Cricketers are neither linguists nor mathematicians, so perhaps one could forgive the Australians their blabbermouthed foolishness of the past week. First it was Matthew Hayden, scrambling to the summit of sports jargon idiocy by declaring himself to be ”a billion percent” behind Ricky Ponting, perhaps in the hope that some of those tens of millions of percents would rub off on the selectors when they cast their eyes over Hayden’s wretched form this year.
After all, if the selectors are with you, even just a miniscule 110%, who can be against you?
But it was a curious Australian translation that really set the tone. ”Resurgent” — a word used by almost every observer of last week’s one-day Super Series to describe the host nation — implies a recovery, a resurrection or a revival. What it does not imply is instantly restored overwhelming domination. And yet, to listen to the Australians, one would think they lost the Ashes because they felt it was time to cut the English some slack.
Indeed, Wisden Cricketer editor John Stern has suggested not only a lingering post-Ashes denial (heightened by thumping wins in the Super Series) but an Australian penchant for revisionist history.
This week, he quoted Hayden as saying that, if they play well, they can beat anybody. The sweeping arrogance and implicit sense of entitlement in this statement are perhaps understandable, given Australia’s history of dominance; but it does suggest, as Stern points out, that the Australians still haven’t realised that they didn’t lose the Ashes — England won them.
It’s the embarrassing bravado of drunken brawler who gets poleaxed by the sober bouncer, and then spends the next few days explaining how, if he’d landed his left in time, that puny little squirt would still be seeing stars.
All of which makes the outcome of the Super Test, under way at the Sydney Cricket Ground, more or less irrelevant. If Australia win, they will claim to be back where they were last year, or in 1999, or in 1960, or in 1935: rulers of the cricketing world, their camping-chair throne placed firmly somewhere between the Yarra River and the right hand of God Almighty. If they lose — well, it just means they didn’t play well enough. Neither result will lead to any introspection whatsoever, or at least not by those a billion percent behind Ponting.
This is a new Australian mindset, and one that smells ever so faintly of long-term decline. The freshness of the teams of Mark Taylor and Steve Waugh is gone, replaced by busy self-validation and comfortable assumptions.
Where once a soft-spoken Taylor would shrug and talk about being quietly confident, and peroxide-haired shock-jock Warne would shoot his mouth off about his new demon delivery and how the pitch would start turning by the second session, today’s Team Australia is characterised by endless optimistic blather from Ponting and coach John Buchanan, ironically offset by mild, focused, and quietly insightful comments by Warne.
This is an entirely different team, technically and emotionally, to the one that steamrolled the world between 1994 and 2003. It is still the best in the world, but it got that way by digesting — not denying — its failures.
One can’t help recalling the final stanza of Auden’s magnificently ominous The Fall of Rome: ”Altogether elsewhere, vast / Herds of reindeer move across / Miles and miles of golden moss, / Silently and very fast.”
Australia is without a doubt the cricketing Rome, but altogether elsewhere, vast herds of Pakistani and Indian teenagers are moving across miles and miles of hard-packed earth, bowling doosras and reverse swing very fast.
What those teenagers probably aren’t doing is watching the Super Test. The absence of Sachin Tendulkar through injury has made the whole affair academic for hundreds of millions of people, and if Inzamam-ul-Haq is dropped in favour of Shaun Pollock, many millions more will tune out. Besides, Pakistanis have more pressing concerns than cricket right now.
Last week, many wondered whether Graeme Smith would have the talent to unify his team in just six days. This week, he revealed greater talents — insight and realism — and explained that melding his players into a unit was simply impossible, given the time constraints and the once-off nature of the match. Instead, he said, he was calling on each individual player to make an individual contribution — a sensible tactic in the circumstances.
All of which made the benching of Shoaib Akhtar on Thursday all the more intriguing. The official line would no doubt be that the Pakistani’s pace would be neutralised by what is promising to be a classic slow-turning Sydney pitch, but between the lines there seems to be an admission that even in a team of individual divas, Shoaib’s temperament might have been too much to stomach.
An educated guess for an outcome? Smith, smitten with having a real spinner, will bowl Muttiah Muralitharan into an early grave. But, before his arm detaches, the Sri Lankan will capture 11 wickets, and Australia will lose. Of course, this isn’t a billion percent guaranteed. In modern cricket there are only two certainties: Muralitharan throws, and Australians have talked themselves up so high that they have nothing to win, and everything to lose.