The most darkly comic sight as Australia lost eight wickets for 40 runs to concede a humiliating innings loss in the Hobart Test came when captain Steve Smith sat slumped in a chair in the players’ viewing area at Bellerive Oval.
Sitting next to him, grim-faced, forlorn but unquestionably familiar with the prevailing mood, was former England batsman Graeme Hick, himself a prominent witness to so many abject batting collapses in his time as to be near enough the perfect man for the moment.
In his current gig as Australia’s batting coach, Hick’s job title is a kind of pre-fabricated punchline, like being Bernie Madoff’s financial advisor or the script-writer for Sharknado. Hick turned 50 in May – a rare instance of reaching a half-century while on Australian shores – but even at that age you wouldn’t bet against him doing better than the Australian batsmen who crumpled to scores of 85 and 161 in this latest disaster.
Perhaps they’ve had it too easy for too long. Like no other national sporting team, Australia’s cricketers are usually shielded from criticism for the worst of their losses because they normally occur on far-flung tours in regions the country at large doesn’t particularly care for. But there is no hiding from embarrassing home losses like this one, in which South Africa took barely three days of cricket between patches of rain to make a mockery of Smith’s side.
For Ashes losses of the last decade, the team has been the subject of mere national disappointment and exasperation. Now they’ve surrendered themselves to outright ridicule, and with batting collapses of 31-6 and 40-8 in this match the reaction is not unwarranted.
Bracing too for its sheer novelty was the baffled reaction in the Channel Nine commentary box as this nightmare reached its denouement – a moment which prompted Ian Healy and Shane Warne to unreservedly offer whatever services were required to help Smith out, like dumbstruck mourners bringing crockpots to the door of a widowed neighbour.
The Australian captain was the only local batsman up for the fight in both disastrous innings in Hobart and his futile hands of 48 not out and 31 brought to mind the more stoic efforts of Allan Border in Australia’s dark days of the post-Chappell era. Yet in his own unique battle to rouse something acceptable from this side, Smith fights not only the inheritance of a diminished and skittish line-up, as Border did, but a less robust domestic cricket culture and a selection team seemingly incapable of identifying long-term batting prospects at the right time.
Heads will roll after this shambolic loss, which adds to a year of global upheaval the disorienting possibility of an Australian cricket side falling to its first ever home series whitewash, a black mark not even attributable to Yallop’s “Lambs to the Slaughter” fill-ins or Woodfull’s battered Bodyline side.
In his darkest hours as captain Border could at least point to mitigating factors, as his inexperienced sides ran headlong into fearsome West Indies bowling attacks and the genius of Sir Richard Hadlee. Shorn of superstar Dale Steyn, the South African team responsible for this dismemberment was bolstered by nine wickets from the late-blooming Kyle Abbott, who was handled reasonably well by division two county line-ups only months ago.
Laying in his wake here are Joe Burns, who might have played his way back into obscurity, and established duo David Warner and Usman Khawaja, whose undisciplined shots to lose their wickets stood in stark contrast to South Africa’s mature batting in the same conditions.
In the gun now are Callum Ferguson, who succumbed to two of the ugliest dismissals a Test debutant could imagine, and Adam Voges, who unlike Border’s old chums bats like a god against the West Indies, Australia’s former tormentors, yet can’t buy a run against anyone else. The renaissance man of the Australian line-up is now most likely to bow out of Test ranks with an average of 61.87, lending a further layer of incomprehensibility to Australia’s mess.
But Voges’s mere presence tells you what’s been wrong with this side for some time, namely the layer of mould that has sat hidden behind a layer of tin foil the last two years. In that time Australia’s selectors have failed to blood any young batsmen bar Burns. They’re paying a heavy price at the moment and will continue to do so.
Take as an example Victoria’s 25-year-old rising star Peter Handscomb – renowned as the best player of spin currently sitting outside the Australian side – who made 784 Sheffield Shield runs at 43.55 last season and 647 at 53.91 the year before, the older of those tallies when he was the same age as Hobart centurion Quinton de Kock is now.
Handscomb, of course, could have had a season and a half of Test cricket behind him by the time Australia’s potentially bracing visit to India rears its head in February of 2017, but as per Australia’s disastrous touring parties of previous years, he might find himself thrown to the wolves on foreign soil if Australia don’t pick him for the rest of this home summer. Surely Adelaide’s night Test is a time to be bold and look for something new.
Triumphant South Africa, on the other hand, are now reaping the benefits of meaningful regeneration – key batting contributors De Kock and 26-year-old Temba Bavuma are long-term commitments – while Australia continue to pick batsmen for the first time at the approximate age at which they used to be pensioned off from the national side.
Australia have for decades been known as flat-track bullies at home but, having been run down twice in as many weeks by a side they clearly didn’t take seriously enough, they’re starting to look more like roadkill.
