Shaking Up Cricket Broadcasting
Grade: B+
From the very first ball of this innings, Australia had something to prove.
Or did they?
After their shock loss in Darwin, the easy talking point was that the home side would come out firing in the second Test - an angry team, fired up by the embarrassment of that defeat - and put Bangladesh back in their place.
And, sure, when Mitchell Starc took a wicket with the very first ball of the Test, like some kind of young Ollie Robinson, it felt like a mighty told-you-so roar from the Australians. “Stop laughing at us! We are still big and strong. See?”
Even more so when Starc then followed up that first-ball wicket (and indeed first-wicket ball) with further wickets on his seventh, eighth, seventeenth, and twenty-fourth deliveries. (His twenty-third delivery was the laziest of drops by Beau Webster at slip.) Bangladesh 5/12 at the end of the spell. Point very much proven.
But was it? Because Starc didn’t have anything to prove, surely? And he was the one who did all the damage here, in his usual ridiculous, new ball destruction style. (He later chipped in with the final wicket to finish with the figures of 6/12, as Bangladesh were bowled out for 64.)
Alyssa Healy interviewed Starc on the way to the lunch break with Bangladesh 6/35, and the entire thing was adorable, the couple play-acting a very professional boundary edge interview, with very serious questions and answers about the session just seen.
Despite this, I was hoping she might break character at the end of it and give him a little kiss. Shake up the traditions of cricket broadcasting! You don’t see Athers giving Harry Brook a peck on the cheek after a typically mad knock, do you? And cricket is a worse sport for it.
In the end, we settled for a shared laugh and a low five between the pair.
First Test Rewrites
Grade: B+
Pat Cummins also chipped in with 3/25, but Cummins didn’t have much to prove either, did he? Unless you count him winning the toss and bowling first this time. But that’s a pretty basic proof. Like showing that the square root of two is irrational. Pat surely knows his way around a reductio ad absurdum proof. (And, if he doesn’t, he’d be the first to notice the contradiction.)
Hazlewood only took one wicket, but he didn’t have anything to prove either. He was Australia’s best bowler in the previous Test.
No. As impressive as Australia’s demolition of Bangladesh was, it proved nothing.
In fact, the main thing it proved was how much more thrilling that final day of the first Test might have been. Imagine this innings swapped with the sensible fourth innings run chase of 57 we saw in Darwin. Now you’ve got something.
If Australia had reduced Bangladesh to 9/39 defending 57 in that first Test, only for the final wicket pair to eke out the winning runs for a one wicket victory, that Darwin Test would have lived long in the memory. A Test immortalised in song, handed down from generation to generation. A fable for the ages.
As it is, who even remembers what happened? Or who even won? Nobody, that’s who.
Clever Scheduling
Grade: A-
Ha ha ha! I jest, of course. Everybody remembers the first Test result, despite its tedious by-the-numbers fourth innings.
Because in the angry fan aftermath of that not-to-be-forgotten match, if there were Australian cricketers who went into this Test with something to prove, it was the batting lineup, who had failed so badly in Darwin.
Unfortunately for those batters, they collided with Shoriful Islam, the left-arm Riemann hypothesis of the Bangladesh attack. Not content with top-scoring with the bat, Shoriful showed that, with the ball, anything Starc could do, he could do… well, perhaps not better, but pretty darn brilliantly, regardless.
He took six of the eight Australian wickets to fall, finishing the day with 6/35, as Australia collapsed to 8/165, which was both bad, but also a 101-run lead.
It’s a combination that, for the third time in less than a year, leaves an Australian Test on the brink of a two-day result.
Still, full credit to Cricket Australia. At least they scheduled this one on the weekend.
Motivations
Grade: D
But, again, the idea that cricketers are motivated by having something to prove feels misguided. Or, to be more precise, maybe they are motivated by that, but, if so, it bears little correlation to the outcome.
Who, for example, would be more motivated by the defeat in Darwin than its home-town hero, Jake Weatherald? And yet, he wasn’t even playing here. So if being motivated by having something to prove was a stimulus the selectors thought worked, discarding him was clearly a dreadful misstep.
His replacement, Matt Renshaw, didn’t even play in the first Test. He couldn’t have been motivated by the defeat there, surely. And yet he only made eight. So, wait, that’s perhaps evidence in favour of the idea?
But Travis Head got out in the same way he has in every innings this series so far - chopping on after getting a start. That offers no evidence either way. Marnus Labuschagne thigh-padded one onto his stumps for four. Does this mean he had nothing to prove? Is Marnus secretly the most insouciant cricketer in Australia?
No. There’s no correlation between having something to prove and performance. I think my tedious performance of doggedly driving this point home throughout this report card more or less proves that.
Perhaps - and I’m going out on a limb here - the success or otherwise of cricketers is less dependent on whether they’re cranky about previous results, and more dependent on a combination of their prowess at the game, the prowess of their opponents, and luck. Even if that doesn’t make for as much fun a narrative.
Still, having said all that, this strange new world where Cam Green is now the single most reliable batter in the Australian lineup (51* at stumps) is amazing.