THE WORLD CATCHES UP WITH AUSTRALIA

GH on Australian parochialism

So that’s it then.  A week ago, Australians were nourishing thoughts of a triple crown.  They had Mother Cricket on side, their mojo on display. They were taking hat tricks by accident. 

They have not even got close, slipping out the Super 8s side door of the T20 World Cup after a conclusive defeat by India in Gros Islet.  Worse, they had the indignity of looking on as their fate was decided by duelling equations - an experience that somehow almost never goes one’s way.  Mitchell Marsh, public rehabilitation carefully stage managed, has failed to grasp his opportunity.  David Warner, when Naveen ul-Haq bowled Mustzfizur Rahman, missed out on his.

There was a further piquancy about Australia’s last day in the tournament, in that it involved three parties who really owe them very little.  There was Bangladesh, whom Australia has not hosted for sixteen years.  ‘Go Bangladesh,’ said Marsh with the game in the offing - words no Australian has uttered in the twenty-five years since Cricket Australia backed Bangladesh’s application for Test status mainly in order to keep sweet with India, Pakistan and Sri Lanka.

There was Afghanistan, whose invitation for a Test Cricket Australia withdrew two years ago because we could afford to tut tut the Taliban as though the regime is the nation rather than a diabolical imposition on it. Of Australia’s refusal to play Afghanistan, even Usman Khawaja is now observing: ‘So it actually hurts the people, and the people are separate from the government.’ Glad you could join us, Usman.  While appreciating that the issue is complex, one would have thought that CA could find lower-hanging ethical fruit.

There was also the setting, West Indies, where it is rising a decade since last we played a Test match - our hosting them is of no financial use to the West Indies Cricket Board.  And this is all of a piece with a country that providing it gets its fixtures against India and England, isn’t much fussed about the rest of the world, and about Test cricket quite honestly can’t be arsed.  So, yes, Australia, the rest of the cricket world would like a word - and let’s not stop there.

Last month, for example, the National Rugby League showed its hand in plans to base a team in Papua New Guinea, successfully tapping the well of government funding.  Yet Papua New Guinea also has a cricket team, a good one, that’s in the world’s best twenty for T20 - Assad Vala’s boys were at the T20 World Cup. 

PNG have for a long time been the strongest nation in the ICC’s East Asia Pacific region.  West Indies visited as far back as 1975.  But Australia has never played this cricket nation on our doorstep, and provided Cricket PNG with only the most meagre support.  Isolated geographically, on none of the major cricket trade routes, PNG finds it hard to get decent competition.  We in Australia seem to think we ‘give at the office’. Indeed, we last played an associate member outside an ICC event eight years ago.] Australia is a stronger supporter of this ICC than this.

Australia was rightly commended for fitting Pakistan and Sri Lanka into their busy schedule in 2022.  But normal service quickly resumed - our next two home summers involve India then England, just like our last year, and there’s plenty more where that came from.  So Australia’s defeat in St Vincent, then, was not only significant in terms of our ambitions but salutary for our perspectives.  This country is in constant danger of looking at the rest of the cricket world outside our biggest rivals as though through the wrong end of a telescope - and the misleading thing about that is that the objects so viewed are much closer than you think.