Australia, the arrogant?

People wonder… what has happened to the Australian Team? Isn’t this the same team which so comprehensively thrashed South Africa at home not so long ago? Just looking into the reasons for that… my point of view, obviously.

I’ve always felt that the Australians had a major sense of arrogant complacency in their approach towards games. Until the 2003 – 04 Border Gavaskar Trophy, no side had managed to even come close to scaring the Australians in their own backyard. They were complacent in the knowledge that no side had the batting firepower to combat their bowlers at a place like the WACA, and that no bowler could have the bag of tricks that would better an Australian batsman at home. They lived and played under this comforting knowledge.

In that series, they realized that Indian batsmen had developed the discipline that batsmen need to combat Australian bowlers at home – albeit, a weakened attack having only Dizzy as a regular bowler – but even he couldn’t make much of an impression on Dravid, Sachin, Laxman and Ganguly – and that the Indian bowlers (ducky boy Agarkar, of all people) had learnt how to tame the Australian batsmen at home.

That hit them hard, and they realized that they couldn’t be complacent with their current knowledge, because other teams were catching up. Hence they worked on playing spin, learnt a few new tricks themselves, and thrashed the Indians at home the next year – something they’d never done before.

But that series had given hope to the English, who developed some new tricks – the best they could do wrt conditions at home – conventional and reverse swing – and again the Australians found that they couldn’t handle it, and lost the Ashes in 2005. Again, it was due to complacency – expecting that the Poms would wilt under tried and tested Aussie firepower, and were incapable of coming up with something up their sleeves as well. They underestimated the intelligence of Vaughan and the intensity of Freddie, and paid the price.

However, for some reason, they refuse to learn. Talk about the series where the South Africans comprehensively screwed the Aussies at home. Or the current Ashes without Stuart Clark. They seem to go in with the mindset that the opposition is not good enough to face our firepower, too dumb to learn anything new to deal with the fact that they cannot combat our firepower under normal circumstances, and they don’t react fast enough to come up with new tricks to combat an opposition who’s learnt to deal with Australian tricks as well as come up with something new up its sleeves as well.

Hence, they were outswung by Anderson in the first innings at Lord’s, outthought and outbowled by Freddie in the second innings at Lord’s, and once again, outswung by Onions and Anderson at Edgbaston. And until they learn to treat their opponents with a little bit of respect, this is not going to change. The results of treating their opponents with some respect are clear – beating India in India in 2004 – 05, and South Africa in South Africa in 2008 – 09. I guess the fact that the repeat leg of the series (Australia coming to tour India after India had toured Australia, and same with South Africa) was played immediately after the home leg also has something to do with the steep jump in the Australian learning curve.

Somehow, it may take one more Ashes defeat to England, it seems, before the Aussies learn the lesson they learnt in 2003 -04 with India and South Africa in 2007 – 08.