The morning after the night before is when clarity kicks in. You shuffle into the main part of the house and suddenly you can see the snowdrifts of bottles that you didn’t notice accumulating. You spot the burn marks on the carpet, the crack in the bottom window, the slice of chocolate cake smeared along the blade of the ceiling fan. You know that this version of you is the person who has to deal with it. With clarity, nothing is clearer than regret.
The morning after Australia’s match-surrendering batting collapse in Delhi, regret was palpable. Not just at failure but failure from a position of strength. Walking in to speak to reporters at the team hotel, it was palpable from coach Andrew McDonald. “It’s a lot of hard work to get into that position, and that’s the real disappointing part,” he said. “Those positions in India aren’t handed over easily, and we had one. We had a really good look at it. That’s the frustration and within the group we know how much we’re going to need to invest to get back into that. Are we prepared for that? Yeah, we are. Are we up to that challenge again? Yes, we are.”
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It sums up the McDonald approach: most often giving straight answers while making a point of calm. See his description that the impetus behind the collapse was “more perceived pressure than anything” given his team’s third-innings position at 86 runs ahead with eight wickets in hand. His concept of perceived pressure may just be a less emotive description of choking, but it was still him saying that his batters had been the authors of their own demise. There was no attempt to turn attention to the pitch or the quality of India’s spinners.
That panic, seen now in the second innings in Nagpur and in Delhi, is the thing to resolve. In the unhappy responses from pundits and supporters at home in Australia, attention has been on the absence of warm-up matches. It is worth pointing out that tour games became largely pointless once host boards started offering sub-standard opposition on surfaces that had no resemblance to Test grounds. The week-long camp in Bangalore gave players opportunities to groove their games, precious little of which has been shown upon reaching the middle.
“There’s no doubt there’s a sense of busyness when you get to the wicket,” was McDonald’s explanation. “You’re very vulnerable in that period of time. How can you slow your thoughts down, how can you calm yourself down to get into your innings? We’ve seen once people get into their innings, we saw with [Peter Handscomb and Usman Khawaja] then it seems like the game changes and everyone starts to talk about how the ball’s got a little bit softer, the spinners are getting tireder, but it’s actually that the batter has got an understanding of the conditions.”
The thing is, swearing not to panic is one of those things that people do when nothing is wrong. The promise vanishes when next put to the test. That is where circumvention is required. Perhaps the longer break between matches will help, even if Australia’s limited training on what should have been day four and five was not a plan, but a function of being cut off from facilities at the Delhi stadium by local authorities as soon as the match ended.
McDonald was clear that various players would still be doing personalised training regimes and that a short time off for others would help them to process. “They’re not going to switch off totally. They’re going to be thinking about exactly what happened. They’re going to be running through it in their heads, they’re going to be talking in small groups. When we come back together, hopefully by that space within the group we’ve got a bit more clarity and we can push forward. Our next move is the most important.”
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After the nine-day break before the next assignment, the team will be different anyway. Flights home will be procured for injured players and those who won’t be picked. There may be an SOS to Glenn Maxwell, just back from a broken leg, who is due to be named for the one-day series after the Tests but could come earlier. It would be a huge ask for him to walk into these conditions and prosper, but a decade of IPL exposure makes him less likely to be overwhelmed by venues, conditions, crowds.
In any case, there won’t be a free batting spot right away. Cameron Green will return to bat at six, Matthew Renshaw is almost as certain to make way. David Warner surely can’t come back so soon from an elbow fracture, and has offered little with the bat in three innings as an opener compared to what Travis Head did in one. Khawaja has made a score, Steve Smith and Marnus Labuschagne remain the most likely to crack the code for a bigger one. Three spinners will probably remain the option.
They were impressive as a joint force in Delhi, though McDonald did not want to be caught up in that. “It’s too soon after what happened yesterday to talk about the positives, because that session probably wiped a lot of that sort of thinking away,” he said. There is negativity to spare from those watching on, built on nonsense intangibles like toughness, heart, fight. Being beaten on the inside edge supposedly shows the lack of all of the above. But skill errors are not moral failings, and playing spin is foremost about skill. Australia’s job is to rediscover the mental state to apply it.
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