In Australia it is winter, and it is footy season. AFL, NRL, the works. The autumn was passing strange, with unnervingly high temperatures and the Gold Coast Suns in the top four. But now it is June, and feeling more as it should, with nights in the southern half of the continent dipping deep into single degrees. The Raiders must be breathing out steam on Canberra mornings, half remembering dreams of ending a premiership wait. And strangely positioned among all this, the Australia Test team is getting ready to play cricket.
Australian winter tours happen, but outside the occasional Asian or Caribbean jaunt this century, they’re confined to quadrennial visits to England. Two years ago, the first time Australia qualified for a World Test Championship final, that match came directly before an Ashes series. As well as turning the supposed culmination into an incongruous appetizer, it also made theWTC final melt into the Ashes summer.
This time, things are different. England will shortly start another five‑Test series with India, but neither side is involved in the WTC final. So it will be England the cricket board rather than England the cricket team that hosts Australia and South Africa, whose struggle for the right to be called world champions will be based not on a series but a single match. An imperfect mechanism, but it means that this time around, in an Australian consciousness, that match will stand alone.
So it is that among the footy news of dawn beach sessions and tribunal verdicts, Pat Cummins is back at Lord’s this week after half the time that an Ashes cycle would otherwise dictate, wearing the green cap and blazer while wandering about the pavilion doing moody photoshoots as one half of an exercise in height contrast withSouth Africa’s Temba Bavuma. Their squads run drills on the main turf, the pleasantness of white knitted jumpers covering the ugliness of synthetic training kit. The timing may be incongruous, but that classic visual cue says it’s time for a Test.
The InternationalCricketCouncil has gone full-court press on promotion, making sure these images are distributed far and wide. Its Hall of Fame announcement was what the marketing types might call something like a brand crossover activation, with four of the seven inductees reflecting the upcoming contest: for South Africa, the batting contemporaries Graeme Smith and Hashim Amla; for Australia, their rival Matthew Hayden, along with the New Zealand player but now Australia assistant coach, Daniel Vettori.
Approaching the third WTC final, the concept of a Test format decider is starting to cut through. Press access is oversubscribed, largely by English publications for a neutral contest. Public tickets are sold out. It will be a different crowd to the usual. London has plenty of Australians and South Africans, and the latter are starving for global tournament success in any form, so expect both camps to turn out in numbers. After the unhinged reaction thatLord’s gave Australia in 2023, in a spontaneous bout of moralising from the Long Room to the back rows, it might make for a nicer atmosphere to have the England supporter base diluted.
It will still be plenty aggressive on the field. Kagiso Rabada’s preparatory outing against Zimbabwe was vicious, the ball rising from a length at serious pace again and again. Marco Jansen swings it left-arm from a release point about 10ft off the ground. Keshav Maharaj is a vastly experienced left-arm spinner who the Australians treated with a respect bordering on hypnosis in their World Cup semi-final. The fourth link in that bowling chain could be several options, but none that maintains the proven quality of the other three.
The Australians have an edge there, with Cummins joining Nathan Lyon, Mitchell Starc and Josh Hazlewood yet again in a fully rounded attack. When Scott Boland took 10 India wickets in the Sydney Test last January, he looked the man, but Hazlewood recovered from injury to dominate a title-winning Indian Premier League season. Boland has been wildly successful in scant opportunities, but Hazlewood has 279 Test wickets, and last year took them at 13 runs apiece. Australian selection tends now towards stability, so career‑length pedigree trumps one of the best understudies in the game.
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Likewise, the other selection questions feel like they fell into place. Sam Konstas will not be thrown in at Lord’s as he was at the MCG, with Marnus Labuschagne to open instead. That means Cameron Green takes Labuschagne’s slot at No 3, after a run-filled county cricket stint. With Green unable to be a fifth bowler because of injury, Beau Webster stays at six. Josh Inglis, who should have been considered for that spot, is overlooked despite his recent century on debut in Sri Lanka and his ability to problem-solve so many batting situations.
The players are excited, the press attentive and the audience has committed. The Test decider is vindicated further each time it is played. It may be a strange time of year for an Antipodean, and a strange tournament structure for anybody involved. But the important thing now is the game: jumpers on, caps fitted, seats taken, rain cursed, sunshine welcomed. Channel changed. The footy can wait a week.