Perth is home to many great myths of Australian cricket, but the national side’s meek showing in the opening Test of the summer is an opportune time to bury a few. Though we may lament its removal from the Test calendar, the Waca is no longer a fortress for Australian sides, who have won only four of their last nine Tests at the venue, losing to South Africa thrice and India once.
Secondly, “the Australian way” of picking cricket teams is not so much confused as completely unrecognisable from the decades in which the country dominated Test cricket. Thoroughly outplayed by 10 and a half men this week, Australia would have gone against the earthy, old-fashioned pragmatism supposedly the hallmark of the Darren Lehmann era, locking and loading with the same squad for the Hobart Test starting on Saturday were it not for a broken finger to opening batsman Shaun Marsh and the suspicion Adam Voges might be ruled out with a hamstring injury.
The absence of the maligned opening batsman and the possibility that Voges will be scratched too masks what would have been another frustrating commitment to bad ideas at the selection table. The players drafted in – recently-exiled Joe Burns and long-ignored Callum Ferguson – would surely derive some dark humour from the situation.
But that’s skipping ahead. When national selector Mark Waugh forewarned on Saturday that all-rounder Mitchell Marsh wouldn’t be dropped after the panel had committed to a two-Test squad, the inherent idiocy of the approach wasn’t accepted unquestioningly but was met with a sense of deflated resignation.
In this case, necessity hasn’t bred invention so much as prompted the hard decisions that could have been made earlier. Back-to-back Tests should have begged flexibility in the pool of available players, not rigid commitment to the losing and fatigued combination who laboured through five days in Perth’s sweltering heat.
Also offered in defence of the original plan was the idea that a two-game guarantee would give players some brief confidence in their spot and promoted a “squad mentality”. That didn’t wash either, and whatever collective mentality led to this Australian performance surely isn’t worthy of careful preservation anyway.
And here’s the problem with giving players a sense of “security” in their spot: of Australia’ problematic batting order, David Warner and Steve Smith are undroppable, while Voges (37) and Marsh (33) are surely old and mature enough at this point to know the correlation between individual runs and selection. Which leaves Usman Khawaja, who was dropped a Test ago anyway, and Mitchell Marsh, who isn’t even a specialist batsman.
There are echoes here of Darren Lehmann’s recent admissions vis-a-vis the selection errors of Australia’s 2015 Ashes campaign, when waning veterans Brad Haddin and Shane Watson were apparently picked because that series buttressed a West Indies Test tour and the side had to be picked for both. Both speak of a commitment to process over performance, and the victory of corporate ideals over common sense. Lehmann is locked in until the end of the 2019 Ashes and Cricket World Cup, which is probably long enough to grow a John Buchanan moustache.
Of course it’s easy to bleat about selection failures, and even easier to do it from our collective armchair, but Rod Marsh made himself an easy target this week, picking neither Australia’s best-balanced XI, nor simply the best players available.
A qualifier. He could hardly call upon Glenn Maxwell when Victoria didn’t play him in the first round of Sheffield Shield cricket (“team balance” they said, in a strange appraisal of their most talented batsman), but Maxwell assuredly is a better and better-performed batsman than Mitchell Marsh (first class average of 29, two half-centuries in 32 Test innings) and adds more in the field. If chosen to bat at six, neither’s selection should depend chiefly on their bowling.
The broader problem here is that both of them, plus Moises Henriques, remain in contention at all. Only a decade ago Test selectors considered all-rounders a luxury Australia couldn’t afford, even with the country’s greatest wicketkeeper-batsman in the side.
Peter Nevill is many good things, as he showed in more than three hours of determined batting across this series opener, but at Test level he hasn’t had enough opportunities to progress beyond squirrelling away late innings runs, and does so at a glacial strike rate of 41. Perhaps it’s an unkind comparison, but his opposite number Quinton de Kock goes at 71.
For Nevill and Australia, that strike rate is a more problematic figure than his average, which is hard to say of a player who showed more grit than most of the top order. But his slow progress at the crease means late-order surges are now dependent on the tailenders applying themselves, as they did in the second innings, and not crumpling into a heap, like they did in the first. The two competing forces can tend to multiply the pressure on each other.
I digress. This side simply cannot afford an all-rounder, and if its pace bowlers are going to be nursed along for Test engagements like these, they shouldn’t be reliant on a fifth bowler anyway. Nathan Lyon will bounce back but in this Test he was out-bowled by JP Duminy. If Mitchell Starc wasn’t fully fit he shouldn’t have played.
The ongoing frustration of this side is the absence of any one of the young Shield batsmen in line for the sixth batting slot, because they represent the future. If Nic Maddinson, Travis Head, Cameron Bancroft and Peter Handscomb are wondering what they’re doing wrong perhaps they can seek the senior counsel of Ferguson, who is an expert on the topic.
There are other problems in this side. Injury aside, Marsh often doesn’t look like a real Test opener until everything goes his way, or when David Warner is distracting the eye with another early-innings blitzkrieg at the other end. On the latter, ditto Australia, whose batsmen were often timid and confused against an understrength Proteas attack.
The fielding, save for some neat catching on day one, currently aspires to competence and little more. Without an explosive talent like Maxwell patrolling the inner ring and keeping batsmen nervous, entire sessions drift, and you can’t imagine an Australian affecting a run-out like Temba Bavuma’s on day four. The irony was that it nipped out Warner, who always looks a threat himself yet rarely actually hits the stumps.
Perhaps the most worrying element of Australia’s anaemic recent Test performances both at and away from home is what looms over the horizon: a home Ashes series that could well rival 2010-11 for thrusting upon us the sobering reality that Australian cricket has spent too long kidding itself.
