When they got to cricket’s metropolis, the Australians wandered about like an associate nation. They suffered their biggest-ever T20 loss to Pakistan and their most significant to Zimbabwe. Meanwhile, here at home, there was a certain pride in not caring too much about another ephemeral T20 carnival. This is not only embarrassingly insular but concerning for the future. Cricket, like anything, follows its support base. While billions of supporters are gripped by the World Cup and cricket’s centre of gravity lodges ever more deeply in Mumbai, Australia shrugs its shoulders, nurses its precious Ashes, and moves on to footy season.
There are two clear consequences of this disconnect. One is that in Test cricket, the format Australia loves, we are on a trajectory towards playing with ourselves. While international T20 cricket is expanding in strength and depth, Test cricket is reverting towards its Anglo-Australian base. We care deeply and beautifully about the five-day game, but we’re beginning to resemble those Japanese WWII soldiers still defending their isolated island for decades after everyone else has moved on.
At ICC level, Australia has been begging India to use its financial power to invest in and save Test cricket. This is worthy, if quixotic. In return, Australia has treated the biggest spectacle in Indian cricket, a World Cup they are co-hosting, as an afterthought. McDonald denied this, saying it was “entirely false” to say Australia didn’t prioritise the World Cup, but his words were hard to hear under an avalanche of evidence to the contrary.
It’s not Australia’s failure in this World Cup that is the concern. It’s the arrogance of not minding. It’s the pride in dismissing cricket’s biggest event as a passing sideshow that we really couldn’t be bothered about.
This attitude has been seen before. Through the late 1980s, Viv Richards’s West Indian team remained dominant in Test cricket while caring less and less about the white-ball game. With an arrogant belief that things would always be the way they were, as long as they remained number one in Test cricket, the West Indies could afford an indifference towards limited overs cricket. Within a decade, the West Indies went from cricket’s standard-setter in professionalism to a byword for complacency. By the time cricket accelerated into the new century, the West Indies were left standing. Their current hope for revival, ironically, is in T20 cricket, in which they are progressing much faster than Australia.
Loading
The coming privatisation of the BBL will be a wakey-wakey for Australia. It will drag us towards the real world in which we are a client of Indian finance. Potential failure to qualify for the six-team Olympic cricket tournament in 2028, a result of this World Cup fiasco, will be another unpleasant blast of reality.
The world has changed. Australia’s pride in its cricket legacy, warmed by another Ashes win, has been put in its place: a small place, backward-looking, and no longer big enough to dictate the future.
