Ashes 2011 (16 page)

So, to paraphrase Norma Desmond, Warnie is still big; it's the cricket that got small. 'Like a room with the light turned out,' was the great Australian cricket writer Ray Robinson's description of the game in his country after the retirement of Sir Donald Bradman. The post-Warne game is more akin to a television studio in which the autocue has failed, leaving captain Ricky Ponting to keep filling time while it is fixed by endlessly repeating the word 'execute'.

The vacuum is so palpable that 71 per cent of respondents to a recent online poll wished that Warne, now forty-one, would return to the colours. One should be wary of the results when self-selecting samples pass for mass opinion, but it has provided a storyline beguiling even to Warne. 'There has been a bit written in Australia and people have been asking me about making a comeback,' he wrote yesterday. 'All I can say is that it is very flattering to hear those words.' That's surely
not
all he can say. He could, for example, say it won't happen, as it really can't; he is now, in any case, in London, interviewing for his talk show. But that would spoil the game, and Warne's spirit is above all playful, his perennial gameness the perfect complement to his extraordinary skills.

Two years ago, it might have been a possibility. When Australia struggled in India in 2008, Ponting is known to have been in touch with Warne about Australia's slow-bowling woes, and there were low-level murmurings of a return. Two years later, Warne is a very part-time cricketer, with a last season ahead at the Rajasthan Royals, and full-time media act.

Most publicly, there is
Warnie,
in which Australia's greatest leg spinner is cast in the role of vernacular Michael Parkinson, and in which the result is probably a little more successful than if Parky took up leg-spin, but not much. The first show brought to mind the exchange in Terry Zwigoff's movie
Ghostworld
where the girl protagonists are debating the awfulness of the band at their school dance. 'This is so bad, it's good,' says one. 'This is so bad,' corrects the other, 'it goes through good and back to bad again.'

With all the surrounding programmes so slick, planned and predictable,
Warnie's
artlessness is very nearly endearing – you watch because you cannot imagine what on earth could be the next idea the producers come up with that sounded funny after six beers. But there's a limit, and Australians appear to have reached it quickly: the show's audience halved after the first week.

Also underestimated is Warne's attachment to his three children, of whom he is far more protective than he is of himself. It was for their sake he forsook the game; he is as doting now as then. There is a touching vignette of Warne in the recent autobiography of his erstwhile Hampshire teammate Shaun Udal. In August 2006, Udal learned that his son was autistic. The first person he bumped into was his Aussie skipper, in front of whom Udal burst into tears. Warne – 'a good man, a softer soul than the public perception,' according to Udal – was immediately solicitous. 'I could not bear it if anything happened to my kids,' he confided. 'That is the one thing that has not happened to me.'

The nub of the will-Warnie-won't-Warnie story, however, is not the possibility of his presence but the perplexities of his absence. For there is no escaping the hole in Australian cricket; it is just that Warne's existence gives it a shape that bears his likeness.

Ponting's Australians are playing with something not associated with cricket in this country in a generation: a fear of doing the wrong thing. They have taken refuge in a bureaucratic cast of mind, in which the system is all, and nobody seems capable of thinking for themselves. 'In the end,' said Mitchell Johnson after his omission in Adelaide, 'I need to work things out, go to net sessions, get back in the gym, get my head straight, and get back into the team.' Follow the system, have a bit of a trundle, do a few ab crunches, and all will be well.

Everyone talks about 'plans' and 'executing' them, but when events occur outside the plan, nobody seems to have a clue what to do. At least John Buchanan only asked his charges to 'control the controllables'; his successor Tim Nielsen, whose contract was quietly renewed for three years back in August, declines to acknowledge that uncontrollables exist.

Warne, of course, never had a plan in cricket; no more so has he had a plan in life. His philosophy reminds you of the scene in
Peep Show
where the incorrigible Jez realises he is about to sleep with his flatmate Mark's girlfriend: 'This is almost certainly the wrong thing to do. But if I don't do it, how will I know?'

Warne would almost certainly hate to be a member of this Australian side – not because they are losing games, for his career contained its share of failure, but because they are going about their tasks so predictably, so mechanically, so joylessly. It is not simply his playing skills that Australians miss, but his infectious, irrepressible, irreverent spirit. If Warnie could be bottled – and surely an advertiser will find a way eventually – then the Australian team would be first in the queue to partake. But it is not at all clear they could enjoy the taste.

Abject defeat at England's hands. Test grounds in which the majority of fans seem to be English. The choice of a spinner with six first-class games behind him, and the recall of an opening batsman yet to score a half-century in this season's Sheffield Shield. Any or all the foregoing would be enough to plunge Australian cricket into a bout of introspection – were it not already there.

Back in August, Cricket Australia held a five-day state-of-the-nation conference which heard disturbing truths about the game's health in this country. Attendances, delegates learned, were marking time. Television audiences had tailed off over the decade by a quarter. There was a marked drop-off in junior participation after the age of thirteen, while female fans were staying away in droves.

When the discussion paper elaborating on these problems found its way into the media, a degree of green-and-gold garment-rending ensued, although the leak may also have had the desired effect: Cricket Australia's board agreed soon after to an expansion in 2011–12 of the so-called Big Bash League, Australia's T20 domestic competition. This would entitle the state associations that compose CA to sell off minority stakes in putative city-based teams, and beget two further privately owned franchises. But apparently excluded from the discussion was the actual quality of Australian cricket, which, it seemed to be assumed, would simply take care of itself, as it always had.

A decade ago, that certainly seemed to be the case. Australia's Cricket Academy, based in the Adelaide suburb of Del Monte, had made it the envy of the cricket world, producing such celebrated graduates as Ricky Ponting, Glenn McGrath, Adam Gilchrist, Damien Martyn and one still-more-celebrated class clown in Shane Warne. Yet even then the academy was on borrowed time, having always had more admirers abroad than at home.

For some years, the state associations had grown reluctant to allow their best young cricketers out of their sights for prolonged residencies. With Australian cricket in rude financial health, those associations had invested heavily in their own development programmes. They were galled by the thought of other states profiting from their talent – as happened, for instance, when Queensland, who couldn't offer Shane Watson a Sheffield Shield spot, lost him to Tasmania, who could. Schemes to bind players to their states of origin were then rendered inoperable by the first Cricket Australia pay deal with its players, which viewed such arrangements as restraint of trade.

So when Rod Marsh was recruited to open England's academy in August 2001, it was even as the concept was perishing in Australia. In its stead arose the Centre of Excellence at Allan Border Field in Albion, Brisbane, whose clientele was not to be emergent cricket talent but older players with pre-existing first-class experience undertaking shorter stints. It opened in January 2004 under the oversight of current national coach Tim Nielsen.

Yet while the Centre of Excellence has kept the states happy, one can't help wondering now whether it has something to do with Australian players tending to mature later, or, in Mitchell Johnson's case, barely at all; and also whether the diffusion of the national focus in junior development has further exposed cricket to the depredations of the football codes, especially Australian rules. Eighteen-year-old Alex Keath, who recently represented Victoria against England, is a rare counterexample to a disturbing trend: champion cricketers drawn away in their teens by the Australian Football League's far-reaching national draft.

Face it: were you a star schoolboy athlete, which would you find more enticing? A year at a national cricket academy run by a legendary cricketer or involvement in a state development programme full of professional coaches heavy with qualifications – or, as a third alternative, an AFL club subsidising your parents and paying your school fees solely for the opportunity to bid for your services further down the track.

You might by now have detected another of those Australia-England role reversals so vexing locals this summer. Parochial self-interest undermining national priorities? Wasn't that meant to be England's problem, not Australia's? Yet interstate rivalries have always abounded here, reinforced by Cricket Australia's antique governance structure, where the voting arrangements have barely changed since 1905. The federal cricket bureaucracy now has a great many mouths to feed. Over the last two years, CA has had to disgorge to the states A$96 million in dividends, a third more than its total surpluses from continuing operations. These rivalries may be further entrenched by the enriching of the Big Bash League, which will give states access to income streams outside those traditionally funnelled through Cricket Australia from international fixtures.

CA's strategists forecast that domestic T20 will in time provide up to half Australian cricket's revenues. Good news for some; but it doesn't sound like an organisation preparing for a reverberating renewal of collective purpose, ready to sacrifice everything in order that the country's cricket team regain global supremacy.

Australian cricket's other relationship ripe for scrutiny if the Ashes remain in England is with India, with whom CA is a joint-venture partner in the instantly forgettable Champions League, played in September 2010, and against whom soon after Australia played a two-Test series in order that India could burnish its number one Test ranking.

Observers looked askance at CA's decision to compel Doug Bollinger and Mike Hussey to represent their IPL franchise in the Champions League rather than prepare for the Border-Gavaskar Trophy with the national squad. The Test series then probably cost Nathan Hauritz his Test place, while Bollinger and Simon Katich also sustained injuries and have since joined him on the sidelines.

To be fair, Australia remains only 0–1 down in an Ashes series sensitively poised, neither side having great strength in depth; England is not yet a good enough side to dominate indefinitely. But a loss to England tends to provoke deeper self-examination in this country than to, say, India or South Africa. Thus there is a growing sense that it might not only be on the field that Australia is becoming a mid-ranking Test country.

When South Africa played Australia in Perth two years ago, coach Mickey Arthur taped to their dressing-room wall a small poster of Ricky Ponting. Around it were drawn thought bubbles of the kind customary in comic strips, each containing a potential worry or distraction of the Australian captain, about his team's form or his own. One of them was the prospect of Australia losing their first home series for sixteen years: at Perth, then Melbourne, the Proteas turned this from phantom to fact.

It was a neat trick, actually devised by team psychologist Jeremy Snape, who argued that teams visiting Australia were inclined to obsess over their own frailties, forgetting that their foes were also flesh and blood. And if you imagine reprising it now, you soon start running short of bubbles, for Ponting and his team have spent their week since the Second Test plunged in self-examination, having in that match been as clearly outclassed by England as perhaps on any occasion in the last generation. Trouble proverbially comes in threes, and so it has for Ponting: batting, bowling and fielding.

Needing to win two of the three remaining Tests, the Australians have arrived in Perth with the prospect of perhaps as many as five alterations to their Adelaide line-up. Criticised for their trust in continuity, Andrew Hilditch and his fellow selectors now find themselves lambasted for faith in change. In particular, their promotion as specialist spinner of 26-year-old Michael Beer has been a gift to headline writers, speculating that Hilditch must surely have examined him through Beer goggles – et cetera, et cetera. The truth is actually worse: Hilditch has not seen him bowl at all.

Were the next Test on Melbourne's easy-paced drop-in pitch, in fact, Australia would almost certainly be planning for the Ashes of 2013 already. But WACA curator Cameron Sutherland's surface of Harvey River clay with 'a fair bit of grass on top' may have arrived in the nick of time to redress the imbalance between the teams, adding that little bit of environmental uncertainty to an evaluation of their relative strengths.

England's record at the WACA is dismal as could be: they have won only one of eleven Tests here, and exceeded 300 in an innings only once in the last twenty years. And although it sounds counterintuitive to suggest that England will miss a cricketer whose wickets so far have cost 80 runs each and whose only innings lasted one delivery, Stuart Broad's absence will remove a crucial underpinning. He was England's quickest and most aggressive bowler in the two Tests, hitting Ricky Ponting's helmet in Brisbane and persuading Michael Clarke to don a chest guard in Adelaide, while his century-making potential at number eight lent a depth to the English order that Australia could not match.