Not so long ago, it would have looked liked business as usual: Australia has won five of its last six Tests, and lost only four of its last two dozen one-day internationals. Nobody who watched Australia turn the Ashes over last year, however, will regard the progress as other than preliminary steps towards restoration. At the peak of its powers, Australia simply went out and won; this summer of 2009–10, it has depended a good deal, perhaps even a little overmuch, on its opponents losing.
The West Indies, ambushed in Brisbane, belied their eighth place in the ICC Test rankings by taking Tests right up to their hosts in Adelaide and Perth. Australia then disposed of a poorly led Pakistan team rivalling Shane MacGowan in its propensity for self-destruction, although only after trailing by 206 runs on first innings in Sydney.
Almost every member of Ricky Ponting’s team has suffered unwonted media pressure about their performances at some stage, even the captain himself. When he top-edged his first ball to long leg at Hobart, he was facing his worst Australian summer in a decade. But when Mohammad Aamer filled his trousers, Ponting filled his boots, batting almost twelve therapeutic hours in the match. As cricket it’s been pleasingly involving, as reflected in the television ratings. But just because names like Shane Warne, Adam Gilchrist and Michael Slater remain in free circulation doesn’t mean that times haven’t changed: they’re commentators now, whose feats set a high benchmark for those they are commenting on.
The Ashes? If not too close to call, it’s certainly too far. Australia would frankly expect to win, based on Leonard Hutton’s rule of antipodean ground advantage that the team expecting to beat Australia down under must be at least 25 per cent their superior. Man for man, they have also progressed further than England since the Oval Test. Most meritorious has been the further advance of Shane Watson, who this season has bulked like a right-handed Matthew Hayden at the top of the order. His pretensions to the status of all-rounder, too, were enhanced when his batting average finally exceeded his bowling average during the Boxing Day Test.
With the slow fade of Brett Lee and Stuart Clark, Australia has also welcomed the happy-go-lucky left-armer Doug Bollinger, as adept with the new ball as Mitchell Johnson is apparently averse to it, and already an after-dinner speaker’s delight. New South Wales teammates, for example, describe his efforts one day in the dressing room to extract toast from a recalcitrant toaster with a knife. Concerned comrades intervened, explaining patiently that it was best not to plunge knives into live electric appliances. Bollinger nodded, pondered, then tackled the toaster again … this time with a fork.
Where the Ashes are concerned, nonetheless, days are early yet. And if Bollinger appears to be filling a Merv-shaped hole in Australian cricket, much else about this summer has seemed altogether less nostalgic.
Chief among the successes of 2009–10 has been the KFC Big Bash, a domestic Twenty20 competition as subtle as its name, enhanced this summer for the first time by overseas players, such as West Indians Dwayne Bravo, Kemar Roach, Chris Gayle and Dwayne Smith, Pakistanis Shahid Afridi and Naved-ul-Hasan, and New Zealanders Ross Taylor and Daniel Vettori. For Big Bash, read Big Cash: a place in the final translates to a place in the supranational Champions League later this year, and a share in its stupendous revenues. Not surprisingly, state associations hitherto dependent on distributions from Cricket Australia are agitating to embiggen the Bash at the expense of the Sheffield Shield.
Australia’s venerable first-class competition is also being squeezed from the other end, its last round this season coinciding with the IPL, an overlap which the league’s ubiquitous commissioner, Lalit Modi, warned rather forbiddingly ‘could mean penalties on such players, including termination of contracts, jeopardising future participation’.
Ponting, among others, has expressed misgivings about the impingements of cricket’s new order:
I’d hate to see the day where we start playing more Twenty20 cricket at the expense of Sheffield Shield. One thing I think we have had over other nations over the last 50 years is great strength in our domestic cricket. You don’t want to tinker with things that are working so well. We have always been very protective of our domestic cricket because we think it has developed and brought on a number of very good players throughout the course of the last 100 years.
So far, the pretence is that nothing need give, and that Australian cricket can somehow follow Yogi Berra’s famous advice: ‘When you come to a fork in the road, take it’. But internal tensions are building, among players, administrators, agents and media.
Ponting, retired from international Twenty20 and whose IPL contract has just been bought out by the Kolkata Knight Riders, reflects one tendency, keen to stretch his Test days out for as long as form and fitness permit—a sense of priorities he has imparted to his baggy green brethren, only one of whom will appear in India’s forthcoming extravaganza. The opposite tendency was simultaneously on show at the Gabba, as Andrew Symonds succumbed for 1, spooning a caught-and-bowled while representing Queensland in the Big Bash preliminary final against Victoria.
Three years ago, Symonds made a match-winning hundred in an Ashes Test at the MCG. This summer, Australia’s pioneer of freelance cricket has scraped together 88 runs and bowled eight overs in half-a-dozen Big Bashings, preparatory to rejoining his six-weeks-of-the-year teammates at the Deccan Chargers. It was a sad sight, and a salutary one, for England, it implied, is no longer Ponting’s only looming rival.