly calling for Ponting’s head on a platter, and yet, had anyone actually given any thought to the succession?

If it’s not Captain Grumpy leading the defence of the realm for the foreseeable future, he asked rhetorically, then who? Katich and Hussey are too old to be considered, while Clarke and Shane Watson brought him to the boil in a denunciation of Australia’s so-called Generation Y. As if to prove a point, a few minutes later, he pointed out a billboard with three of the team lined up in their whites to advertise Qantas. Except on closer inspection, they weren’t cricketers at all. They turned out to be a trio of air hostesses. It was a harsh trick, but pretty funny, I thought.

Even so, it's all symptomatic of the wider bout of navel-gazing going on in Australian cricket this summer. If this really is Australia’s weakest team since their mid-80s nadir, with Ponting cast in the role of Allan Border, than at least it can be said in hindsight – not least from watching Fox Sports’ endless re-runs of World Series fixtures from that decade – that Border had around him a core of young players who would go on to build a world-beating team. Right at this moment, regardless of how the Ashes pans out, it’s hard to say the same of the men around Ponting. No wonder he carried the cares of the world onto that flight with him.