Apply an X-ray to its position description, and you’ll find that the core job of a sports administrator is to give a career-long enactment of The Miller and the Donkey. Whatever choice they make, part of the audience will say they’ve put on the wrong game at the wrong time with the wrong team in the wrong place on the wrong broadcast medium with a wrongheaded approach. Sometimes, some of those people are right. Sometimes, you have to remember you can’t please all of them all of the time.
Some of them are not happy about three One-Day Internationals against New Zealand in between two Test series. They think these short games are irrelevant, and an unacceptable injury risk, and will disrupt Test preparation for Pakistan. Well, buck up, it’s not the worst thing that’s happened this year. Once these appalling wasteful distracting unnecessary games are played, I have a sneaking feeling most of these people will flick on their TVs and radios.
Admittedly, it is a weird season. It started with the white ball in the Matador Cup and South African ODIs, then went pink in a day-night Shield round, to red for two Tests and Shield brackets, back to pink for the day-night Test in Adelaide, to red in the Shield. Now it goes white in this ODI series, to pink for the Shield and the Brisbane Test, back to red for Boxing Day, which comes after everyone outside the Test squad has gone full-time white ball for the Big Bash T20s, until February when the Shield resumes with the red, while the internationals keep playing short-form with the white ball, the last of which will be bowled in Adelaide the night before the first red ball is lobbed down in a Test in India.
That’s no paragraph for the purists, whether of cricket or of syntax. But given the depth and extent of the mish-mash, this series doesn’t feel like a straw that’s going to burden any dromedary with particular inconvenience.
In many ways, there is a lot to like about this scheduling. It gives a break between the Test series, a reset button that allows you to refocus, so they retain their individuality rather than being blurred into one long conga line of white trousers and hidden confectionery. And if history is a guide, it’ll be good cricket. Australia and New Zealand have a brilliant ODI rivalry, not built on some underarm nostalgia in need of a deodorising spray, but on 15 years of close-fought matches.
Think about the trip over in early 2000, when Adam Gilchrist and Steve Waugh launched a couple of 300-plus totals, before the Kiwis wrecked Australia for 191 while Damien Martyn carried his bat. Or the home tri-series in 2002, when New Zealand finished Waugh’s one-day career by persistently winning, except in Melbourne where Michael Bevan’s measured masterpiece with the tail scaled 246 from the depths of 82-6. A lot of strangers were hugged in the MCG that night.
The Chappell-Hadlee trophy appeared in December 2004, with Australia’s 246 chased down with two balls to spare. A fresh-faced wicketkeeper named Brendon McCullum sealed it down the order. The next game had curly-locked Kiwi bowler Kyle Mills bombing the long-on boundaries with sixes, eventually stranded 44 not out, 17 runs short, three overs unused. What might have been. As if to salute the standard of the contest, the decider was rained out, honours even.
These contests have since become part of the evolution of target-chasing. A decade ago, 300 was all but impossible. December 2005, New Zealand lifted their game, bowled out two runs short of Australia’s 322. Next game they recalibrated to mow down 331. McCullum did the final damage again. January 2007, fuelled by Jacob Oram’s violent hundred in Perth, the Kiwis fell eight runs short of the 343 built by Ricky Ponting and Matthew Hayden. A few weeks later, with poor old Mike Hussey captaining a trip to New Zealand, they blew past Australia’s 336 and 346 in consecutive games.
Somehow the schedulers let this rivalry fall away. By the 2015 World Cup, the two sides hadn’t played in so long that their pool match decided the bilateral trophy. This series is part of getting relations back on track. Anyone who might be injured in these games might equally be injured in a Test. On average players are better for any available run.
Regardless of format, a couple are a chance to play themselves into the Test side. Patrick Cummins makes yet another comeback from the blighted moonscape of injury, and the super-fast bowler was close to an Ashes Test last year. Selectors might not be able to help themselves if he goes well. Glenn Maxwell was back as soon as Rod Marsh quit the selection chair, and a big show here could pressure Nic Maddinson at No6: indeed, on the selectors’ own rationale for picking Maddinson, Maxwell was eminently more suited.
Of the rest, Steve Smith and David Warner lead the pack, George Bailey and Aaron Finch are the batting veterans with Travis Head their padawan, and Matthew Wade will keep to Adam Zampa’s leg-spin. No one could resist having Mitchell Starc and Josh Hazlewood lead the bowling, but it’s bizarre to omit John Hastings. Not trendy, but a magnificent practitioner, he has the equal-most ODI wickets in the world this year, and from 27 fewer overs than England’s Adil Rashid.
Even with the run-fests in South Africa and last summer against India, those wickets came at an average of 24 and a strike rate of 27. In a squad with Mitchell Marsh, James Faulkner, and a classic Greg Chappell academy pick in Hilton Cartwright, Hastings could easily challenge for one of those all-rounder spots: he averages 37.8 as a batsman since returning to the team in 2015, including important innings at Leeds, Wellington and Centurion. A ridiculous absence; but then, being a selector is a bit like being an administrator. There’s an old story about a bloke and a donkey.
