Australia’s cricketers, currently playing Sri Lanka, are in unfamiliar territory. The Test venues are small and seedy. The surrounding jungles and mangrove swamps are infested with leeches, and sparsely peopled by simple peasants, some of whom are heavily armed and distrustful of foreigners.
The days are chokingly humid, the sort of thing that drowns consumptives in their seats. The nights would be pleasant, if one wasn’t kept awake by the scraping of reptilian bellies over sand outside the door of one’s reed hut.
Welcome to the north coast of Australia, where Sri Lanka’s cricketers are living the latest instalment of the ongoing feud between their island and Australia’s cricket authorities.
It’s a sordid saga, even by sporting standards, with intransigence dominating both sides, racist obscenities from its players punctuating the Australian argument, and a champion bowler with an illegal bowling action muddying Sri Lanka’s waters.
One can only assume that the Australian Cricket Board convened earlier this year to decide on the most insulting treatment it could hand the visitors. The desecration of temples, vomiting on the captain — all were topped by the plan currently in operation: two Tests (three might concede that Sri Lanka are a real Test-playing country) in Cairns and Darwin, the armpits of Australia.Â
Given the previous level of diplomacy between the countries’ respective cricket bodies, Sri Lanka will no doubt retaliate in the future by having Ricky Ponting arrested at Kandy International airport on charges of human organ trafficking. But for now the game goes on, papering over incipient canyons of acrimony and resentment.
But then the spoils have always gone to the victors, and so perhaps Australia are simply exercising their right to throw their weight around. Indeed, that right was strengthened this week by the announcement that Down Under will host next year’s ICC Super Series, a Test match and three one-day internationals in which the top team according the International Cricket Council’s rankings will play a Rest of the World team.
Unless there is a large asteroid zeroing in on Melbourne right now, it seems certain that Australia will take on the best of the rest.
The announcement at the weekend will have put South African and Indian noses out of joint. Indeed, for a time earlier this year it seemed that South Africa had buttoned up the deal. But then, knowing cricketing rumours, there were probably half a billion people in India who’d heard from a guy who knew for dead sure that Mumbai would host the series. So perhaps we never had a look-in at all.
Not that this marketing stunt is necessarily a prize worth winning, if the old-school broadsheets are to be believed. Christopher Martin-Jenkins of The Times has heaped scorn on the series, but then very little has impressed him or his readers since Dennis Compton retired.
However, his misgivings aren’t necessarily misguided. Rest of the World teams usually dissolve like chaff on the breeze 48 hours before the toss. Star attractions are suddenly struck down with cramp or gout or ennui, and the cobbled-together replacements are invariable mismatched, grafters and slow spinners filling one-day slots while Test XIs are stuffed with tonkers and medium-pacers.
Of course hosting — and winning — the Super Series won’t hurt Australia’s rearguard action against the apparently unstoppable migration of cricket’s power structures towards Asia. The pull of Dubai (and of money got by fair means and foul) will eventually render Australia servile, but until then it’s a case of ‘Oh no you bloody well don’t.â€
And for anyone who’s got a problem with that, there’s a bus leaving for Cairns at noon.