Amid the usual sea of opinions leading into this series, Andrew Strauss
cut to the core of Australian cricket's troubles with an observation he
made about the last Ashes tour down under. While the Test matches of
2010-11 and their margins were clear, Strauss noticed something a little
more far-reaching and disturbing on his travels. The standard of the
players and teams his side faced in their tour matches was nowhere near
the level that England tourists had come to expect. Where once the
visitors expected a serious fight no matter where they played, now they
were surprised to feel unthreatened.
Three years on, and a very public execution at Lord's
has confirmed the decline Strauss witnessed. First evident among the
grassroots, it has now enveloped the shop front of the Australian game.
The bewilderment experienced by a succession of batsmen as they trudged
off with inadequate scores for the fourth consecutive Ashes innings was
mirrored on the faces of the Sunday spectators, Australian television
viewers and Cricket Australia staff on both sides of the world. How had
it come to this?
Shane Watson, Chris Rogers, Phillip Hughes, Michael Clarke, Usman
Khawaja and Steve Smith fell in manners familiar and unfamiliar,
technical or mental, to pace or spin. There was no underlying pattern.
But the death dive of the national team's recent performances, including
a sixth Test match defeat
in succession, is the ugliest and most visible symptom of a collective
malaise that has been creeping ever wider for some time, hurried along
by band-aid solutions and rampant market thinking that has helped to rot
the teeth of the domestic game.
Among the most troubling elements of Australia's current state of
poverty is that there is no single person in the team nor around it who
has the capacity to provide a remedy. Not the captain Clarke, nor the
coach Darren Lehmann, the selectors Rod Marsh and John Inverarity, nor
even the high-powered general manager of team performance, Pat Howard.
Had he still been employed, the estranged former coach Mickey Arthur
would have been equally powerless.
They all have had influential roles within Australian cricket over the
past three years, and all have a genuine desire to see the team winning
matches. All are doing their best to prepare players for tasks such as
England. But none have complete control over the areas of Cricket
Australia to where the game's decline can be traced. Perhaps not
surprisingly, all are often heard to say the words "not ideal". All
should be speaking earnestly to their chief executive, James Sutherland,
who despite much financial prosperity has presided over the
aforementioned rot.
Several issues stand out as causes of the problems on display at Lord's.
The first is the marginalisation of the grade and Sheffield Shield
competitions, for so long regarded as the best proving grounds of their
kind in the world. In 2013 they sit at the fringes of CA's thinking.
Grade cricket has fallen behind the much vaunted "pathway" of under-age
competitions and Centre of Excellence training as the primary providers
of players bound for international duty. The Shield, meanwhile, is now
played disjointedly and unhappily around the edges of the Australian
season, having ceded the prime months of December and January to the
Twenty20 Big Bash League.
This scheduling stands in marked contrast to the fixtures now produced
in England and India, Australia's two most recent tormentors. For all
the buzz and hype around the IPL and the Champions League, neither
competition cuts across the first-class Ranji Trophy, which remains a
tournament fought in an environment of continuity and cohesion.
Similarly, the English county season offers domestic players a greater
chance for building up form and confidence in the format most
representative of Test matches. Plenty of battles have been fought
within England to keep it so, and next summer its primacy will be
further embossed by the spreading of T20 fixtures more evenly through
the season.
Even if the Shield were to be granted a place of greater centrality to
the Australian summer, the matter of pitches is also a source of
problems. Australia's glaring lack of batsmen capable of playing long
innings can be related directly to the emergence of a succession of
sporting or worse surfaces, as state teams chase the outright results
required to reach the Shield final. Queensland and Tasmania have been
among the most notable preparers of green surfaces, often for reasons of
weather as much as strategy, but their approaches have become
increasingly popular across the country. This has resulted in a litany
of low-scoring matches and bowlers celebrating far more often than they
did during the relatively run-laden 1990s. Batsmen are thus lacking in
confidence and technique, while bowlers are similarly less used to
striving for wickets on unresponsive surfaces so often prepared in
Tests, as administrators eye fifth-day gate receipts.
Money is never far from anyone's motivation, of course, and the
financial modelling of Australian player payments must also be examined.
This much was pointed out by Arthur himself when the BBL was unveiled
in 2011, accompanied by the news that state contracts would be reduced
on the presumption that every player would also play T20. Arthur's words
should be ringing in the ears of CA's decision makers almost as much as
his anguished complaints now about the loss of his job.
"Your biggest salary cap should be your state contracts with the smaller
salary cap being your Big Bash," Arthur had said when coach of Western
Australia. "If we're really serious in Australia about getting Australia
to the No. 1 Test-playing side in the world, we should be reflecting
that in our salary caps and budgets. You can feel the squeeze just
through the salary caps that we have to work with. You're getting a
bigger salary cap for six weeks' work over the holiday period than you
are for trying to make yourself a Test cricketer. I think that's the
wrong way round."
The wrong way round and the wrong way to maintain a strong Test team.
The pain of Australia's players at Lord's, not least their clearly upset
captain Michael Clarke, was patently clear. But having almost conjured
miracles at Trent Bridge, St John's Wood has provided a much more
realistic picture of where the team has slipped to, and why. There can
be few more humiliating places at which to be defined as second rate
than the home of cricket, for so long the home away from home for
Australia's cricketers. In a moment of hubris after their win at the
ground in 2005,
Ricky Ponting's team held uproarious court in the home dressing rooms.
This time around any visit to the England side of the pavilion will be
made far more humbly.
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