From Aussies to Ashes....................
23rd September 2005



Some days back I was relaxing in the train on my way to Dadar, I heard a couple of boys talking about the fall of Australia in the cricketing world.
Personally I felt a smile growing inside me as I heard the naïve banter. But later I gave it a slight thought. That was maybe because I have lots of free time nowadays. On a serious note I just wanted to analyze what went wrong with the champions.
I have a bad habit of using analogies when I want to understand most things. I did draw out an analogy; I compared the world dominance of US with the Australian dominance of the cricketing world.
But my own conclusions surprised me; In search of an analogy, I found a pattern of total dissimilarities.
Firstly, there is an invasion of Asian power in both the cases,
China-the biggest threat to US world dominance
India/Pakistan/Sri-Lanka –The biggest threats to Australian cricketing dominance
But there are some significant discrepancies in the 2 patterns. Let me try and highlight those.
Unlike the world scenario where China has been sucking the US throat on the economic front, the battle is not so intense on the cricketing field.
The aversion of the Chinese field to devalue the Yuan has strangled the US economy for too long now.
But the Australian team has won tournaments and series the world over far too easily without any serious competition for a long time now.
Also a very significant event like the World War II was primarily responsible for the US dominance;
But in case of the cricketing field, Australia has built up its dominance by playing great cricket and only that.
At the same time when US was holding back other countries from coming to the Economic forefront by various arm twisting techniques, the cricketing world saw no such efforts on part of Australia to dominate cricket or cricketing politics.

So far so good!

But last week saw Australia fall to ‘Ashes’ after its historic defeat to England but believe me; I have never seen a team fall to Ashes so gracefully.
The team has not exactly been humble over the years nor have been their players but never ever have we seen them reverting to unfair politics or unfair practices to gain the slightest advantage over their opponents and peers.
We would have to concur that it was just the case where we saw some exceptional cricket being played by the England cricketers especially the heap of exceptional cricket led by deadly Freddie.
A magnanimous bowling line up, coupled with some confident looking batsmen was all it took to humble the mighty Kangas.
I don’t know for how much longer, but the Aussies have definitely been worthwhile champions, while the US has and always will struggle to be complete world leaders.
Maybe they can try their hands at Cricket …………