The old order changeth?

I was thrilled of course that India beat Australia so handily in Mohali – South Africans are almost always happy to see anybody beat Australia (perhaps because we seldom manage it). But Graeme Smith’s and Jacques Kallis’ reaction worried me – you could see the hubris oozing out as they seized on the poor Australian performance as evidence for a massive boost for their (our) chances in Australia in December. Don’t these guys learn? Only four months ago in England, the South African ‘spin machine’ had a lot to say about our pace attack leading up to the Tests (‘up there with the 1980s West Indians’), only to see it go for 600 in the first innings at Lords’. Yes, we got a draw there and won the series, but surely the lesson is to shut up and keep one’s counsel.

Kallis and Smith are not alone in believing that Mohali shows Australia going the way of Wall Street. A lot of commentators have jumped to the same conclusion. I’m not so sure that we can decide, after one bad match, that they are truly in decline. After all, just a week earlier in Bangalore, India had been in some difficulty. The difference between the two matches was perhaps the magnificent first innings centuries by Ponting and Hussey and Stuart Clark’s presence.

Yet, if we look a little deeper at Australia, there may well be grounds for ‘cautious optimism’. (An economist cannot be more positive than that right now.)

For years we’ve been told about Australia’s fantastic cricket structure, which spots talent young and raw, and brings it through to the national team, maturing technical skills in academies and inter-state cricket, and just as important, toughening players up emotionally to deal with the rigours of international cricket. This ‘machine’ has been the foundation, it is claimed, of their incredibly successful cricket culture andon-field dominance for 15 years and more. It’s not been down to luck – the coincidence of a ‘golden generation’ of players - but rather to ‘the system’. Replacements for Warne, McGrath and the rest would roll off the assembly line, ready to go.

For quite a while it looked like exactly that was happening, which is one reason why Mohali was such a shock – the size of the defeat, if not the defeat itself. But in fact the machine has been misfiring for some time – in a more conventional corporation, the human resources department would be under serious fire from the board. Let’s look at the list.

Andrew Symonds, a clear case of burnout as Fox’s humane piece showed, has joined a growing list of ‘problem players’. Not long ago, it was Shaun Tait – he was supposed to be coming back but we don’t hear much of him now. Before that, it was Damien Martyn, who cleared his No. 4 desk from one day to the next and is now relaxing in the ICL. Don’t get me wrong – I am totally sympathetic to these players and the pressures they have to face. But I think it’s pretty lousy management to have three star performers ‘hit the bottom’ within two or three years without apparently noticing, let alone doing anything about it.

Then there’s Ashley Noffke. He’d been moving along the assembly line for quite a while and apparently shaping up as a pretty nifty speedster, when suddenly he was, without notice, dumped on the trash heap. He looks pretty good (on paper at least), but is now also off to the ICL. Again, either really poor man-management, or (if he was deemed a ‘lemon’) the failure of the system to refine his talent into the finished article. And it seems that the two bowlers chosen ahead of him – Siddle and Bollinger – had not even been in ‘the system’, underlining that ‘the system’ ain’t working so good.

On the spin bowling front, mismanagement also abounds. The unfortunate career of Stuart MacGill had an appropriate denouement in his farcical retirement halfway through an away Test. Surely his problems in coming back from injury should have been recognised earlier, or he should have been persuaded to play one more game. Then poor Beau Casson is talked up as the great new hope, only to be dumped after a single match, in favour of two unknowns for the India tour. But when Tweedledum gets injured, he’s replaced not by Tweedledee, but by Cameron White, who was presumably no higher than fourth in line just 3 months back. As with Noffke and the fast bowlers, it’s hard to see a ‘system’ at work here: instead it carries a slight whiff of panic, of impulse rather than deliberation.

So, like all dynasties, Australian cricket may be re-discovering that nothing last forever. But like that other faltering global superpower, the US, it would be rash to assume that it is already entirely down and out.