Did Australia deserve to be in Super Eights?

As I was going through the tournament groupings at the commencement of the ICC World T20, the one thing that stuck was the second round groupings, which would have had India, Australia and South Africa, all in the same group in the Super Eights of the tournament. I cursed under my breath at the schedule; after all, having two minnows in the first round to face would do India no good either, would it?

Just four days into the tournament, I wondered again, whether having Australia in the same group would have been such a bad idea after all? Given the kind of performances they have had dished out in the two games they played, it would have done Team India’s chances no harm at all to have had the Aussies in their group! Seriously, if someone uninitiated to the game would have had been informed that this was the same team that had gone on to win three World Cup finals and sixteen consecutive test matches on two different occasions, there is a reasonable possibility that mocked laughter would have been the only possible reaction coming one’s way.

The sense that I get from watching Australia over the years as compared to this team is that not only are they short on talent – which is an obvious given the spate of talented retirements that preceded the turn of this year – but also, and more importantly, the hurt is much lesser on having lost a game. One of the excuses that could be afforded at today is that the humongous amount of cricket played by the cricketers in this day and age has made it virtually impossible to shed more than a proverbial tear over any loss before moving on to another tournament, another game, another inning.

Yet, Cricket Australia was the only board that had monitored their cricketers’ workload, even going upto the extent of disallowing the opportunity of a few of them to represent the franchises in the Indian Premier League this season. In the hindsight, that move seems to have backfired as well, with most of the players not looking T20-ready as some of their counterparts around the world.

To me, Ricky Ponting is like Sachin Tendulkar, a class cricketer in his own right, but not exactly the T20-purists’ definition of a T20-batsman. Rather surprisingly, Michael Clarke’s batting is a pale shadow of the debutant who had eased his way to a century against India in Bangalore. And this isn’t restricted solely to this most condensed format of the game, he has been out of sorts for some time now, and that has had its affect on the Aussie middle-order in more ways than one. The one batsman that I consider a T20 specialist is David Hussey, and for some godforsaken reason, he has been batting far lower in the batting order than he could have, given his performance in T20s.

Brett Lee’s comeback to this sport was restricted to a couple of fine performances in the IPL, but he was dismantled with utmost ease by both, Chris Gayle and Tilakaratne Dilshan, casting further question-marks over his future in international cricket. Nathan Hauritz is currently Australia’s only specialist spinner. What (further) amazed me is that despite having watched the other teams struggle against spin in this tournament, and West Indies’ penchant to falter against anything that can be reasonably termed as slow, Ponting decided to stack up his bowling with five medium pace bowlers in the playing eleven! The malaise therefore is not restricted to only lack of talent – which I certainly believe could be an issue – but also a lack of long-term strategy, and match-to-match tactics, making the decision of Cricket Australia to hand over the captaincy to Ponting for another couple of years a highly questionable one.

Last, but probably the biggest factor to have hit the Australian team was the ouster of Andrew Symonds. One can end up writing a thesis on Symonds’ continuing misdemeanours, but there are two very basic points that need answering; one, who on earth certified Symonds ‘fit’ enough to be selected for the tournament – and thank god they did not have him in the Ashes squad – and the other about whether there is any difference in the handling of Shoaib Akhtar by the PCB and Symonds by Cricket Australia?

I guess, it will take some answering!

Suneer Chowdhary
Suneer is a freelance cricket writer and can be reached at suneerchowdhary (at) gmail dot com