0Australia’s Golden Era Hurts the Current Cricketers

Aus­tralia – what the heck! They’ve just lost the series against South Africa fol­low­ing some bat­tling col­lapses worthy of Eng­land at their very best (or worst!)
It’s incred­ible to see what has happened to the side when they are com­pared to the team of recent past. There’s a big wad of rub­bish in the cur­rent line up – I can’t think of any­one who would make the Eng­land side who played in the last test against South Africa. OK they have a few injur­ies, espe­cially in the bowl­ing depart­ment, but things will have to change.
Of course it was nev­er going to be easy, los­ing the likes of Hay­den, Langer, Gil­christ, Warne and McGrath but for Australia’s cur­rent mal­aise we must look to that golden era.
When those play­ers were thrash­ing every­one that crossed their path the line up was almost always the same. Con­sist­enty breeds suc­cess, or so the say­ing goes. And it’s an under­stand­able ideal – i.e. that you should always play your strongest side.
But it also meant that those play­ers wait­ing in the wings – includ­ing the cur­rent Aus­sie coach, Dar­ren Lehmann – got very few oppor­tun­it­ies (few­er than 30 tests for ‘Boof’) to show what they could do and to exper­i­ence the magic of test cricket.
That res­ul­ted in play­ers not hav­ing the neces­sary exper­i­ence when their chance came when the spine of the suc­cess­ful team retired.
Can Aus­tralia recov­er? Only time will tell – but it might take some time before they re-find their pomp of old.