Information about the book
In 2007, I published a collection of journalism called The (Green &) Golden Age, encompassing a decade of work about the long period of Australian cricket ascendancy. Why? I had a strange sense of living in end times. Strange because at the time the teams led by Ricky Ponting appeared unassailable, with the Ashes, the Frank Worrell Trophy and the World Cup all in safe and undisputed keeping, and new caps such as Mike Hussey, Stuart Clark and Andrew Symonds already nicely bedded down. All the same, Shane Warne, Glenn McGrath and Justin Langer were gone, and Adam Gilchrist and Matthew Hayden would not be long behind them. It seemed like an opportune moment to capture the past, and to pay tribute to this team of the talents before it receded entirely from view. And though I could hardly have forseen the magnitude of the forthcoming revolution, I also intuited that in T20 the game had a vibrant, lucrative and potentially discombobulating variant. The last few pages of The (Green &) Golden Age were devoted to a preview of the first World T20 in South Africa, with the prophecy that 'the face of the game is about to change', albeit that success might prove a 'mixed blessing', and for Australia a particular challenge.
Don't worry if you didn't read this; not many did. But here, despite popular demand, is a sort-of sequel: Uncertain Corridors, the title pertaining both to those of technique outside the off stump and those of power in which administrators make decisions concerning cricket's future. It offers a sample of what might be loosely described as 'stuff' I have written about the twilight of Australia's great era, and this cricket country's attempt to find its way in a T20-centric world. For, as we now know, that inaugural instalment of the World T20 was won by India, which promptly embraced a format it had previously scorned, and parlayed it into the money machine of the Indian Premier League, thereby consolidating the economic thrall in which it keeps the rest of the cricket world. Australia has struggled to keep up in every respect, on the field and off, commencing a painful rebuilding of its talent stocks even as it has undertaken a top-to-bottom refit of its cricket system in emulation of the IPL, each rather complicating and compromising the other.
For much of the time, Australia's team was marshalled by captain Michael Clarke, coach Mickey Arthur, and the still striving Ponting and Hussey, all to specifications laid down in an August 2011 report by a panel of eminences, the so-called Argus Review. At one point, Australia threatened to outdo Arthur's former side, South Africa, going within an ace of victory during an unforgettable Test at Adelaide Oval. But when Ponting then Hussey went, Clarke struggled with the additional burden, and Arthur paid with his job – the first Tests of his successor Darren Lehmann I will report in a forthcoming chronicle of the back-to-back Ashes of 2013–14. So Uncertain Corridors amounts to another time capsule, of middling success, with both highs and lows attained against India, and muddling strategy, at times just too clever by half.
To be fair, we are all of us groping our ways forward. A French philosophe once quipped that the English invented cricket because of their non-religiosity, to give them a sense of the eternal. But there has been nothing eternal about the six years since Sreesanth caught Misbah ul-Haq to afford India victory over Pakistan at Wanderers, and some falls have been especially precipitous: in May 2013, Sreesanth was one of three regulars of the Rajasthan Royals arrested on charges of spot-fixing in the IPL, midst allegations of fathomless corruption. A fan out of touch with cricket since Australia's last World Cup win would quickly lose their bearings in the modern landscape. Who are these players, these teams? What are these events? Where did these schedules come from?
Because you can regard all this as the outworkings of animal spirits liberated by Kerry Packer thirty-six years ago, I include a speech delivered last year on that great time tunnel, Howzat; my most recent subject, Shane Warne, also looms large. And because it's also a big wide cricket world these days, Uncertain Corridors includes glimpses of some esteemed Australian opponents, plus despatches from cricket's high councils (the International Cricket Council, the Board of Control for Cricket in India) and far-flung satellites (Afghanistan and Papua New Guinea). These suggest some foundation for the truism about money being like muck: best when spread. For cricket has found its new riches acutely problematic, in their tendency to prop up dysfunctional autocracies and bureaucracies whose chief interest is their own perpetuation, to offer instant riches to unfinished players and subtly marginalise those with traditional ambitions, to puzzle and alienate cricket's core supporters in quest of fabled 'new markets'. We might even wonder whether cricket would not be a happier game were it less wealthy, or at least more equal, as heretical a notion as this may sound to votaries of the remorseless logic of late capitalism. In search of a more positive conclusion, the book ends with some reflections on two cricket forms: the club game and the Test match, opposites where I feel most at home. Perhaps you do too.
Uncertain Corridors is offered with thanks to my most excellent colleagues at The Australian, The Nightwatchman, Wisden Cricketers' Almanack, The Cricketer and The Global Mail, where these pieces were previously published, and to my wife Charlotte and daughter Cecilia, who waited very patiently for me to finish them.
