Aussies brace for life after greats
It’s 40 years this week since Dennis Lillee, Greg Chappell and Rod Marsh retired together at the SCG – a different era to David Warner but the same message to Australia.
In January, 1984, there was so much emotion around the Test match retirements of the three legends that Australia, for a while, floated away on the sweet memories of their grandest deeds rather than look ahead at the grim world looming without them.
Incredibly, Australia failed to win any of its next eight series over four years after they played their last Tests, like Warner, against Pakistan.
Chairman of selectors Laurie Sawle famously said a few years later: “We learnt one big thing – when you have a great group of senior players you simply have to make sure they don’t leave together. You just have to stagger their departures.’’
Australia had another triple Sydney farewell in 2006-07 against England when Glenn McGrath, Shane Warne and Justin Langer played their last Tests together.
An era of greatness was replaced by a less spectacular one. There’s no way, given the modest state of most of its rithat vals, Australia will fall off a cliff like it did in the mid-1980s, no matter how quickly other senior players follow Warner, but Sawle’s message is still relevant.
Warner will be gone next week from a side whose youngest player, Marnus Labuschagne, is 29 and the challenge for head selector George Bailey is to stagger the departure of an outstanding group has grown from boys to men together. Batting-wise, that means getting one more year out of Warner’s boyhood buddy Usman Khawaja and two out of Steve Smith.
If that’s Smith the occasionally clunky four-wheel drive rather than Smith the purring Porsche, that’s fine.
People talk about the lack of exceptional openers to replace Warner but the depth is thinner in the middle order.
Smith may not be the batsman he was but almost every great one Australia has had – Allan Border, Matt Hayden, Ricky Ponting and Michael Clarke among them – faded near the end of their careers.