Admirers of the Australian system of cricket may have to rapidly revise their opinion as a great team disintegrates before their very eyes. The cricket world used to believe that anything Australian was good for the willow game, including the aggression the famous Australian players used to bring to the field with their strong body language
and the aggravation they used to cause with their take-no-prisoners attitude. The team that dominated Test and limited-overs cricket for close to a decade and a half before losing the Test crown two years ago has lost major players and is a mere shadow of the juggernaut that twice won 16 Test matches in a row and the last three World Cups (50 overs) on the trot.
Captain Ricky Ponting’s despair at the demise of his own, and his team’s, greatness is becoming apparent in every pressure situation. His repeated questioning of umpiring decisions has assumed a sickly pattern. In the latest instance, in the controversy he whipped up over a catch referral to the television umpire, he was fined 40 per cent of his match fee for dissent. Presiding over a team in decline, Ponting seems to be losing it and popular opinion is building up Down Under too for looking beyond him when it comes to the captaincy. For the skipper who won more Tests and games than Allan Border, Mark Taylor and Steve Waugh, successive Ashes series have become a kind of Waterloo.
For years they ruled the game and were least bothered about the “Ugly Aussie” image portrayed by their bullying and badgering of umpires and sledging, which is the loud, ugly, and even vulgar berating of opposition batsmen. So long as they were winning, the game seemed to accept their aggressive behaviour and other teams also tried to emulate the slanging of batsmen, which tactic the very successful captain Steve Waugh said was aimed towards “mental disintegration” of the opposition. As the Australians ruled the roost, the cricket pitch became a place where the combative nature of sportsmen was needlessly exaggerated and the finest arenas of the game were the lesser for it.
When the same aggression is shown, principally towards the umpires these days as the Australians are in free fall, it is the image of cricket that takes a hit. Ponting’s heated arguments over an apparent fault of the referral system, which is still in its infancy and is evolving with the improvement of video and related technology, did nothing for his team or his own exalted standing as the only player in the world to have been a member of teams that have won close to 100 Test matches and three World Cups. A champion sportsman losing his temper in a high-pressure sporting situation may be forgiven, but not if he loses his dignity.
At a time when cricket is trying to move on from years of being embroiled in such unseemly shenanigans as match- and spot-fixing, all its players owe a duty to fixing the image deficit. When history passes its verdict on the greatness of the Australian teams, there should be no place for too many footnotes circumscribing the handsome victories achieved. Sport should not define life so much that winning becomes the only thing. There should be less of triumphalism and greater human qualities in sportsmen for them to be acknowledged as masters of the game and of life. An example springs readily to mind in the iconic Sachin Tendulkar. If prickly Ponting were humble enough he might acknowledge he has let his career spin off at a tangent while someone senior to him is demonstrating how a sportsman should be in triumph and adversity.