Why Australia’s men need to start winning – and soon

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This was published 2 years ago

Why Australia’s men need to start winning – and soon

By Andrew Wu

Not long after Steve Smith hit the boundary to seal Australia’s 2015 World Cup triumph, former captain Ricky Ponting was full of praise for a team that had won 19 of its past 23 completed games across all formats.

“It’s probably a better team than we give it credit for right now,” Ponting told the cricinfo website. “Probably because it’s a young team that’s developing we probably don’t know just how good a team this is. I’ve sat back and looked at this one-day team over the last couple of years and it’s a very good team.”

This was a side consisting of a 25-year-old Smith, David Warner (28), Josh Hazlewood (24) and Mitchell Starc (24), which was so strong there was no room for Pat Cummins in the winning XI or a spot in the squad for Nathan Lyon, who sits behind only Shane Warne for the most international wickets by an Australian spinner.

Even if Ponting was referring specifically to the 50-over team, six years later the tournament remains the crowning achievement for a generation of players whose individual statistics sit comfortably alongside most players from most eras in Australia’s proud cricket history.

If the major prizes for Australian cricket are the Ashes, beating India and South Africa, and the World Cups, then there is little else to show for a group that sadly risks being remembered more for sandpaper than silverware.

In Tests, the 2019 retention of the urn was a creditable achievement, and they were not far off a famous win in India in 2017, but the cold hard facts are the Ashes drought, now stretching 20 years, continues in England, they have lost three straight series at home and away to India, and also suffered defeats either side of the Indian Ocean to South Africa.

The failure to make the final of the World Test Championship after being at or near the top for the bulk of the qualification period adds to a narrative of near misses and opportunities squandered in the longest format.

A semi-final appearance at the 2019 World Cup was a strong pass for a side still dealing with the aftermath of the sandpaper scandal, but visions of a dynasty proved a mirage. The T20 world title remains elusive at a time when the Indian Premier League has altered the cricket economy.

Wicketkeeping great Ian Healy, a member of the Australian team that finally dethroned the West Indies in 1995 as the world’s premier team, thrashed England in three Ashes tours and regularly won overseas, believes today’s team has underperformed.

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“It’s bad, isn’t it? It’s not that it’s a terrible era of player,” Healy says. “Those stats tell the story, I would say yes. I hadn’t put those statistics and non-achievement in my own head; that’s quite surprising. This era of player with those stats, it’s an underachievement.”

Australia’s win-loss record is also modest. Under coach Justin Langer, who assumed the reins in May 2018, Australia have won less than half of their completed matches (56 from 113) for a winning percentage that places the team seventh among the 12 Test playing nations. They have lost five of their past six series.

For all the tension and dissatisfaction among players about his methods, the problem extends beyond Langer, even if the buck stops with the coach.

Why? Because this group of players has now performed modestly under two coaches. They are the common denominator.

Since the 2015 World Cup final under Darren Lehmann, Australia’s win-loss record is only marginally better, with 117 wins from 232 completed games, again placing it seventh of the 12 full members.

At some point, this team has to start winning more regularly. It does not mean a return to the win-at-all-costs mentality that seeded the Cape Town saga, or an invitation for players to hiss and cuss from the slips cordon. New Zealand have shown nice guys can win.

David Warner and Steve Smith don’t have much time left to win more silverware for Australia following the rise of their rivals.

David Warner and Steve Smith don’t have much time left to win more silverware for Australia following the rise of their rivals. Credit: Getty

Head office’s domestic program has problems yet never have Australia’s cricketers been as well paid and won so little.

“At a time when we’ve never had more money in the game, not just the players being paid but in the game, and more coaches, we’re not being remembered well so far,” Healy says.

“It won’t be remembered fondly if they don’t start winning a couple of things because everyone will throw in Sandpaper-gate, MOU fighting about money and all that sort of stuff.”

Hazlewood disagrees with Healy’s assessment, pointing to the rise of India – the one-time sleeping giant turned behemoth with the financial clout and population to dominate the game.

Whereas Australia was ahead of its time during Healy’s era with its cricket academy, such pathways are now commonplace among its rivals.

“India have become a powerhouse in all the formats and their depth is phenomenal,” Hazlewood said from Dubai, where he was preparing for the Indian Premier League final. “You don’t realise it unless you’re here in the IPL. There are dozens of players who can step in and play for India. The population is a huge part of that. We don’t have that in Australia.

“Cricket in India has grown hugely, even the last five years. I certainly don’t think we’ve underachieved.”

For Australia, the T20 World Cup has come at the wrong place and the wrong time. Aaron Finch’s side was ranked No.1 in the world just over 12 months ago and was arguably the team to beat for the 2020 tournament at home, which was postponed due to a once-in-a-century pandemic.

Since then, however, Australia haven’t so much tailed off as fallen off a cliff with defeats in New Zealand, the Caribbean and Bangladesh exposing a lack of depth among the men’s ranks – a far cry from the 1990s when Australia A sides comfortably beat England. Hazlewood acknowledges it is an area the team needs improvement.

“Probably the next guys in, it probably drops away a bit, and we’ve found that out the last two years,” Hazlewood says. “I think that’s a place to work on, getting that depth and the next 10 to 11 players being up to international standard is crucial.”

Healy believes an inaugural T20 World Cup success in the Middle East would be a greater achievement than winning the Ashes this summer, the latter a feat that every Australian side bar one has achieved at home since 1991-92. But he is not optimistic.

“I think this is going to be a supreme effort for this team to make the semi-finals,” he says.

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Time is running out for several of the team’s veterans. Finch and Warner are 34, Smith and Glenn Maxwell are 32, while Starc and Hazlewood are on the wrong side of 30. If all make it through to India in 2023 it would have to be one of the oldest World Cup sides Australia has ever fielded.

“Maybe for some of these guys it’s the last chance; some of them have been around for a while,” cricket great Greg Chappell, a national selector from 2016-19 before his retirement, says.

“The T20 and 50-over World Cups, the Ashes or World Test Championship are the big-ticket items. We’d like to think we’d win more than our fair share. It would be a good time for these boys to do it.”

If they can hold on, there are several opportunities to reshape the narrative. The upcoming T20 World Cup is the first of three global events in the next 24 months, a period that also takes in Test tours of India and England.

“The next three years will stamp what this team’s about,” Hazlewood says. “The Test team is very solid at the moment, and there are changes in the white-ball team giving people opportunities in the pandemic.

“If we can get a good nucleus of players and threaten in all three tournaments and win the Ashes we’ve probably turned it around a little bit from the last couple of years.”

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