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WHY AUSTRALIANS (USUALLY) WIN AT CRICKET

As the Ashes approach, Ed Smith answers the question that gives Englishmen nightmares: what explains Australia’s (occasional) dominance?

From INTELLIGENT LIFE Magazine, Summer 2009

History is absorbed before you think of it as history. Before I could read, my grandfather—a tough Yorkshireman and a serious cricketer—gave me his album of 1930s cricket cigarette cards. I spent as much time with them as with my first bat. It was the portraits of Australian batsmen that made the deepest impact. Staring at you from beneath their famous baggy green caps, they seemed unimpressed by anything, let alone this young Englishman. They had a look—resilient, cussed and self-reliant—that said there was a score to be settled. Don Bradman perfectly embodied this relentless hunger, but it ran deeper than him. There was a bloodline.

The more I watched and played cricket, the more this cultural inheritance became clear. Greg Chappell was made to wait for his Test debut—so he marked it with a hundred. He had to wait to become captain, too, whereupon he made two hundreds. Allan Border defied the West Indies and blunted England. Steve Waugh took bloodymindedness to the next level. The line of succession was never in doubt. Chappell (7,110 Test runs) retired five years into Border’s career; Border (11,174 Test runs) retired nine years into Waugh’s; and Waugh (10,927 Test runs) retired nine years into the career of Ricky Ponting.

Ponting will end up being the most prolific of the lot. Still only 34, he has already passed Waugh’s tally and is closing on Border. Ponting has had his problems, including one or two early drinking spats that were skilfully defused by the Australian board. He was always too precious to be allowed to fail. And he has that Australian look. He isn’t spoiling for a fight, but he is ready for one. You sense he has a long memory for slights and disappointments. In fact, we know he does. Out-captained by Michael Vaughan in the 2005 Ashes, Ponting responded in 2006-07 with the most brutal demolition in Ashes history.

He shows no trace of introspection or idle curiosity. Sometimes, during the predictable years of Australian world dominance, you wondered how his expression never changed. Surely, this far ahead of the field, a trace of boredom or irony might cross his brow? Not when I was watching. Scoring runs, winning matches, taking nothing for granted—these things were his life’s destiny, an inherited mantle of relentlessness.

Does this quality explain Australia’s Ashes dominance? Since the first Ashes Test in 1882, Australia have led England by 121 wins to 95 (with 84 draws). But since 1989, the gap is far more marked: Australia have won 34 to England’s nine. Worse still, four of those nine have come after Australia have won the series. England have won a paltry five “live” Tests in 20 years.

To critics of the English game—a group which includes many distinguished ex-players—this disequilibrium is structural. Australia’s dominance is not down to a lucky crop of talented players, a cycle that will pass in time. Our system—our amateurish club cricket and bloated county circuit—is no match for the conveyor belt of Australian state and grade cricket.

I, too, would reform county cricket—with fewer games, better wickets, more practice time, and discrete time-slots for competitions to allow proper preparation for each form of the game. But I suspect the structural argument may be losing legitimacy just as English cricket prepares to accept it.

Structures are easy to copy; cultures are far subtler. When is success structural and when cultural? If you are aiming to emulate a winning team, it’s a crucial distinction. Take West Indian cricket in the 1970s and 1980s. With dazzling batsmen and lethal fast bowlers, the West Indies were all-conquering. What drove this success? Was it their club system? Was it their inter-island first-class competition? Certainly, their cricket was strong at the roots—far stronger than when the Test team declined in the 1990s. But surely the more decisive factor was cultural. Here was a loose confederation of islands collectively throwing off the yoke of colonialism. There was a score to be settled—against England, against the white world. The West Indies honed intimidation alongside self-expression. It was a party with a purpose.

In the 1980s did English cricket seek to copy the West Indies’ structure? Of course not. Everyone knew that it was a special case. We waited for the wheel to turn, and turn it did. In the 1980s West Indies won 17 Tests to England’s none. In the 2000s, up to April this year, England won 13 to West Indies’ two.

I’m not suggesting Australian cricket will nosedive as swiftly as the West Indies (though it's certainly possible). And I suspect that structural advantages—only six first-class teams, each fed by just one major amateur league—have played their part in Australian dominance. But those structures are in decline and Aussie culture is changing. Twentieth-century Australia harboured a long grudge: that it wasn’t taken seriously enough—the cultural cringe, as it is called. Sport was a way of balancing the ledger.

That grudge has now been fully and properly settled, both on the field and beyond. Sydney is a capital of laid-back cool, and Australia is one of the most envied countries in the world. Can that look, the expression peering out from those cigarette cards, survive the transition? Will the new cool Australia show the old unslakable defiance? To whom will Ponting pass the mantle?

Australia may owe a deeper debt to isolation and cultural insecurity than to club and state cricket. So, even if Australia do win the 2009 Ashes, their dominance may be almost at an end. Knowing England, they will fail to spot the signs of decadence in their old enemy, and they will have just got round to copying Rome when it falls.  

Ed Smith has since reported on Australia's crash out of Twenty20. The Ashes Test Series between England and Australia starts on July 8th.

Picture credit: Fred van Deelan (illustration); Sam Barker

(Ed Smith has just retired as a cricketer. His third book, "What Sport Tells Us About Life", is now in paperback. His last sport column was about why he can't warm to Tiger Woods.)