Touring Australia has always been tough, so we ought to have a little sympathy for the Indians now battling for their lives in the first Test in Adelaide.
Once players trying to face down the Aussies had only to contend with the aggression that seems to come naturally to these descendants of the rough, tough settlers who had to face a huge continent, wall to wall forest, vicious wild animals and unnatural beasts like the kangaroo.
Now, there is the factor I understand completely after 30 years in Manchester where the tragic consequences of the Munich air crash bound the Manchester United supporters together as if they had faced a war.
It is almost a lifetime since that dark February night when eight of their players were killed as their plane failed to conquer the snow and ice on the runway and turned a triumph on the field into a disaster.
Bobby Charlton, a survivor, sits in the stand as a constant reminder of the way United came alive again but no man of Manchester needs a nudge to recall that night. Neither do the Australian Test cricketers need the constant screening of Phillip Hughes’s Test number to know that they have to try all that much harder after his death.
Can you make David Warner more assertive? I doubt it. Early in his century this week he hit a sublime straight drive, four from the moment it left his bat yet he ran like a zebra ahead of a pride of lions and completed two as the ball crossed the boundary.
I laugh whenever I heard some commentator suggest that the touring batsmen ought to imitate such an instinct.
National gameCricket, they say, is Australia’s national game, and so it is; but far from the decorous, don’t-forget-to-say-please-and-thank-you, game that began in the balmy fields of England and is still played at a — comparatively — leisurely pace, still mostly by former public school boys and still ruled by gentlemen of leisure in the club of clubs at Lord’s.
Now they have a saintly figure, a lad from the Outback, a country boy who was happier discussing bulls and cows than batting technique, as their forever symbol, their rebuilt Test side will find a new strength and we should not be too damning if India loses this series.
It almost does not matter that India has players to compete with Australia, led by a great captain.
At this time it is difficult to see it winning as it faces a nation as united as the men of Manchester ever were.
As for England, improving all the time against those Sri Lankan masters of the 50-over game, I wish it could find a tenth of the aggression that fills Australian bones.
As I have often written before, England feels a restraint about the way it plays one-day cricket and a need to be good ambassador first and ruthless cricketers second.
It has only taken full possession of the Ashes when Australia was growing old as in 2005 or reshaping the side as in 1985 and 1986-7.
Great spiritWe must not criticise its victories. Australia has come to this country and won series by sheer purposeful, never-say-die spirit against great players and outlasted England on its own pitches as it did in that fabulous Test at Adelaide in 2006.
It owed that victory — one of the greatest — to unadulterated determination and stamina even though Paul Collingwood and Kevin Pietersen who were only a stride behind it in strength of character.
I wonder if England or India or South Africa will ever be permanently on top while the spirit of Phillip Hughes remains.
