Neither a roar nor a silence, the low and unmistakable hum was ever present in Perth.
It’s the sound of a crowd soaking up the cut and thrust of the game’s oldest form, and it provided the refreshingly insouciant soundtrack to a Wednesday when many of the truisms of Test cricket shone through.
Two years of COVID-19 had, among other things, denied Test cricket to Australia’s westernmost state. This year, Western Australia’s cricket fraternity had lost two of its favoured sons, Rod Marsh and the visionary Laurie Sawle, each honoured before play.
As selection chairs in different eras, Marsh and Sawle had searched for top-order players in the front rank with varying results. Mark Taylor, a 1989 Ashes tour selection of which Sawle was proud, drafted something like the blueprint for how Usman Khawaja and Marnus Labuschagne set Australia’s platform.
Marnus Labuschagne marks his 150.Credit:Getty Images
Like Taylor, who notched centuries in his first meetings with England, Sri Lanka, Pakistan and South Africa, Labuschagne enhanced his reputation as a quick study of the opposition by making the West Indies the third team (after Pakistan and New Zealand) he has taken for a century at the first time of asking. As Taylor did against the Proteas in 1993, Labuschagne made it a big one.
The pandemic had also given rise to a few theories about how Test-match preparation need not be composed of Sheffield Shield games at home nor tour fixtures away. Ahead of last year’s Ashes series and this year’s winning tour of Pakistan, Australia’s Test team played neither.
But there was the overpowering sense of a return to the mean about the way things panned out between Australia and the West Indies on the opening day of the Test summer. Where multi-format man David Warner exited early, Khawaja and Labuschagne made the most of lavish preparation.
Across four matches apiece for Queensland, Labuschagne had soaked up 370 balls and Khawaja 520. All had been sent down with effort and direction by determined state opponents in a competition that remains the world’s first-class benchmark.
Warner, who mistimed an attempt to drive Jayden Seales by a wide enough margin to drag the ball spectacularly onto leg stump, might easily have desired at least a couple of long-form innings with which to recalibrate after the Twenty20 World Cup.
David Warner’s slim Test returns for 2022 continued.Credit:Getty Images
Adjustments between formats, often without bridging fixtures between international assignments, have been an occupational hazard for Warner throughout his days as a batter for all seasons. He has often managed to make the switch successfully through immense skill and mental discipline.
But for Khawaja and Labuschagne, the advantages of specialisation were writ large across a partnership that ensured – as had been the case in 2018 and 2019 – Australia could bat first in Perth’s new stadium and shrug off early life for the bowlers through the hard graft of the batting engine room.
Khawaja and Labuschagne put on 142 together.Credit:Getty
Watching from on high in the Channel Seven broadcast box, a previous generation of top-order batters looked on with approval. Matthew Hayden, Justin Langer and Ricky Ponting could recall many earlier days when they had done likewise.
If unheralded, the West Indian attack was not without skill. Seales and Kemar Roach moved the ball around, Jason Holder extracted steep bounce and Alzarri Joseph’s pace was, as previously advertised, considerable. Kyle Mayers’ cutters were as awkward as they have become uncommon.
Labuschagne, in particular, enjoyed a decent helping of fortune. He edged several deliveries through or over the cordon, but also took his chances to score without ever looking back on those interludes with much in the way of guilt.
Partly through the conditions, but perhaps also in a sign of some tactical naivety, Kraigg Brathwaite declined to test the patience of Labuschagne as others have done. The straight lines and leg-side fields of New Zealand, India and England had corralled him.
“You can have one way to score runs, but the last three, four years, people start setting that heavy, six-four leg-side field with mid-off, one slip,” Labuschagne said this week. “It doesn’t matter how good you are off your legs, you can’t score very quick.
“That’s the battle, being able to understand when you need to lay low, when can you express yourself, when to reel it in, when to be more aggressive. It’s always satisfying when you come out on top.”
The day’s proceedings delivered another message also, in terms of the standing of the team led ably by Pat Cummins. Take away much of the Langer-related noise of the past 10 months, and what remains is a highly skilled and highly seasoned side with a chance to put itself on similarly lofty ground to the teams Langer once played for.
Langer, Hayden, Steve Waugh and even the late Shane Warne had always been eager to push a narrative in which this was still a young and aspiring team, unworthy of comparisons to their own. That was the case in private team discussions as well as public commentary.
But as Labuschagne, Khawaja and latterly Steve Smith fashioned the innings of top order pros on a spicy Perth surface, greater perspective emerged. This is a team with a chance, over the next nine months, to be remembered as fondly as the hum of an engrossed Test match crowd.
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