Geoff Lemon's Blog, page 49

We can feel for Tim Paine the person – honesty is difficult | Geoff Lemon

This is not how Pat Cummins would want to take the captaincy – during the trials of a friend who created his own misery and now has to accept responsibility

Honesty is a difficult business. There are people with an innate inability to lie, left with their own reality shaken if they try to misinform someone else’s. Safe to say they’re a minority. The impulse comes early, the way kids lie extravagantly, faces smeared in chocolate while denying any knowledge of a stolen block. Some of us never consistently grow out of that – this writer included. We feel trouble coming and our impulse is to hide. As adults, we’re not scared of being punished, we’re scared of being unloved. We’re scared of others seeing the things that we feel ashamed of and casting us out.

His dishonesty may have been by omission rather than commission, but you can understand why Tim Paine, by this point the Australian men’s cricket captain, never wanted to put the story of his dodgy text messages in the open. As well as the personal humiliation in front of a potential audience of millions, it would involve visiting that humiliation on his wife and kids, and the fear of being diminished for both reasons in the eyes of everyone he cares about. The anticipated shame of all of those things would be intense, as is the shame we have all internalised about our sexual wants and actions.

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The Spin | Ashes has lost focus with scandals engulfing ECB and Cricket Australia

After months of scandal, two already ordinary teams now look like something more tawdry and tarnished

The Ashes are coming, the Ashes are coming. And yet, if you were paying attention to cricket over the past couple of weeks, you may identify with a lack of enthusiasm. You may identify instead with a weariness, a wariness, a general swirling malaise. Australia and England, that pair, where those leading the game and those leading the teams have been draping themselves in the inverse of glory.

The two captains, as per the pre-series marketing, have dwindled to one captain, meaning that 100% of the remaining captains and 100% of the former captains in this series exist under a cloud. Australia’s anointed repairer of reputation, Tim Paine, resigned his commission via the national tradition of a teary public apology after his homespun erotica attained belated publication. England’s blameless golden child, Joe Root, has always been fiercely claimed as the property of Yorkshire, and thus must remain so, as a teammate who, Azeem Rafiq said in his testimony to a parliamentary hearing, was oblivious to racist chatter.

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Pat Cummins for Australian captain is on brand but he might also add substance | Geoff Lemon

Those running Cricket Australia have an exceptional candidate to replace Tim Paine rather than just the next in line

For a sporting body, the chance to play a card like Patrick Cummins is rare indeed. He has every attribute to be a success with media outlets and the sporting public: tall, good looking, sufficiently young without being too young, intelligent, well spoken, a winning smile, a hint of political progressivism without – you know – talking about it too much, a seriously good highlight reel, a winning CV, and a place in all formats that is never open to question. Unless some unlikely transgression is dug up from his past, he is the ultimate cleanskin at a time when Cricket Australia desperately needs one.

All of which means that he will surely be installed as Australia’s next Test captain once his obligatory milkshake duck check is complete. After the sandpaper farrago in 2018, some of the cricket world did manage to dredge up enough goodwill to see whether the Australian men’s players and the governance body responsible for them could remake their culture into a kinder, gentler polity. The public relations version of that image was maintained via new captain Tim Paine while he and CA put their preaching of “elite honesty” into practice by covering up an investigation into his off-field behaviour. Three years later, and a tearful resignation press conference ended Paine’s tenure just as one had begun it.

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Anatomy of the loser AFL club: when is the sting of sporting failure worse?

To fall just short? To never know how it feels to get close? To land between, avoiding either pole? Emma Kemp, deputy sport editor, recommends Geoff Lemon’s treatise on the losing team

You can read the original article here: Anatomy of the loser AFL club: when is the sting of sporting failure worse?

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Australia’s World Cup win a surprise triumph for orthodoxy in the T20 age | Geoff Lemon

A team based upon their powerful Test bowling lineup had enough power to carry them to victory over their determined New Zealand opponents

Australia’s relationship with Twenty20 international men’s cricket has always been strained. When Ricky Ponting captained the first ever match in 2005, with players in fancy dress wearing contrived nicknames on their shirts, even smoking an unbeaten 98 couldn’t stop him looking like an unimpressed cat unable to bring up a hairball.

Influential people shared his disdain, but even after taking the format seriously, and developing one of the better domestic leagues, Australian teams in T20 World Cups fell flat. It was easy to dismiss the importance of the condensed form, but for a dominant Test power that also collected 50-over titles like stamps, the shortfall was a quiet irritation with no immediately apparent remedy.

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New Zealand take on Australia and history in T20 World Cup final | Geoff Lemon

If the Black Caps can end their poor form against Australia, the game they wanted least could also yield the sweetest victory

If New Zealanders had a choice of opponent in Sunday’s T20 World Cup final, the average preference would surely be anyone but Australia.

This isn’t about the power dynamics of relative size, because New Zealand’s defining characteristic as a cricket team has become the ability to match up against opponents with even more economic and population disparity than there is between the bookends of the Tasman Sea. But for other less tangible reasons, whether or not they involve the regional friendship and rivalry between the countries, Australia are indisputably New Zealand’s bogey side, the team that beats the Black Caps no matter how well either side is going. The past doesn’t always define the future, and there is of course no reason why this New Zealand team couldn’t be the one to break the pattern. A similar hold ended at this same tournament, when Pakistan ignored decades of World Cup losses to India with a powerful 10-wicket pasting. But the historical record includes very recent history, and it remains another obstacle to overcome.

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David Warner cut off in mid-flow against Pakistan but the mojo is back | Geoff Lemon

Before he was caught in the T20 World Cup semi-final off a ball he didn’t hit, the Australia opener proved his mettle

In the end, the story didn’t entirely deliver for David Warner. But in the end, it delivered enough. For what has felt like so long in the compressed world of short-course cricket, Australia’s opening bat has been out of form, out of runs, out of time, and eventually just out. The one thing he hasn’t been is out of patience. Warner’s reservoir of self-belief is profound enough to hide Loch Ness’s secrets. When he faces a struggle, he endures it until it passes. As he has creaked and stuttered after a couple of difficult stints in the IPL, he hasn’t gone chasing runs with desperate swipes at the ball. He has waited for runs to come back to him.

In recent matches at the T20 World Cup, they have started returning. But in Thursday night’s semi-final win over Pakistan, it was rhythm that came back to Warner as well. It came back even while Shaheen Shah Afridi was running wild.

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Australia the clear underdogs as they face a Pakistan side firing on all cylinders | Geoff Lemon

Australia have the quality to beat any team but it will take something special against Babar Azam’s side in the T20 World Cup semi-final

When Australia’s men tackle Pakistan in the Twenty20 World Cup semi-final, they will come up against a purring cricket machine. If we’re swayed by the latter team’s longer-term history, then it would be entirely feasible for Pakistan to surge unbeaten through the group stages and still bomb out in a semi-final. The success in this tournament though hasn’t been down to players randomly producing brilliance. It has been a collective in which the tasks to be done are clear and in which almost every player is firing.

T20 being T20, a team can still have a bad game in a knockout. But for this Pakistan side it would be an aberration, not a likelihood. Their success starts at the top with Mohammed Rizwan and Babar Azam, wicketkeeper and captain making the opening stand. Rizwan always plays with a beaming smile, and bats with the same joyousness, taking on the bowling whenever afforded the chance, one of the cleanest strikers in a format full of them. Twice in this tournament he has made 79 not out, denied more by completing a run chase that he began. Babar alongside has four half-centuries from five starts, making himself the core around which the innings coheres, with a range that depending on need can go from collecting runs at six per over to thrashing them at closer to nine.

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David Warner is coming into form just as Australia need him | Geoff Lemon

The man who legitimised T20 in his homeland has had a lean spell but has sprung to life in time for the World Cup knockouts

As Australia qualified for the Twenty20 World Cup semi-finals by chasing 158 against West Indies, the most important piece dropped into place with a click. David Warner is Australia’s defining T20 player, ever since rising to prominence with a pyrotechnic national debut back in 2009. His current captain, Aaron Finch, may edge him on career runs after 13 matches in the past year that Warner missed, but Warner has still played the most T20s for Australia. He more than anyone legitimised the format in Australia by crossing from it to become a Test success. All the while, he gathered more than 5,000 IPL runs.

In his most recent IPL season and his World Cup to date, his batting has done anything but click. His half-century against Sri Lanka was followed by a low score against England and an asthmatic wheeze against Bangladesh, unable to middle shots while needing to chase a small target at high speed to boost the team’s net run rate.

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Australia’s feelgood factor returns as crushing win strengthens T20 World Cup position | Geoff Lemon

Victory over Bangladesh did not suddenly make Australia the best team in the competition but it did put the wind back in their sails

If Australia’s Twenty20 team and World Cup campaign were each flat after being steamrolled by England a few nights ago, they each received a fair amount of reinflation by Thursday’s performance against Bangladesh. Adam Zampa took five wickets for the first time in the format, almost every bowler struck within their first over, Aaron Finch blazed at the top of the order, and Australia knocked off an embarrassing target of 73 in barely six overs. The resulting boost to net run rate put Australia into second spot in the group, with a better chance now than South Africa of reaching a semi-final.

Some sporting results have little significance when it comes to assessing the strengths of the relative teams. Australia’s recent T20 meetings with Bangladesh all fall into this camp. Playing in Dhaka in August on rugged surfaces that left both teams struggling to reach triple figures, the home team’s wins were standalone pieces of performance art. Conditions at the World Cup were never going to be so extreme.

Nor did anyone predict that when the tournament arrived, Bangladesh would implode. Losing to Scotland in the pre-tournament qualifying round, scraping through to the main draw in second place, choking against West Indies and Sri Lanka, all out for 84 against South Africa. In their last match of the competition against Australia, these were players who were well past ready to sack off the whole thing and go anywhere but here.

So there isn’t much to read into a win in which Liton Das reached for the third ball of the match from Mitchell Starc and steered it into his own stumps. Nor when his partner Soumya Sarkar did the same from Josh Hazlewood the following over. Nor when Mushfiqur Rahim missed a tame delivery from a part-time off-spinner to be trapped in front. Three overs, three wickets, puncture hissing. The Bangladesh scorecard ended up with four ducks and eight scores in single figures. All out in 15 overs, the match barely lasted one regulation innings.

What it will have done, though, is make the Australians feel good. Zampa will be confident against left-handers, knocking off three of them with his wrong ‘un spinning away from the bat among his figures of 5 for 19. Starc had the new ball swinging, which is key to his craft. Glenn Maxwell got a tidy bowl in the Powerplay after being looted by England. And after that same match in which Australia batted in boots of cement, Finch found the middle of the bat and the edge of the arena repeatedly in his 40 from 20 balls.

The only persistent concern will be Finch’s partner, David Warner: his innings featured one vintage Warner punch behind point, but otherwise consisted of a couple of boundaries off the top edge, some dashed singles, and a few missed swipes, including the one that saw him bowled for 18. Even the chance to put away a free hit instead turned into a single to mid-on.

Perhaps the most pleasure the Australians will take will be from the brief closing work of Mitchell Marsh. It is curious, given his lot as a Test player was defined by inconsistency, that this year Marsh has become the most essential part of his country’s T20 batting. His unarguable solidity as he walks out, the snap of sound when he pulled his first ball for four, the refined violence in the way he rifled through extra cover, or pulled another all but beyond the grandstand to seal the win, was the stuff of authority that can inspire others to fall in behind. He didn’t play against England, and this may have made no difference to the result, but it will cheer his teammates to imagine that it could have.

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