Leader of the Resistance

GH praises an unbeaten 70

Allan Border turned seventy today - perhaps we all feel a little older at hearing that. Wrote this about him fifteen years ago, and much of it still seems true, even if Ricky Ponting has since overtaken him as Australia’s tallest Test scorer. It is also, I might add, the 110th anniversary of the birth of Jack Iverson, and the coincidence of their birthdays seems a strong argument against cricket astrology. GH

When he came to write his epic narrative account of Australian politics in the 1980s, Paul Kelly called it The End of Certainty, encapsulating the period’s reforms, realignments and reverberations. To a history of Australian cricket in the 1980s, the same title could be fixed. After a hundred years in which Australians had come to expect a top two position in global cricket as of right, they found themselves rooting for a middling team: callow, fragile, susceptible even on home soil, ranks thinned further by rebel tour recruiters.

Throughout these austerity years, one presence was constant. When Allan Border took his first faltering steps in first-class cricket, Australian cricket was in rude health. But within a year, plundered by Kerry Packer’s private enterprise, its vulnerabilities had been exposed. And although Packer’s depredations had the effect of expediting Border’s progress to international level, their after effects lingered. For the next decade, the scar left by World Series Cricket was apt to itch and ache and weep when the patient was under stress.

To Border more than any other player would be left the task of repairing what, especially against the West Indies, was sometimes irreparable. His career record attests the tenor of the times: he was on the winning side 50 times in 156 Tests, on the losing side in 46. He played, moreover, in sixty draws. An old Australian joke runs that draw(er)s are for swimming in; in Border’s time, they often seemed the best that could be done and expected

St Allan: Patron saint of the last ditch