It was interesting to read one of the commercial applicants for cricket’s next broadcast deal in Australia, Network Ten, aiming to ″restore cricket to its former prominence″ and ″ignite the love affair between Australians and this great sport″.
Leaving aside the predictable bargaining down-talk, the statement assumed a common agreement that cricket has lost its pre-eminent position and that the love affair has gone stale. You would expect nothing less from the voice of youth.
The Australians were barely troubled in accounting for the West Indies.Credit:Getty
By the end of Australia’s 419-run victory over the West Indies in Adelaide yesterday, the question was whether that love affair has been eroded more by a sense of something lost, or by a surfeit of winning.
It’s a complicated question because, out of the uncommitted cricket audience peeling away from the game, some seem disenchanted by Australia having slipped from a kind of romantic peak that existed in the past, while others are tired by games like this, where Australia are too good at home to provide a compelling, and competitive, spectacle.
Cricket Australia must feel it can’t win. Just as well it has put a politician in charge.
First, the positive view. Australia’s dominance in Adelaide was sealed by relatively new talents such as Scott Boland, Michael Neser, Marnus Labuschagne and Travis Head. It was not the old firm stomping yet again on West Indian hopes, but the young and the restless, the hungry and the ambitious.
Boland’s career is already without parallel. In recent decades, perhaps only Stuart Clark came into the Australian team as a reserve bowler and made a mark so quickly. Boland brings the added extra of being completely and utterly lovable (no offence to Clark).
He’s 33, he is Australia’s second Indigenous Test cricketer and, like the first, Jason Gillespie, he’s had his kids before he hit the big time. One of his nicknames is The Babysitter.
On Saturday night his ″heavy ball″ was as impossible for the West Indies as it had been for England last year. He produces figures straight out of the under 9s. Who can’t love that? This is an instant folk hero.
Neser was just as good as Boland in Adelaide, and deserves another chance to translate his Sheffield Shield consistency into Test performance. Neser has had to overcome the disadvantages of being relatively short, relatively medium-paced, and relatively proletarian in his bearing.
David Warner signs autographs for fans in Adelaide.Credit:AP
There is none of the thoroughbred glamour of a Starc, Cummins or Hazlewood. Neser is one of those bowlers that Australian selectors have traditionally only picked when starved of alternatives and when the bowler’s statistics have turned into a gun at their heads.
In Adelaide, Neser was accurate and penetrative, although in deference to the attack leader, Starc did bowl the delivery of the match, and it was a shame he wasted his pearling inswinger on an out-of-touch Jason Holder when it would have dismissed Virat Kohli.
These performances, along with more runs from the insatiable Labuschagne and the enterprising Head, might be the type of thing that reignites that great but fading love affair between Australia and cricket, if the premise is accepted that the past actions of the old guard are responsible for wearing it out.
Bring in new talent for a new audience! But there is something missing in this analysis. You can’t quite imagine a bold new broadcaster unearthing a ‘new and freshly engaged audience’ entirely through the exploits of Messrs Boland, Neser and company, unless Ten can find a place for them on The Bachelor (hint: don’t do it).
Here arises the other, possibly more obvious and insoluble, challenge for Test cricket. One-sided matches, whether they last three, four or five days, are boring. This match never once reached even the simulation of a contest.
The West Indies had spent what modest reserves they had brought in the Perth Test match. They were not just poor in Adelaide. They were uncompetitive. This narrows the audience to those of us who can remain attentive to the Bolands and the Nesers and the look-at-moi dramas of David Warner.
One-sided games turn cricket into even more of a nerd’s game than it already was. Compared to these West Indians, England were not much better last year, and in the past decade only India and South Africa have contested Australia’s mastery in home conditions.
South Africa’s current team is in transition, lacking the batting firepower of those past squads, but their fast bowling attack is potentially the best in the world. Australian viewers must be craving a challenge; you got the feeling that even the Australian players, in Adelaide, were not wanting to feel as much sympathy for their opponents as they were feeling for the West Indies.
It’s unlikely they will for the South Africans. But will there be enough to spark up that love affair? If there’s one thing about nerds and love, it’s that we always live in hope.
News, results and expert analysis from the weekend of sport sent every Monday. Sign up for our Sport newsletter.
