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Thursday, January 01, 2009

The fall of an empire

People in South Africa, India and every other cricket playing nation must be rejoicing at the good times ahead. Yes, the Australian Cricket team has well and truly fallen from the lofty heights reached by them over the past several years. I don't think the rest of the pack has made significant improvements in their levels and caught up with the aussies. But it has been a combination of aussies losing their quality and other teams getting their show right that has led to the current state. The aussies are now in a state of free fall. The empire has finally fallen.

I have stopped following the Australian domestic season (don't even know if it is still Pura Milk or something else !) quite sometime back. But looking at the occasional reports the situation is pretty bad. Rebuilding is going to take a long time. I only hope that their decline is not as bad as that of the current West Indies cricket setup.

The selection committee seems bit clueless at the moment. They have definitely gone soft since Trevor Hohns days. There is no greater testament to that than their continued persistence with Hayden. Their mentality towards the choice of spinner for the team is appalling. These must be bad times to be a spinner in Australia - in one day, out the next. I think the selectors are expecting to replace Warne with someone close to Warne. Sorry, that is just not going to happen. Not overnight, anyway.

Any team would struggle when you take away the quality of McGrath, Warne and Gilly at almost the same time. Those are three once in a generation players who luckily for Australia turned up during the same generation. Warne revived the dying art of leg spin (wrist spin in general), McGrath took metronomic accuracy to an all new level and Gilchrist defined wicket-keeping allrounders. 

Gilchrist's role seems to be the one that is reasonably filled for now. Haddin is not another gilly, but he is not bad either. The lack of form (and focus ??) of Symmonds is another headache for the aussies. Watson is a decent allrounder, but by no means world class. The immediate task of rebuilding must therefore target improving the bowling strength while also fixing the allrounder problem.

I think there is another important problem facing the Aussies. It is that of Captaincy. Ricky Ponting is a very poor captain when the chips are down. His body language is often very bad when things aren't going his way. The only good thing about Ponting's captaincy is that his batting after being made captain has improved. Unlike England, India or just about any other country, Australia don't seem to have a culture of past captains playing under a new captain.

It often happens that with the end of the captaincy stint, the player goes out of the national team. This is where the dilemma is. Ponting is still by far the best Australian batsman and still has few years left in him. If he is not the right man to be captain, who is ? and whoever is made the new captain, can the selectors break the tradition and manage to accommodate Ponting in the team ? Also, will Ponting's bloated ego be able to fit in the new setup ? 

2009 is going to be an interesting year for world cricket in general and Australian Cricket in particular. We could find out answers to most of the problems raised above. At the end of the year, we will find out if Australian Cricket has managed to steady the fall or if they continue to go deeper into a bottomless pit, towards the state of Caribbean cricket.

Although the current and future states look bleak, the past has been fantastic and a joy to watch. In fact, the current state of things makes one realize just how darned good was the product that was built by Border, nurtured by Taylor, peaked under Waugh and had been slowly declining under Ponting. I will leave with some very good lines by Peter Roebuck recently.

At such times it is tempting to examine the causes of the collapse. Perhaps it is simply that Australia ran out of great players and luck, a combination that often goes together. Perhaps, too, it is better to remember the numerous glories of the last 15 years and not their limitations. In their stint as the game's flawed exemplar, Australia have played attractive cricket, scoring quickly, encouraging legspin, fielding balanced attacks, scorning stalemates and not sledging quite as much as might be imagined. Australia were ruthless, sometimes unscrupulous, but seldom dull. Taken as a whole, the teams led by Mark Taylor, Steve Waugh and Ricky Ponting have enhanced the game, especially its five-day format.

Along the way Australia have taken part in three of the greatest series ever staged, in the Caribbean, India and England. Always it has taken a mighty effort to bring them down, and that remains the case. Australia may not have been liked but they have commanded respected, sometimes amounting to fear. It has been a time of Waugh and Glenn McGrath and Shane Warne and broken moulds. But nothing lasts forever and now it is someone else's turn.