Following the unceremonious departure of Justin Langer in February, the fortunes of the Australian men’s team were always going to be closely watched.
Some past players and cricket fans had been conditioned by nearly five years of Cricket Australia image-making to see him as the heart and brain of a team he did not captain, nor play for, but merely coached.
Pat Cummins drops a catch.Credit:Getty
There was the unmistakable sense that, in the event of anything like a misstep, these groups would not just be observing closely, but also be waiting with metaphorical baseball bats.
Some hoped that the team would falter in Pakistan. It did not, winning Australia’s first series there in 24 years after finding the collective strength of mind to make the trip.
In Sri Lanka, a fluctuating two-Test series was shared, causing some criticism that was drowned out by praise for the way the touring players and staff conducted themselves in the midst of the island’s dramatic economic and political crisis.
And in Top End matches as the football season moved towards its end games, a surprise loss to Zimbabwe was swiftly overtaken by a clean sweep of New Zealand around Aaron Finch’s ODI retirement.
So, it was not until the World Cup, won a year ago by Australia after the captains belatedly but successfully prevailed upon Langer to give the players room to breathe and formulate more worldly tactics than those he had used with the Perth Scorchers, that the team actually made a pronounced pratfall.
There were errors in selection, fuzziness in focus, slowness to react to sharper opponents and failures to extract the ruthless results from Ireland and Afghanistan that would, for all the hand-wringing, still have seen Australia squeeze past England and into this week’s semi-finals.
Most of all, criticism centred around how Mitchell Starc was dropped for the final game, replaced by the lesser-known Kane Richardson. His expensive figures only encouraged questions from Langer himself and the commentary boxes, TV and radio studios that had, to that point, still been somewhat preoccupied by the spring carnival.
When Glenn Maxwell spoke frankly of how the cricket schedule left little time to dwell on things (in the same press conference he expressed how disappointed the players were not to have shown the best of themselves in the tournament), he had committed the apparent sin of expressing a view that sport’s magic realism is not all-consuming for its practitioners.
Generations like Langer’s and those before, and their ardently vocal, largely male acolytes on social media and talkback radio, made their puzzlement at these sentiments clear. Playing for your country should be an honour every day; losing at home for your country should be a shame you carry with you on the trip home.
It is no coincidence these very views, that the players had tolerated for several years and eight Amazon episodes of Langer, had become part of why they wanted a change in approach after the summer of 2020-21. Tim Paine, for all his support of Langer and criticism of CA’s reticence to give the coach a straight answer about his contractual future, gave a telling illustration of this in his book, The Price Paid.
Justin Langer and Tim Paine.Credit:AAP
Paine had, after the series loss to India, addressed the team: “I said to the boys, ‘It has been a tough series and the bubble tested everyone, but we had a crack, it was disappointing because we had control in the last two Tests but couldn’t get the result we were after.’ At the end I said, ‘We’ll get another crack at it, so go home, dust yourselves off, have a bit of time out,’ and then I added something like, ‘At the end of the day it is not life or death, it’s cricket, it’s sport, it’s a game’.”
That speech was admired by numerous members of the side who had slogged through a difficult series. It was also be an apt summation of the mantra of Paine’s successor Pat Cummins. Langer, though, had other ideas.
“Later that night JL came over to me with those burning eyes and said, ‘Don’t you ever f—ing say that again, it is not just a f—ing game at this level.’ I could feel the heat generating from him, it had been eating away at him. He was having none of it, and he’d got himself really worked up over it. I said, ‘Well, we are just going to have to learn to disagree, it is a game, that’s what I think.’ He grumbled and cursed, but we got on with it.”
Now that attitude may be the one that is loved by the men who wish they had played cricket for Australia, or by the past players who did actually get there in bygone eras.
But it is not the way of professional cricket teams, nor any organisations, in 2022. And it certainly does not appeal to the vast majority of an Australia that is much more diverse, and much more broadminded, than talkback radio would have you believe.
