When the Australian national anthem is played before a cricket match, there is not much more than polite acknowledgement. It is a different story when it rings out before a World Cup football fixture, prompting a much sharper emotional response. The mind drifts back a dozen years to the Socceroos’ first appearance after a 32-year exile from the tournament. “It’s a wonder strike from the wonderboy of Australian football!” called Simon Hill of Tim Cahill’s outrageous winner against Japan, the words printed into the collective memory from the Kaiserslautern Miracle.
With this in mind, Tim Paine’s side never stood a chance competing with that when turning out for the second one-day international in Cardiff, their fixture starting at exactly the same time as the footballers’ campaign against France a couple of thousand miles east of here. The entire cricket world had been watching their every move for the past four months but yesterday they were as good as anonymous when trying to square the series in the grey, miserable drizzle of Wales.
By bowling first at the toss, Paine denied his team the chance to watch their countrymen on TV, which was perhaps for the best given the taxing match it became. On one pitch, Australia held firm in the opening exchanges before some counterattacking flourish. On the other, Jonny Bairstow hit his lofted off-drive so hard in the power play that the ball was so scuffed it needed to be changed by the umpires. Cue every gag you’ve got about that being far more effective for tampering with a ball than sandpaper.
Ah yes – as if there were not enough distractions, David Warner announced to the world just before the games began (which included, also on the stroke of 11am, the rugby union Test in Melbourne that Australia lost against Ireland) that he would be taking his personal T20 roadshow to the Caribbean Premier League in August. The banned Australia opener will be paid more than one hundred grand, it has been reported, for six weeks of work. Nice work if you can get it.
In Russia drama struck as the game clock neared an hour. Australian crowds, for whom the world game is for most a secondary interest compared to the oval‑shaped football codes, had a passing understanding of the scope of the video assistant referee after its use in the recently completed A-League season. Now, with the divisive penalty ruled against them through it, they (we) will rage for as long as we have about the Fabio Grosso dive that led to a cruel elimination from that 2006 World Cup.
As France celebrated, Jhye Richardson went through Alex Hales with a beauty. A 21-year-old with the brightest of futures could not deliver the coldest of comforts to those stuck to their screens. Only an equaliser would bring national relief, and it did moments later when Samuel Umtiti punched a ball away in the France penalty area as if he was on the last line of defence in Australian rules football. Mile Jedinak, grey through his beard, ice through his veins, smacked it home. The Kazan Miracle, anybody?
Not today. The chancy French winner was sent upstairs for another video review but with the same daunting feeling for Australians as when Shane Watson referred his final leg before wicket decision at this same ground in 2015, in what turned out to be his final Test innings. By now, the cricketers were back in their dressing room for a rain delay and sharing in the pain. But there was ample pride as well. When Jedinak spoke after the defeat he refused to take the easy option and stick his boot into VAR. “I can’t fault them,” he said instead of his charges. “They put in an almighty effort.”
When the rain stopped and Paine led his team back, the man on ODI debut, D’Arcy Short, took a magnificent diving catch in the deep to remove Joe Root. The smile as he stood and realised what he had pulled off was the best kind. Like Richardson earlier, he gave a glimpse of the future. Later, Paine took a diving catch himself and propped up with a face full of blood. Just as he refused to leave the field when breaking a thumb in the torrid Johannesburg Test, determined to set an example, there was no way he was going off here. Quietly, the mission to earn back respect, and win back attention, has started, whatever the eventual result of the match.
