A paradox of modern cricket is that white ball batting grows more red-blooded as red ball batting’s anaemia worsens. Short form scores are soaring as long form scores dwindle. A year ago at Great Barrier Reef Arena in Mackay, Australia scored at nine an over in an ODI with Cameron Green one of three centurions. Green was out there again today, batting crisply and decisively in a disciplined eighty-ball half century. Elsewhere the gap between the formats yawned.
Eighteen wickets fell for 227 runs on the first day at Test cricket’s newest venue, which might well be christened the Barriertoir. The ball swung, the bats quailed, the umpires were busy; Australia ended up with a lead of more than 100, but also the sense of an opportunity foregone.
They started full of purpose. The football changing rooms here have been allocated to media conferences - Pat Cummins remarked yesterday on their cosiness, and his smile stood out even more than usual in the dim light. He didn’t pause over the nearby whiteboard bearing the Mackay Hawks’s game plan for their forthcoming confrontation with the Saints, but might have noted the generic quality of sporting exhortation, including the modish insistence on ‘culture’ - much invoked this last week.
Anyway, once Cummins won the toss, the game unfolded as Australia might themselves have whiteboarded it. In a ‘must win’ game, they were ‘disciplined’, ‘smart’ and hit their targets, reducing Bangladesh’s top order to matchwood in three-quarters of an hour, then passing their total inside fifteen overs.
To be sure, Mitchell Starc could wait the rest of his life for conditions so ideal: a warm but not hot day, a little furr of grass, a helpful breeze from fine leg, and a succession of left-handers hanging back a little from the hint of extra bounce, offering tentative hands as the ball tailed away. Bowling a standard length in Darwin, Australia’s pacemen had perhaps been slightly short to batters who are…well…slightly short. Starc had absorbed the lesson, sacrificing a little ball speed as he pursued a fuller length. 0 0 9 0 5 0: it read like the number for a twenty-four-hour helpline.
‘Link up’? One Beau Webster boner aside, the catching in the five-man cordon was sharp. ‘Pressur acts’? At one point Mominul Haque punched into the covers, where Cummins dived to his right, then threw down the non-striker’s stumps from a prone position. ‘Get in their face’? After lunch, Josh Hazlewood induced a mishook from Taskin Ahmed, took strenuous exception to the batter impeding his attempted return catch, and cranked his pace irascibly. Newton’s Third Law of Motion about there being an equal and opposite reaction to every action doesn’t apply universally to cricket, but accomplished teams, such as Australia, treat challenges as incentives. This was a group of cricketers with a point to prove.