“Well, it’s good for the game, I guess.”
When Australia cops a surprise loss at a cricket World Cup, men’s or women’s, this has been the fallback line. A hubris based coping mechanism. A way of making sense of the fact that Australia might not win EVERY game it plays. I heard it rolled out this week as Australia crashed out of the men’s T20 World Cup following defeats to Zimbabwe and Sri Lanka.
I’ve witnessed the argument before, I might have even said it after Afghanistan eliminated us at the 2024 version of this tournament. But, honestly, stuff that. This is a team that had won sixteen of twenty-one games leading into the pre-tournament series with Pakistan. They’ve won one from six since.
Coach Andrew McDonald has rejected suggestions that other formats (read: the Ashes) had been prioritised over this event. Two things on this, one, Pat Cummins is literally on the record saying it was worth risking a missed World Cup to play one Ashes test. In his words…
“Realistically, if I didn’t push for that third Test, I probably wouldn’t have played any of the Ashes Tests. And I still would have been 50-50 for this World Cup. So, yeah, it was all totally worth it.”
And secondly, it’s actually fine to pursue our biggest rivalry ahead of a T20 World Cup that has been held four times in five years. We just shouldn’t be shocked when we fail to get out of our group.
They talk a lot in T20 cricket about releasing the players from consequence. Abandoning fear in order to play with a kind of childlike freedom. Can you take that lack of consequence too far? Cam Green, Glenn Maxwell, Josh Inglis, Cooper Connolly, these are all players of immense talent who have all been miserably out of form, but who were backed to figure it out in World Cup. Steve Smith’s end of BBL season surge was ignored until, eventually, he was flown in to carry the drinks for the decisive defeat against Sri Lanka. There is still a game to play against Oman, which only holds the possibility of further calamity.
Maybe the best outcome for Cricket Australia is the reality that this event has sat behind the Amazon paywall. If a tree falls in the woods and no one is there, does it make a sound? IDK, but I do know that Australia losing to Zimbabwe should see cricket fans make a rather loud noise, but many just didn’t catch it. At a time where Kayo subscribers are forking out $46 a month and Stan Sport users are paying $27, there are a lot of cricket fans who simply haven’t got the cash to pay Jeff Bezos to watch this Aussie team fail.
For those of us that did pay the money (or better still listened for free on the ABC listen app)... well I guess we are Zimbabwe fans now.
