On Hubris and the Strategic Focus of Australian Cricket

[danieldwilliam]

With two tests of the current Ashes series down and only one win or two draws required for Australia (1) to win back the Ashes it’s time to reflect on hubris and my understanding of the deep strategy of Australian Cricket.




Firstly, a note on the context. Cricket is the sport that defines Australia’s emergence as a nation-state distinct and separate from the UK or the Empire. Being good at cricket. Being the best at cricket. Being better than the inventors of cricket at cricket is as much a part of the Australian creation myth as the First Fleet (2), Ned Kelly (3), the Eureka Stockade (4) and Kylie Minogue (5).

With that in mind, what is the point of Australian Cricket and therefore, what is an appropriate strategic response?

With Ned Kelly martyred, the Eureka Stockade burnt down, Chinese Australian miners (6) allowed to mine gold and Kylie able to pretty much look after herself clearly the entire efforts of the Australian nation are available for cricket. This is somewhat of an exaggeration. There is a fair amount of uranium and coal to be dug up and somewhere in Sydney some real estate needs selling or a cocktail mixing or something and no doubt the yanks or the poms or both will need digging out of some war or other in the near future. In any event, those beers won’t all drink themselves. Australia is a young country with much to be busy about.  However, cricket is important in Australia and some resources are available.

What, then, is the end to which the considerable resources of sporting Australian Australian-hood should be bent like the arm of Muttiah Muralitharan at full pelt? 

To have a team that consistently wins test matches? Well, yeah, but that’s hardly a challenge. To have a team that consistently wins test series handsomely? Okay, but it’s not about the team. This is an issue wider than just 11 blokes on a field having a good couple of days at work.

To be the best team in the world? Sic transit gloria mundi. Strength in depth is required. Then is our aim to have a squad of players from which the best team in the world is regularly selected? Or which could field the two best teams in the world?

No, Australia (1) requires more than just the statistical likelihood of cricketing success. Cricketers’ careers are fleeting. Winning is forever.

The aim of Australian Cricket shouldn’t be to aspire to anything as temporary as cobbling together a group of Australians who are good at cricket. For a start, there’s not much of a challenge to that. Unless you’re recruiting in the Darwin Centre for Recovering Substance Abusers or you’ve been over run by Drop Bears finding 11 Australians who are good at cricket is actually easier than failing to find 11 Aussie cricketers. Secondly, this is a national effort. If we are weave our foundational stories about a sport let them say something more about us than “We quite like this game and occasionally we randomly assign 11 players to it who are pretty good”. If cricketing prowess is to define Australia tomorrow as it did yesterday then nothing less than complete and eternal hegemony of the game is good enough. Not to have a winning team or a winning squad but to be undeniably and indisputably the best cricketing nation on this or any other planet, permanently. Forever and ever. Amen.

To be a nation so renowned for cricket that opposing teams consider themselves fortunate to avoid a whitewash and privileged to be considered worthy opponents.

To win forever.

From this simple requirement unfolds the primary strategic aim of Australian Cricket – to build and maintain a system of cricket that consistently produces a squad and a reserve squad from which the best two cricket teams in the world can be drawn. Where the B team is able to beat any other Test side at full strength. If you like, a cricketing version of the strategy of the Royal Navy from 1750 until 1950. Hegemony. Pure and simple. Not just in the present but in the unknowable future. For generation and generation and generation. That my sons and daughters (7) should look forward to generations of Australian cricketing success to come just as my father before me does.  Ozymandius (8) is not an Australian.

Was there ever a nation more finely disposed to cricketing hegemony than Australia; a land where vast acreages of land are permanently given over to not much happening very slowly? Where it can take a full test match’s worth of commentary just to drive to the local pub and back for a schooner? Where rain delays play is a joke from another age and another country and  the sun itself rises and sets like the looping delivery of a Shane Warne leg-break?


With the above in mind my own emotional response to the recent performance of the Australian cricket team is not the savage blood lust of hubris tinged with the brutal realisation that my time must surely come and my day pass so I’d better get some banter in fast. Rather, I am sad and relieved in equal measure. Relieved that the dark days may be over. That the years when it was doubted that that Australia was the best cricket team may be done. We may have passed the time when “Australia is the best cricketing nation” is not axiomatic. Sad that it has taken so long for the glimmer of hope, nay of faith, to be re-kindled. Sad at the loss of ten wasted years when the world could have benefited from watching the best cricketing nation play the best cricket the best. Grief and relief that at last Australian cricket may be living up to the promise it made in 1882 when it burned English cricket and created a nation from the ashes of the stumps and the dust of the wicket.

Let Us Rejoice! For we are young and free.


(1) Australia! Australia! Australia! You beauty.

(2) Criminals.

(3) A criminal concerned about racism.

(4) Some miners, concerned about racism.

(5) Sort of my sister, concerned about railways.

(6) Or as I like to call them Australian miners

(7) And this success should come both home and away.

(8) Not even Bruce Ozymandius or Forsyth as he is known in Britain.

Comments

[f4f3.livejournal.com]

This is about cricket, isn't it? I claim my point.

[danieldwilliam.livejournal.com]

Your run.

Runs are called points in other sports.

[f4f3.livejournal.com]

There are other sports?

[danieldwilliam.livejournal.com]

Well, there are games.

[widgetfox.livejournal.com]

I have been thinking about this, and I am slightly puzzled because it seems to me that if one team were to win in perpetuity, the sport would just stop. I mean, in the end no-one except the perpetually-winning team would want either to play it or watch it. Clearly it would take a while - the eighties and nineties were not long enough - but in the end, it would have to happen, I think?

JW says that the South African team is the best in the world, by a considerable margin.

[danieldwilliam.livejournal.com]

The serious answer is that, in the unlikely event that Australia did manage that sort of perpetual hegemony you (might) get an arms race effect where everyone gets better but Australia remains the best.

And to an extant that’s what happened in the 80’s and 90’s where after two or more decades of being beaten by Australia, England and South Africa did something about it. This in turn has provoked what I hope is a strategic response from Australia to up their own game (although I fear that it might be a combination of lesser, more temporary effects including just random variations in luck().

There remains the competition for second place and all the other (more or less) meaningful bi-lateral competitions.

There is also the prestige and excitement of taking part. Again, a real world example is the soccer World Cup. Costa Rica aren’t going to win it. They have no chance – but it’s just great to be taking part in one of the world’s greatest events. And they get to play three former winners of the World Cup in their group matches.

The final serious point is that intention is not the same as attainment. The positive benefits that come from genuinely intending and attempting to a hegemonistic position are more important and more certain than the benefits to be had from achieving such a position. The point is to try, not necessarily to succeed. The process is more important than the outcome.

The process yields mass involvement in intra and inter community activities and the participation in some form of civic society. It promotes equality of opportunity. It gathers people round a benign national foundation myth (We’re the human being who are best at cricket because we work bloody hard at it. Rather than we are the only real human beings because of !Reasons.) And so on.

On a more appropriately frivolous note.

Did anyone stop fighting the Spartans? What is the only human response to the statement that Quintus makes in the first act of Gladiator?


http://www.doublecoveragefootball.com/2013/11/quintus-movement.html

Finally, I think this is an aphorism of Sun Tzu, the surest victory is to make the enemy give up.

[widgetfox.livejournal.com]

I agree with all of this (or at least am open to it) except the first paragraph. Eventually I think the other countries would want to stop playing, although it might take a while.

[danieldwilliam.livejournal.com]

JW may be right but I’m with Zhou Enlai. It’s only 2013. Too soon to tell.

[widgetfox.livejournal.com]

I think he sees it as a more fluid state than you. I will show him this correspondence later in the week, though, and report his views.

(I do have some views on cricket that are not "JW says..." but not on this particular issue.)

[widgetfox.livejournal.com]

Actually, I do have a view on this, although it's a highly uneducated one, which is that my take on this series was more "England = suddenly and inexplicably rubbish" than "Australia = massively improved".

[danieldwilliam.livejournal.com]

I think you’re closer to the truth than otherwise.

I think it’s less sudden. The 3-1 result of the last Ashes series rather flattered England. They had a few lucky breaks and home advantage. This time the pendulum that was swinging Australia’s way over our summer has swung a little more Australia’s way and a pretty good but historically erratic bowler has hit a good patch and had some luck.

[widgetfox.livejournal.com]

Completely agree. The summer test that was rained off should have been Australia's and that was very bad luck. The final test, ultimately, was a fair draw, but had England won - a real possibility if the umpires had not decided that dark had fallen - it would have been an incredibly unfair result (and, to be fair, Cook admitted it). Clarke played his hand very sportingly, for the spectators, and it would have been a very unkind fate. On balance the England team played better - Bell was the only consistently good player - but not by all that much.

That's part of the reason I'm more inclined to suspect an English collapse than an Australian transformation. It's much easier to collapse than transform over a three-month period.

[hano.livejournal.com]

Awesome. Wrong obviously, but I'll forgive you - I didn't realise you were Australian, that's punishment enough :)
Mind if I link to this?

[danieldwilliam.livejournal.com]

Thanks – feel free to link away.

The history of my nation is one of punishment. We are the purest victims of the rise of capitalism and the creation of the prolitariate. Exiled from hell we have created paradise in the south.

I grew up in Australia. I am, technically and God help me, a Queenslander.

[widgetfox.livejournal.com]

I have ancestors who were transported.

[danieldwilliam.livejournal.com]

and back?

[widgetfox.livejournal.com]

I'm not sure how much we actually know, but AFAIK they stayed.

[danieldwilliam.livejournal.com]

Right, so they must have been ancestors who left progeny behind?

Or did their decendents return?

Or are you also Australian and may I have my five dollars?

[widgetfox.livejournal.com]

I think door number one.