Fair To Say

Watching the third test in the all-too-short West Indies vs Australia series, it is all too obvious that Australian test cricket is on the decline. It may not be a sheer precipice that the baggy greens have suddenly jumped over with the retirements of Langer, Gilchrist, Warne and McGrath and McGill - more of a gentle slope towards mediocrity - but the decadence and eventual fall of the Taylor/Waugh/Ponting empire seems to be an increasingly likely prospect.

The current empire was begun in 1995 in the tour of the West Indies, when Mark Taylor led the Aussies to their first series victory in 22 years, finally ending the dominance by the Caribbean sides and sealing Australia’s accession to the throne. This is how sporting eras are supposed to begin and end: with the new champion standing triumphant over the still-twitching body of the old. Australia is starting to look suspiciously like that 1995 Windies squad: strictly trading on past glories, with only one great batsman left (Ponting playing the Brian Lara role) and a pace attack that can’t live up to the legacy of sustained pressure that retired greats used to deliver.

Is there going to be such a moment soon where the heir apparent beats Australia on their home soil to put away any doubt? According to the ICC test rankings India is poised to be the Charles to the Aussie Elizabeth, although England, South Africa and Sri Lanka are bunched up closely with the Indians. India makes sense as the new on-field powerhouse of Test cricket, because they’re doing a bang-up job of dominating the sport off the field.

Cricket, like many other team sports, is subject to the whims of chance in that a dominant player from one country can turn the sport on its head. Obviously Shane Warne was such a player, for reasons I don’t need to emphasise, but it would be too simplistic to ignore the role that the advent of the state and federal academies have had on Australian cricket. The next world champion of cricket was likely going to be the one that best made use of the academy system template. England has tried it, with varying success due to political factors within the county system - not to mention that they had to stoop so low as to hire actual Australians to teach them how to do it, which hasn’t gone down that well. Those in the subcontinent have no such compunctions over employing Australians - Greg Chappell aside - and India now has the perfect opportunity to invest all those IPL crores into the sort of innovations and technical improvements that will see them close the gap on the current leaders.

The only problem with that thesis is that according to the current ICC Future Tours program (PDF) it won’t be until the 2011/12 season that India next plays Australia away, so we’ve got a long wait ahead. Then again, Indian-led efforts to jazz up Test cricket include such proposals as a “world championship of Test cricket”, whatever that means, which may speed up the process. Either way, it look like it’s only a matter of time.