Let’s dish it up to the Aussies
We may like Pat Cummins, the cleancut captain of Australia, but let’s not pretend that his team is anything other than the usual collection of rogues and scoundrels. If it meant winning a cricket match, this lot would still tear your heart out with a toothpick.
David Warner may have exited stage left, blowing a kiss to the Wellington crowd, but his villainous moustache remains on the face of Aussie cricket, bristling and sneering and looking down on the world.
And that is why the Basin Reserve is sold out five times over. When Usman Khawaja and Steve Smith walk out to open the batting for Australia there will be polite applause in the pavilion, but the groundlings will boo and hiss and want to pelt the dastardly pair with grapes. And yet none of the barracking will pierce the armour of arrogance that protects all Aussie cricketers.
They expect to win. You just knew that India, who had been so superb all tournament, would fall over in a fearful heap when confronted by the Aussies in the World Cup final, just as they had fallen over in the final of the World Test Championship a few months earlier. Even one and a half billion Indians can’t shake an Aussie cricketer’s sense of entitlement.
We saw it in the first T20 international in Wellington. The Aussies were down and out. They needed 28 off eight balls and Tim David, who used to play for Singapore, was on strike. And yet in the edges of their souls, most New Zealand cricket fans knew the Aussies would find a way to win and New Zealand would find a way to lose.
It’s called an inferiority complex. It would not take a clinical psychologist to work out why Adam Milne delivered two length balls, both of which were smashed for six, when all he needed was a couple of low full tosses. So it came down to four needed off the final ball. Did anyone in either camp really have any doubt about the outcome? New Zealand hoped to win. Australia expected to win.
That is the problem facing New Zealand going into the test series and it is a monumental one. They haven’t beaten Australia in a test match for 12 years and that was on a fluky pitch in Hobart. The last six test matches have been massacres. The closest margins of victory have been by 7 wickets and by 247 runs.
Even Kane Williamson, the highestranked test batsman in the world, has floundered in recent times against the Aussies. In his last 10 test innings against them he averages 23 and has got past 50 just once. Williamson needs to go deep both into himself and into the innings.
It is going to be the biggest challenge of Williamson’s career, because turning round a psychological deficit is one of the hardest things in sport.
At last year’s Rugby World Cup, Ireland might have finally thought they were about to exorcise their demons.
Coach Andy Farrell said before the quarterfinal against the All Blacks: “I suppose an inferiority complex is what’s happened in the past as far as getting to world number one and thinking that we’re going to fall off a cliff because this shouldn’t be happening to Ireland.
“But what we’ve learnt to do is throw ourselves into big challenges and try to meet them head on and embrace that. We don’t want to be second best, we want to be first best.”
We all know how this story ended. Ireland were the better team. Their record over the previous two years proved that. But they still lost. They lost because that is what they were used to. The All Blacks won because that was their entitlement.
Ireland thought that they had overcome their inferiority complex, but there were still fragments, sharp fragments, stuck deep in the emerald psyche. Getting rid of those fragments is desperately difficult but close up I have seen it done once.
Great Britain and Ireland’s Walker Cup team of amateur golfers would routinely get smashed by the Americans. And then Peter McEvoy, a brilliant golfer and slightly wacky thinker, was appointed captain and changed the plot line. He knew he had a good team, but the trick as leader was making them all believe that they were a great team.
McEvoy engaged Saatchi & Saatchi to make a motivational video. It depicted the GB&I team hitting a series of stunning shots before a mystical golfer sticks another one close and walks on water (there was a submerged platform) across to the green. All done to drum and bass and Gareth Hunt, of New Avengers fame, solemnly saying “do you know how great Great Britain is?”
McEvoy wangled his team an invitation to Buckingham Palace. He kitted them out in yellow shirts, claiming yellow had proven psychological advantages which boosted the wearer and intimidated the opposition. That was why, he said, the yellow shirt was worn by the leader of the Tour de France, the Brazil football team and the Aussie rugby team, who at that time were particularly good (“four more years”).
Most of it was hooey, but the latterday svengali had his team believing in more ways than one. He kept telling the media how good they were. McEvoy had dismantled the inferiority complex. GB&I broke through and won three consecutive matches against America, which was just about unheard of.
And maybe, just maybe, the Blacks Caps could do with some similar motivational, out-of-the-box thinking against Australia. Brendon McCullum had the swagger but when it really mattered Mitchell Starc splattered his stumps in the first over of the World Cup final. Yet again the Aussies were laughing in New Zealand’s faces.
They have been metaphorically splattering New Zealand’s stumps in test matches for 30 years and it has to change. They have won 23 tests in that time, to New Zealand’s lone victory. So when Smith gets out, don’t let him linger disbelievingly at the crease as he has a tendency to do, but give him a spray and get him out of there.
I am not suggesting that New Zealand need to behave like mongrels. But they need to bring some edge and yes, a touch of arrogance to their cricket. Anything less and the Aussies will walk all over them.
Australian cricketers have always thought they have a divine right to victory. They bowl underarm, they rub sandpaper on the ball, they belittle the opposition, they chuck Kiwis out of their country. So let’s man up. Stand tall like the Pinetree. Bring a bit of Colin Meads gristle into the team.
The Aussies will strut if the Kiwis let them. So drop the shoulder and stick a few up under the grille. Not in our backyard, mate.
Turning round a psychological deficit is one of the hardest things in sport.