Ashes 2011 (4 page)

It could easily have been otherwise. 'You might thank me for this one day,' Duncan Fletcher claims to have told Strauss after casting his captaincy vote as coach for Flintoff four years ago, ending Strauss's promising leadership audition. One wonders now how it bore on Strauss, to be part of a daily calamity where the only consolation was his not having to defend it.

Strauss's batting was slightly dispirited throughout that misbegotten sojourn, even a little disoriented. He perished hooking twice in Brisbane, which smacked of someone trying to make a point before it was quite clear in their own mind. Thereafter, he seemed almost astrologically cursed by poor decisions, and his average shrivelled to less than 25.

Memory of those travails has stuck. In a review of the English batting published in last week's
Sydney Morning Herald,
Stuart Clark, four years ago Australia's leading bowler, was dismissive of Strauss, rating him the least effective of the team's top seven. 'He hooks up,' said Clark, undoubtedly casting his mind back to the Gabba, 'and when playing forward his front foot goes straight down the wicket rather than to the line of the ball.'

Yet that method can't be said to have served Strauss badly. At his best, he is one of those players the sages routinely describe as 'well organised', as though batting was something to be learned from the
MCC Coaching Filofax,
and averages calculated by reference to the Dewey Decimal System. What it essentially means is that a cricketer has rationalised his game to within familiar and manageable limits, which in Strauss's case is verifiably true. He moves early then holds still, letting the ball come; he concentrates on scoring square of the wicket and off the pads; his strike rate hardly deviates from between the mid-40s and low-50s.

His organisation, in fact, is broader than technical. His economics degree at Durham University might have been a 2:1, but Strauss credits it with his unusual self-directedness: 'Having to revise for exams on my own enabled me to work on cricket without someone standing over me.' On the recommendation of his Australian-born ECB Academy coach Rod Marsh, he has for nearly a decade kept a detailed cricket diary. On meeting Alan Chambers five years ago, he was powerfully impressed by one of the polar explorer's aphorisms: 'Never put your body in a place your mind hasn't been first.'

So where his opposite number Ricky Ponting stakes the crease out briskly and busily, as though he can't wait to sort the bowling out and collar the contest, Strauss usually looks like a man settled into a comfortable routine, wearing the calm mask between deliveries of someone waiting in a queue – once again, a very English characteristic. You could arrive at a ground and not be sure whether Strauss had just taken guard or been batting a couple of sessions; you could meet him afterwards, it is said, and not be clear if he'd made a hundred or nought. Interestingly, in diary extracts published in his
Testing Times
(2009), he emerged as disarmingly susceptible to doubt, particularly during the eighteen months he went without an international hundred. But watching him from afar, you would not guess it; like one of those animals capable of controlling their heart rate and respiration, he appears to move only when he has to, and always with an end in mind.

As for that residual antipodeanism, Strauss should probably embrace it. Australians are fond of claiming success, and distancing themselves from failure. The story is told of the great racehorse Phar Lap, trained in Australia but foaled in New Zealand, that newspaper posters were prepared before its first American start covering both eventualities: 'Australian horse wins' and 'New Zealand horse loses'. The better Strauss does, the likelier the media is to stress his Aussie links; it will be in failure that he becomes just another lousy Pom.

Australian cricket is sibilant with whispers. A newspaper article last week spoke darkly of the dissatisfaction of comrades with Michael Clarke and a push to promote Marcus North as a successor to Ricky Ponting, with Michael Hussey reportedly agitated at comments of Clarke's about the preference of some players for serving their IPL paymasters.

This being the way of things, the article set rolling the 24–hour juggernaut of talk radio, television and Twitter, gaining rather than losing momentum from the litany of denials. An opinion poll in a weekend paper proved Clarke's approval rating to have slumped to Obama levels, with only 28 per cent of respondents preferring him to follow Ponting – Cameron White had more supporters.

In one respect, Clarke should feel reassured. If his chief rivals to Australian cricket's number one job are either barely in the side (North) or out of it (White), then it is surely his for the asking. Yet not since Australian cricket's
anni horribili
in the 1980s, when at one stage a lobby for Dirk Wellham thrust him into the role of Allan Border's deputy for exactly five days, can I recall advocacy for a candidate for national captaincy outside the starting XI. Clarke can be thankful he's not competing in
The X-Factor.

At the very least, it is a poor start to the summer's relations between the Australian cricketers and their media, who mix at the best of times like oil and water. Where the relatively wealthy English cricket press has a strong core of well-credentialled ex-players, Australia's journalists tend to be all-sport roustabouts specialising temporarily whom players keep at arm's length with the aid of a courteous but protective public affairs cadre and a phalanx of zealous agents. The players go through their motions grudgingly, bound only by a contracted minimum of appearances: there was amusement at Cricket Australia earlier this year when Clarke asked that a glossy mag photoshoot be deemed one of his gigs.

Team members are consequently seldom seen other than in the regimented and formulaic environment of media conferences, where the questions hardly rise above the level of the cricket equivalent of their favourite colour and what's on their iPod. Shane Warne and Glenn McGrath, superb extempore performers, are sorely missed; there is certainly nobody in the Australian setup as consistently engaging as Graeme Swann.

The results are plain to see. In coverage terms, the summer game languishes by comparison with the football codes, masterful at promoting their players even out of season – the Australian Football League's annual draft, for example, will squeeze cricket off the sport pages when it is held on the Gold Coast next week. And cricket writers fed up with mushroom treatment start speculating, as they seem to have here, on the basis of an unsourced mutter, a sideways glance and a theory or two.

Is Clarke's position as Ponting's dauphin in jeopardy? Is his place in his team-mates' esteem secure? The rumours predate this summer, dating back to a widely reported dressing room contretemps between Clarke and Simon Katich after last year's Sydney Test, when the former's keenness to slip away with his celebrity girlfriend offended the latter's obeisance to post-match rituals.

Rumours resumed after Clarke's muted tour of India. Other players were said to have 'issues' with him. Perhaps the highest kite flown was a newspaper article suggesting that South Australian Callum Ferguson – five centuries in forty-eight first-class games and an average of 36 with Adelaide Oval as his home pitch – was an Australian captain in the making.

Frankly, who can tell? Dressing rooms are curious places. Dissimilar personalities can get on. Too-similar individuals can clash. A losing team need not always be on the point of insurrection, and a winning team need not be concordant – for proof, see the Yorkshire XIs of the 1960s, recently brought to life in Andrew Collomosse's excellent new book
Magnificent Seven.
Steve Waugh and Shane Warne won a lot of Tests together without liking each other all that much.

Nor is it as though the Australian media have an ear to the dressing room keyhole. Thanks to Cricket Australia's public affairs
cordon sanitaire,
they have their ear to the keyhole of six-inch-thick steel double doors separated by a moat from the Australian team's gated compound where the fences are topped with barbed wire.

But therein may lie the problem. Australian cricket now wears such a banal, expressionless face that it leaves the journalists to make their own suppositions, while the choreographed denials invite the scepticism of Mandy Rice-Davies: 'Well, he would say that, wouldn't he?' The other factor is that, just for once, two teams are about to undertake a Test series with a reasonable period of preparation and premeditation. Such hiatuses demand interim narratives, preliminary judgements, questions to be answered, answers to be questioned. There actually used to be more of this. Nowadays the calendar is so congested that speculation is usually the stuff of a day or two at best. Is Ponting finished? Oh, now he's got some runs. Is Steve Smith a top-class leg-spinner? Errr, no. Nothing puts rumour and innuendo to flight like real runs and wickets – and it's not long to wait now.

Bismarck commented famously that there were two things the public must never see made: sausages and laws. Had he known of the game, he would surely have added cricket teams. Albeit unintentionally, Cricket Australia has just demonstrated why.

For some time, CA has been squirming about the encroachments of the football codes on summer. Although of limited actual significance, the Australian Football League's national draft has come close to eclipsing concurrent cricket news; the League's PR flaks boast of 'owning' November, and not idly.

Thus the scheme, driven by CA's marketing department, of bringing forward the selection of the Australian team for the First Test, just ahead of the draft, and turning it into a public event, in the lunch hour at Sydney's bustling Circular Quay, in sight of the Opera House, the Harbour Bridge and various other visual clichés. Ricky Ponting and some of his men could also be presented to the media, and even mingle with the public – a rare experience for them nowadays, when for much of the time the players might as well be holograms.

Unfortunately, the days when the Australian cricket team chose itself are a thing of the past; likewise the era when Australian cricketers were physically susceptible only to kryptonite. The selectors, chaired by Andrew Hilditch, did not want to commit themselves. Three Sheffield Shield games loomed. New South Wales were hosting Tasmania at the SCG, Queensland entertaining South Australia at the Gabba, Victoria tackling Western Australia at the MCG. Likewise was Australia A due to throw the gauntlet down to England at Bellerive Oval in Hobart. It made as much sense to announce the Test team so ahead of time as it did to include whodunit in the programme for
The Mousetrap.

So it wasn't only the climate that made the event a damp squib. When the moment came that only a handful of spectators were waiting for, Hilditch temporised. He started to read. The list went on … and on. It stopped at last, almost arbitrarily, at seventeen names. Tension? You could barely have heard a piano drop. As a moment of buttock-clenching bathos, it ranked with the England and Wales Cricket Board preening themselves around Allen Stanford's box of bucks. Ricky Ponting doesn't faze easily, but even he was nonplussed: 'It's a different feel. Unfortunately, that's what we've got. For some reason, Cricket Australia wanted to name the squad as early as they have. We've just got to get on with it.'

In fact, it was the selectors who needed to be getting on with things, winnowing this down to something more properly resembling a cricket team – as indeed they will. In one sense, it was quite an instructive exercise, like watching the rushes of a film or reading the first draft of a book. One was admitted to the selection process at a preliminary stage, with all compositional options still open, and before the consideration of factors like conditions and overall balance. On the other hand, there are reasons all this is usually screened from the public gaze.

For a start, the selectors have sent a garbled communiqué to those involved in the Australia A game in Hobart. The team's captain Cameron White, who has led his state to consecutive Sheffield Shields, has learned he is not in Australia's best seventeen. Ditto,
inter alia,
opening bat Phil Hughes, opening bowler Peter George and keeper Tim Paine. As motivation, it is notivation.

For those who have been chosen, meanwhile, the message is ambiguous. The selectors are standing for continuity
and
change, past performance
and
future potential, which implies not flexibility but suggestibility. Surely, for instance, the relative abilities and ripeness for selection of Michael Hussey and Usman Khawaja will not be altered by the events of one round of games.

Yet the squad of seventeen seems to set up comparisons that might be difficult to ignore. Suppose that Doug Bollinger bowls like a drunk in Sydney while Peter Siddle rests in Melbourne. Suppose that, in the great Sheffield Shield bowl-off, Nathan Hauritz is tidy but luckless while his new shadow Xavier Doherty gathers a few wickets; Kevin Pietersen then throws his hand away in a Red Bull rush at Bellerive Oval to either Steve Smith or Steve O'Keefe.

How does one rank the respective merits of such performances? Does it become difficult to persist with Johnson, despite his unvarying selection for two years, and not to commit to Siddle, despite the recency of his return from injury? Does then choosing Hauritz invite the criticism that the selectors have ignored a contest they set up? Above all, are players to infer that they have not a considered judgement of their ability to thank for their baggy greens, but the luck and chance of a single game?

In bygone days, of course, selectors pronounced ex cathedra. Players heard of inclusion, and omission, via the media – a cruel fate, if at least a shared one. In more recent years, in the spirit of inclusion, transparency and all those feel-good things beloved of New Labour sloganeers, selectors have become more accessible, to players and media – some have even grown quite talkative.