It’s 9pm on a late summer’s evening in 2017. Tuxedoed and sequined members of Australian Cricket Society are settled inside a casino ballroom. They top up their champagnes or VBs for a third or fourth time. The Allan Border Medal is in full swing, complete with crisply produced montages showcasing the athletic, fast-twitch, muscular exploits of our national team – the sort that would do Leni Riefenstahl proud. The names ‘Bull’, ‘Boof’ and the veiled insult of ‘Goat’ echo through the coverage as loyal fans tune in on Gem to recall the year.
Around this time attention will turn to the 2016 men’s tour of Sri Lanka: the series starting on Tuesday. Some viewers will scan blankly. ‘What happened again?’ They can be forgiven. After all, right now it’s winter, the footy’s on, and soon there’s Olympic glory to bask in.
As ever, Test cricket is harder to contextualise. Football clubs amass trophies, Olympic nations win medals, basketball franchises crave rings. A three-month reign atop the ICC Test ladder doesn’t quite have the same resonance. Where do we place this series? With respect to both maestros, when it comes to the Warne-Muralitharan trophy, there doesn’t appear to be much on the line as the teams prepare to do battle in Pakelle.
But like scavenging through Central Park for rare Pokemon, there is context to be found. Even in the gun-for-hire, globetrotting age of modern cricket, where pop-up competitions rage in all corners of the earth, it still holds that the Test victory away from home is most prized.
Of course, Sri Lanka is not yet a Major. But as a series, this one will reveal much about whether Australia’s philosophy has shifted ahead of a tilt at their version of a grand slam: India, South Africa, England – a task they haven’t collectively mastered in well over a decade.
This Australian side has brightness to it again. Most of the batsmen are averaging fifty or better, the seamers are either frightening or pinpoint, and off-spinner Nathan Lyon increasingly confident of winning games late. The Australians also appear to like each other, which can’t hurt. After nearly a decade of middling cricket, they’re entitled to dream of supremacy again, this time under the Lehmann-Smith axis.
Yet so much about what epitomises Australian cricket – the perma-aggression, the compulsion to progress the game at all times, the obsession with asserting dominance – holds it back. The defining moment of last year’s Ashes disaster was Australia’s then-captain, Michael Clarke, attempting to brutalise a ball through cover with the score at 29-5 on day one at Trent Bridge, with the series more alive than Pauline Hanson’s current media presence.
Clarke is gone now so it’s perhaps an unfair example to single out, but as an illustration of Australia’s cultural reflex to pressure, it’s hard to go past. When in trouble, hit your way out. If you’re on top, intimidate anyway. Australia’s cricketing philosophy can produce undeniably attractive results, but it’s culturally ingrained to a fault. Can Smith’s era uncouple itself from that addiction to alpha cricket when needed?
The polarising ‘bully’ tag rightly casts Australia as international cricket’s villains. It’s a characterisation understood by former Sri Lankan cricketer (now commentator) Russel Arnold, who spent two years playing in Sydney’s notoriously tough grade cricket competition. “I would think that Australia are talking about conquering every part of the world. Looking at Steve Smith wanting to go to Sri Lanka early, for example, that’s very impressive,” Arnold told . “But across international cricket, the approach to the defensive side of things isn’t there in the way it used to be. And when it’s tough, you simply fall back on what you know.”
“Australia’s struggles away from home come down to attitude. They’re aware of it. They still have the Aussie mentality of blasting them out and pushing them over. Even so, they do a lot more than a lot of others do. They play a lot of cricket in the subcontinent with the IPL. It’s a little strange that they’ve struggled to bring that familiarity to Test cricket.”
That makes for a curious series. With Australia mobilised once again and aiming for cricket’s summit, how they choose to engage Sri Lanka will be worth watching. The hosts tend to produce low, slow wickets in hot, crowdless grounds. The conditions reward patience, subtlety and guile. These themes are wildly un-Australian. They’re also hard to turn into Allan Border Medal montages.
Encouragingly, Australia has already passed their first examination away from home. If Sri Lanka is India-lite, then New Zealand was England-lite, and signs of flexibility were there. Patient innings from Burns and Khawaja, precision seam bowling from Hazlewood and Bird, and a prominent role for Nathan Lyon showcased a maturing side. The New Zealand series also showed that Australia could win by being un-Australian.
With Sri Lanka out of form and missing key players, the tourists could probably still bully their way to victory in Sri Lanka. But if they do, it might be an opportunity lost. At some point – most likely in a major moment against India or England – there will be a need for finesse. It may come in the form of a second spinner, or a patient partnership, but it will come. If Australia has designs on scaling Test cricket’s Everest again, mastery of these moments is what will take them to the summit. Sri Lanka could provide them with an ideal start.
