Crashing out of the T20 World Cup isn’t the problem. It’s that Australia doesn’t care
When the Australians arrived in the metropolis of cricket, they walked around like a collective nation. Their biggest ever T20 loss was to Pakistan and their most significant loss was to Zimbabwe. Meanwhile, here at home, there was a certain pride in not caring too much about another temporary T20 carnival. This is not only shamefully short-sighted, but also worrying for the future. Cricket, like everything else, follows its own support base. While billions of fans are engrossed in the World Cup and cricket’s center of gravity becomes ever more concentrated in Mumbai, Australia shrugs its shoulders, cherishes its precious Ashes and moves on to football season.
This disconnect has two clear consequences. Firstly, we are well on our way to playing ourselves in Test cricket, the format Australia loves. As the strength and depth of international T20 cricket increases, Test cricket returns to the Anglo-Australian base. We care deeply and beautifully about the five-day game, but we’re starting to resemble Japanese World War II soldiers who continue to defend their isolated island for decades after everyone else has gone elsewhere.
At the ICC level, Australia is imploring India to use its financial muscle to invest in and save Test cricket. Even though it’s quixotic, it’s worth it. In contrast, Australia treated the biggest show in Indian cricket, the World Cup they hosted, as an afterthought. McDonald denied this, saying it was “completely wrong” to say Australia had not prioritized the World Cup, but said his words were difficult to hear in the face of an avalanche of evidence to the contrary.
The problem is not Australia’s failure at the World Cup. This is the arrogance of not caring. Pride in dismissing cricket’s greatest event as a temporary sideshow that we don’t really care about.
This attitude has been seen before. In the late 1980s, Viv Richards’ West India team continued to dominate Test cricket while placing less and less emphasis on the white-ball game. The West Indies could afford to remain indifferent to limited-overs cricket, in the arrogant belief that as long as they remained number one in Test cricket, things would be the same as they always were. Within a decade the West Indies had gone from cricket’s standard-setter of professionalism to the epitome of arrogance. The West Indies were left afloat as cricket gathered pace into the new century. Ironically their current hope for a revival is in T20 cricket, where they are progressing much faster than Australia.
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The impending privatization of the BBL will be a wake-up call for Australia. It will take us into the real world where we are customers of Indian finance. The prospect of not qualifying for the six-team Olympic cricket tournament in 2028 as a result of this World Cup debacle will be another unpleasant blast of reality.
The world has changed. Australia’s pride in its cricketing heritage, warmed by another Ashes victory, has given way: a place small, backwards and no longer big enough to determine the future.
