Chennai: The cricket rollercoaster seems to have a will of its own. How else can we explain how the form book goes so topsy-turvy from one series to another?
Take the Ashes in which the Aussies have the urn and England has gone to dust just a year and a half after winning the previous Ashes 3-0. The same was the case with the Australians who had beaten India 4-0 at home and came to face India after the home team had been beaten 2-1 by England here.
India won 4-0, whitewashing a team in a 4-Test series for the first ever time.
Cricketing fortunes seem to rest on the precipitous edge, so prone to falling off the cliff. If a team so much as tarries for one season, it is likely to face a complete reversal of form and the rub of the green in the very next.
Those observing the previous Ashes series in England would have noted how close the series really was and how Australia were in it until they were tipped over by a more experienced team asserting its knowledge of how to play the big moments.
Also, the way the batsmen shaped against Mitchell Johnson in ODIs last summer may have borne the first signs that the balance could be tilted.
The Poms faced the biggest challenge in Brisbane where they were given a thorough working over by the Great Australian Psychology Test run by the media.
The Brisbane Courier-Mail was particularly mentioned for cranking up the psychological battle on behalf of the Aussies. The invectives hurled at the Poms at the ‘Gabba may have scarred them even more and the way they went on about the Poms, particularly Stuart Broad, would have broken anyone’s will in modern day saturation media coverage.
In cricketing terms, it was Johnson’s pace that did England in. A phenomenal 37 wickets at below 14 runs per scalp is an awesome performance. Great pace bowling performances are what decide many series on sporting pitches and it has been a while since the likes of Glenn McGrath had made such wins possible in the Ashes.
The transformation of Johnson is one of the remarkable stories of cricket. When his delivery arm is down and his pace is off and his radar is confused, he becomes the whipping boy. But when he got everything right as we saw in the brief ODI series in England, change could be seen coming.
It was not the fear in the eyes of batsmen at extreme pace that was the defining point in technical terms. The seam movement at extreme pace coming off a length was what tipped the scales.
And it was not as if the support cast was so ordinary England could plan to play out Johnson and look at scoring off the others. Ryan Harris was constantly at the batsmen hustling them and Peter Siddle was the eternal workhorse who gets better and better as the match progresses.
They made a fearsome threesome. If the trio of pacers remains fit and Pattinson comes into the reckoning, South Africa may be in for its toughest assignment in their next series as the world’s top ranked side.
The sustained pressure of touring Australia, a sporting nation that takes particular pride in rubbing it in when the home team is performing, can wear even the best of teams down and an ageing combination on the decline was unlikely to be very competitive.
No one would have believed at the start of the series that a team which had lost seven of its last nine Tests, would be completing a rare whitewash, only the third in Ashes since 1877.
The Aussies bouncing back in this fashion is good news for the top rungs of Test cricket. They are also easily marketable in India too. However ugly their image tends to be when they are on a winning path, cricket world needs a combative Australian team to keep the interest abuzz and the turnstiles clicking.
This is not a young Aussie side but today’s cricket is not about how long a country dominates as much as about how attractively they can play cricket.
