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Gideon Haigh
Published at 12:01AM, January 8 2014
How good a cricket team are Michael Clarke’s Australians? For the green and gold gathering at the Opera House yesterday, the answer was . . . well, absolutely ace. Those resisting the urge to get carried away have tended to more circumspect judgments, such as good enough, good but not great, good but yet to be tested.
One answer on which all can agree is: better than was thought six months back. But not perhaps utterly transformed. It seems long ago, but Australia played some excellent cricket last summer, and would have been still more formidable had they enjoyed the services of a fit Ryan Harris and Shane Watson.
In order to assess Australian success, then, you need to fathom the nature of their unsuccess — how and why they lost six consecutive Tests in India and England, five of them by colossal margins, from February to July.
The vague and self-serving explanations heard so far will solidify over time into the stuff of vague and self-serving autobiographies. Perhaps one day we’ll have a fuller picture; but perhaps we also won’t, because further and better particulars don’t really serve anyone’s interest.
Australia’s most obvious advance is in the fusion of Harris and Peter Siddle with the misunderestimated Mitchell Johnson and the misoverscrutinised Nathan Lyon.
Less obvious, perhaps, but little less fundamental has been the uniform excellence of Australia’s outcricket. How poorly English batsmen have rotated strike this summer, seldom truly challenging the ring with aggressive calling or daring an arm in the deep with an extra run. But that is partly a function of the Australians, notably David Warner, being nearly as intimidating in the field as with the ball.
In manpower terms, Australia’s balance is also improved. A year ago in Sydney, Australia fielded five batsmen, five bowlers and a batsman-keeper in Matthew Wade; this time round they had six batsmen, four bowlers and a keeper-batsman in Brad Haddin in the form of his life, with Watson and also Steve Smith available to bowl.
And if Watson still calls to mind Norman Mailer’s description of jungle rumbling George Foreman — “as slow as a man walking up a hill of pillows” — he has been highly economical, giving away just 2.55 runs an over. In Australia’s next destination, South Africa, where he took five for 17 in Cape Town in November 2011, he could be more useful still.
Amazing to say, even after ten consecutive Tests on both sides of the world, the Watson enigma persists, as lengthy and seemingly unresolvable as Lost.
Sage judges now hold that he would be better off supplanting George Bailey at No 6, handing on his No 3 spot to Alex Doolan.
This, however, may not be the time. Doolan has all the hallmarks of a fine player except perhaps the first-class record, which is no better or worse than his state captain Bailey’s: six hundreds and an average of 38 in 53 games, versus 14 hundreds and an average of 38 in 103 games. Doolan would also be being asked to start a top-order Test career against a razor-keen attack without a first-class innings in two months, with the possibility of some second XI cricket in the Futures League at the end of the month.
With an average of 26, Bailey has hardly made every post of his first series a winner. But his best innings in Adelaide was cut short by a fine catch on a day England otherwise dropped everything, and had a rough review not gone against him in Melbourne and had Clarke delayed his declaration until lunch on the fourth day in Perth he might now be being deemed a qualified success.
Critics and commentators will always wish for change — a cycle of new faces and climate of experimentation suit us. Decisions for selectors are less clear-cut, and must factor in time, place and chemistry.
Further argument for the status quo is also a matter of balance — the balance of personality. Duncan Fletcher once referred to a team’s “critical mass”, a sustainable ratio of “steady men” to “free spirits”: Fletcher put the ideal at eight-to-three, with a marked tailing off of results from six-to-five.
The exact arithmetic is less important than the sentiment, whose inference is that in changing a cricket team’s personnel you also tamper with its humours. An unconscious sense of this undergirded critique of the rotation policy, and Australia’s Ashes accomplishments have provided further evidence.
It has been success, of course, that has allowed Australia to play an unchanged XI this summer; but from what players were saying publicly before the fifth Test, an unchanged XI has contributed to success.
As a shrewd judge of the game summed it up for me in Perth, this side contains “a lot of sensible cricketers”. Bailey is one: to exclude him now, too, would also amount to writing off the investment of a whole series, which seems wasteful.
This debate invites another question: how reflective is the Australian cricket team of the overall strength of Australian cricket? A golden summer does not make a golden era: in Haddin, Harris and Chris Rogers especially, the team is continuing to draw on its inheritance.
Nor do there seem a host of players outside the XI clamouring for attention. James Pattinson and Jackson Bird have barely resumed cricket; Mitchell Starc and Pat Cummins are still to do so.
How great it would be if right now there was a batsman ripping up records in the Sheffield Shield; instead they are busy stonking balls out of various Big Bash League parks. Slow bowling talent hardly abounds and the next best wicketkeeper is unclear. Cracks are being mortared, but remain some way from closed.
Looking around, of course, there is a lot of cracking going around. South Africa will represent a salutary challenge. But the standard of international cricket is at the moment far from healthy. How good a cricket team Clarke leads, then, might depend on whether the question is absolute or relative.
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Topic: Aussie team for SA (Read 11367 times)