Fall of an Empire

-Atul Agarwal

It was a bright sunny afternoon in Johannesburg on the 23^rd day of March, 2003, and millions of Indians back home were glued to their television sets, hoping that the Men in Blue beat all odds stacked up against them. However, the Aussie skipper Ricky Ponting had different plans. His knock of 140 off 121 balls was enough to send us in deep sense of melancholy. The sound of the ball hitting the meat of the bat before flying over the stands still reverberates in our ears. It wasn’t that the Indian Cricket Team struggled this way throughout the tournament on their road to the finals. They were one of the most dominating sides in the competition. In their defence, they were up against the most dominating cricketing nation of the generation. They were the mighty Australians!

Fast forward fifteen years, in the ongoing Test match against India in Adelaide, the Aussies seem to have lost all traces of the aggressive outlook, which made them the powerhouse of world cricket for nearly two decades. Justin Langer, former opening batsman and Australia Head Coach, himself feels that the current pool of players is no match to the legendary cricketers the country produced in the late 1990s and early 2000s. “We’ve literally got kids when it comes to Test cricket playing. They’re just finding their own skin, they’re fighting their backsides off, not only to help us win the Test match, but to find out what Test cricket’s about”, quoted Langer.  

This collapse is said to have started immediately after the Ashes series of 2006-07 when Damien Martyn, Justin Langer, Glenn McGrath and Shane Warne announced their retirements together. Mathew Hayden and Gilchrist hung around for two more years before hanging up their boots. They were soon followed by Ricky Ponting, Mike Hussey and Brett Lee, thus erasing the last few letters of the term “invincible” used to define them.

Australia lost more than just the big names during that period. Due to the financial benefits that came along, the most seasoned and esteemed players decided to participate in the ICL. Names like Ian Harvey, Matthew Elliott, Jimmy Maher, Michael Kasprowicz, Stuart Law, Michael Bevan and even Gillespie were lost. Cricket Australia decided that any players who were part of the ICL were effectively harmful to Australian cricket. There was pressure from the BCCI, but it was Cricket Australia that made the decision. Those players who were in the Shield would never play again, instantly weakening it. Those who were coaching candidates would take a few years before they were let back into the ground.

To add to their misery, the rules of the National 2^nd XI competition turned Futures League were amended to include a minimum of 8 players in the squad who were below 23, thus, turning what was one of the strongest non-first-class competitions in cricket's history into an Under-23 competition. The duration of the matches was also condensed to three days.

The Big Bash League, which was introduced in 2011, was held midway through the Shield season. Shield cricket ceased to exist for nearly two months when the BBL was ongoing. That means for a player who is just a first-class specialist, he gets almost two months off with no first-class games to play during the major part of the summer, and he also can't push his name forward for the Test side in that time.

The after effect is easily evident by their current rankings - 5^th in Tests, 6^th in ODIs and 4^th in T20Is, as compared to the top most position that they held in all the formats of the game when Steve Waugh/Ricky Ponting led them to three consecutive World Cup trophies. The phrase "Australian cricketer" no longer means a monster that will demolish your faiths and dreams - unless you are Australian. They have simply been dwarfed to painstaking, muddled, inundated-by-backbiting, magic seeking Australian Team. It feels as if we are witnessing the debacle of a huge empire, and an upsurge of a new realm.

In order to bring back the era of supremacy that the Australian cricketers enjoyed, the Australian society needs to be changed as well. They need to build in more and more sporting clubs, which used to be virtually the only distractions a decade ago, instead of never-ending shopping centres, movie theatres, gambling, gyms that wholly and solely decorate the suburbs now. The backyards in the new housing development need to have enough space for sports activities in addition to basic entertainment activities. The government and the common people of Australia need to work out plentiful campaigns to rapidly reinforce the participation of people in sports, especially cricket, just like the early 2000s.