The 2009 Ashes: An Australian View
August 25th, 2009 by Gideon Haigh in The Ashes 2009
2-1: it’s a curious scoreline. It looks and can be definitive. England won the Ashes of 2005 by such a margin, having been, session after session, every bit the better team. England 2 Warne 1 might have put the matter more succinctly.
England’s success four years later by a similar margin is a great deal less marked. One suspects that the teams could continue playing some months yet and still be hard to split. In the nine-Test series of which Lily Allen fantasised last week, the likeliest result would be 4-3, with the winner and loser far from clear.
No power on earth should have prevented Australia winning the First Test at Sophia Gardens. That Monty Panesar and Jimmy Anderson did has seemed increasingly absurd. Ricky Ponting’s critics are mainly opportunistic and captious, but his underuse of Ben Hilfenhaus, overuse of Marcus North and misuse of Mitchell Johnson on the last day are all decisions he has probably quietly revisited.
Johnson’s blow-out on the first day of the Second Test at Lord’s, meanwhile, must be one of the curliest conundrums to have faced an Australian captain. To bowl or not to bowl? With injury to Nathan Hauritz, Ponting had not so much a bowling attack as a defence, and actually did not do a bad job of marshalling it. But by the end of the second day, Australia had fallen too far behind to make a game of it, valiantly though they fought.
In fact, if there are grounds for optimism from Australia’s performances this summer, it is that they fought consistently, even if it was mainly their own inadequacies making this necessary. Their second innings at Lord’s, Edgbaston and the Oval evinced a character probably out of proportion with the available talent; England’s rout at Headingley was the equivalent of a massacre, a suicide pact and a mass desertion combined. Individually, too, the Australian players will probably receive higher marks than their team, and the anomaly of the team’s statistical dominance should act as a challenge to them, while also acting as a standing reproach to every statto.
No individual in his team was so fascinating as the captain himself, whose cricket and life have taken an unanticipated turn. He is essentially leading Allan Border’s career in reverse, being born in the sunny uplands of abiding success, now plunging deeper into the valleys of diminished expectation.
Ponting will rue misfortunes with the umpiring, and also with the coin, especially at The Oval, even if Headingley provided a choice example of the genre of the good toss to lose. And while he will hate the thought, he has made a good loser this summer, quietly living up to the lofty sentiments about the ‘spirit of cricket’ for which he was earlier in the tour vilified.
Cricket Australia’s chief executive James Sutherland has opined unprompted that it would be ‘totally unfair’ to sack Ponting, which is a little strange, seeing it’s hard to imagine on anyone’s agenda, and it might even act as one of those statements by the boards of football clubs expressing their ‘full support at the present time’ for an unsuccessful coach.
Ponting, in fact, has Margaret Thatcher on his side, or at least the old Tory apothegm: TINA. There Is No Alternative to him as leader, or indeed as number three. The position of an ambitious deputy in an unsuccessful side is a fascinatingly ambivalent one: each failure invites the consideration of alternatives. He has been so squeaky clean in his demeanour and so excruciatingly dull in his public utterances on this tour that it has been just a little cloying.
Yet much as he may covet higher honours, and for all the splendour of his outings as Lord’s, Edgbaston and Headingley, Clarke seems to understand that he is not quite ready; indeed, that the Australian team is not quite ready for a change so convulsive in a period where the surrounding change has already been so significant. The Australians will have a hard enough time in the next little while making sense of the scoreline 2-1 – or, in their case, 1-2.
Posted in The Ashes 2009 | 5 Comments »
August 26th, 2009 at 1:53 pm
Why have australians turned the test captaincy into a golden watch for the exceptional batsman in the side? It’s so formulaic that it must at one point, stagnate.
The reality is that Ponting has continued for so long because Australia just cannot afford to lose perhaps their best batsman since Bradman, especially when the rest of the squad – barring Michael Clarke – is sliding towards mediocrity.
Gideon says the criticism is captious and opportunistic. The criticism is neither opportunistic nor captious; his mistakes have time and again blighted their campaigns. The faults aren’t trivial. Bowling part-timers when you have the Indians in India on the ropes isn’t trivial. I know there were the over-rate and the consequent suspension issues. But growing up watching Mark Taylor and Steve Waugh, I knew the Australians would not have bothered if there was the possibility of a victory in the CURRENT test. Not to mention the fact that he put his selection above the possibility of a victory, a situation he was put in because he himself could not control the over-rate.
And some say, generally he is a good captain. Wait a second, no. The man positions a deep point even before the lacquer comes off the new ball. He succeeded with this ploy once in India, and never came up with another one. The batsman keep taking singles, get themselves in, score runs the amount of which the current Australian line-up isn’t impervious to, unlike those of previous generations. He was too rigid during that south African chase of 434, not wanting to alter set plans to suit the situation. There have been countless other such instances, but Australia did not always come out holding the short stick because the players were good enough with or without the captain. Anyway, naming each one is not appropriate for a comments section.
Basically, it is not “There Is No Alternative”. Frankly there are more than enough alternatives for the captaincy. It is just that the Australians have created a problem for themselves with their ‘ca[tain into retirement’ tradition. Is it so difficult for an Australian to join the ranks after a period of elevation?
And if he comes back in 2013 as captain, I predict a repeat, just saying.
August 26th, 2009 at 5:11 pm
I agree with CMIS. Ponting’s captaincy has been consistently poor for several, imo.
August 26th, 2009 at 11:58 pm
My issue with Ponting is I do not see any improvement in the tactical side of his captaincy. Broder was a poor captain in the early years but he improved with age (except for the last SA series) but my concern is that Ricky isnt. Your comments on Cardiff are spot on and together with his bowling choices in the second innings at the Oval, where the game was allowed to drift, I am concerned he is not learning earlier lessons.
In Michael Clarke’s ODI captaincy, I am yet to see anything that would tempt me to replace Ponting now, so the status quo should be maintained. I look forward to our summer to see if some lessons have been learnt.
August 29th, 2009 at 8:23 am
As the article points out, the problem for Australia is that there really is no alternative. Promoting Clarke will be disastrous. He’ll be as bad as—if not better than—Ponting.
If Australia want to be number one again, they need to follow Dean Jones’s advice: Bring back Warne as captain for two years and then hand over captaincy to Clarke.
September 1st, 2009 at 4:21 am
We all know Ponting is a great batsman, but I certainly agree that he is a curiously poor captain. He has a fine captaincy record, but that is more to do with the strong depth of Australian cricket and the poor depth of most other countries. It is a bit like looking at Brazilian or Italian soccer, they may not have a vintage team, but they are Brazil or Italy, always strong, always expected to win. Australian cricket nowadays, and for most of its history, is the same. It has felt as though Ponting has somehow lost and drawn games where it would have been easier just to win. All these contests have been mentioned.