Australian men’s Cricket team

Within days of their arrival in England in late April 1993, the Australian men's Test team struggled against a Duchess of Norfolk's Invitation XI that ...

So it was perhaps fitting that on the morning of the fourth and final Test in Ahmedabad, with the series practically a dead rubber, players were asked to avoid warming up on the Narendra Modi Stadium’s oval. Albanese made things even weirder when he grabbed Steve Smith’s arm and raised it to the heavens in far too enthusiastic a celebration of nobody’s quite sure what. For rationalist team managers, the experience gained from a month living and playing in India, eating local foods, facing local bowling and adjusting to local conditions can simply be replicated in planning meetings and a week of internal training camps. Instead of selecting the country’s best eleven players, providing them with time and resources to prepare, and backing their abilities to adjust to local conditions, Australia’s selectors adopted a “horses for courses” policy that assumes players are something like Pokémon: those with particular strengths can be deployed for specific battles. Modi himself, India’s controversial Hindu-nationalist prime minister, would be doing a victory lap in a seriously weird shoe-shaped float backed with wickets and cricket bats (which media couldn’t avoid describing as a “bat-mobile”) with his visiting counterpart from Australia, Anthony Albanese, to commemorate “75 years of friendship through cricket”. As is routinely observed, however, Australia’s men’s cricketers – despite the relative rivers of gold now flowing through the sport – no longer have the luxury of exploring local conditions for a month before donning their battle gear for the Tests. It should then be no mystery as to why, over this period, Australia has never won a Test series in England or India in nine attempts. The answer lies in the curious deceits of modern management, which has captured sport as well as government, charities and most institutions larger than a tennis doubles team, and prefers “strategic planning” – done with butcher’s paper or whiteboards well away from the coalface – to empirical observation and experiential learning. Warner, failing miserably and predictably, copped a cracked elbow and a concussion, and was mercifully subbed out of the series during the second game. Yet the Australians decided against even one warm-up match against a local opposition, preferring to practice among themselves on specially prepared spinning surfaces in Sydney and then in a training camp 1000 kilometres south of the first Test venue. Within days of their arrival in England in late April 1993, the Australian men’s Test team struggled against a Duchess of Norfolk’s Invitation XI that included the retired talents of Ian Botham, Joel Garner and Tony Greig. And then they dropped Travis Head, Australia’s only truly in-form batsman and the fourth highest-ranked batsman in the world, citing his disappointing tours of Pakistan and Sri Lanka last year.