Five Test defeats on the bounce, selection chaos, resignations and a whole raft of new faces, Australian cricket is facing its biggest crisis in living memory. Adam Collins, who has seen Steve Smith’s team unravel first hand, urges the new breed to detach themselves from the myths of the past and forge their own identity.
We’re conditioned to trust history. Taught that to ignore it ensures repeating its errors. In moments of difficulty, looking backwards is logical to inform a future solution.
Australian cricket has a problem. A Test side that keeps collapsing, keeps losing. Five times on the spin at time of writing, crashing from the top of the ICC rankings to their lowest ebb in three decades. History is naturally mined in the urgency to seek repair.
This has its risks, too. Instead of being a filter for what to avoid, history can become a template to be mindlessly followed. The political discourse of the day refers to ‘post-truth’ as a new concept, but really history has always been subjective, a range of ideas and delusions that are products of time and circumstances. The story of Australian cricket is as constructed and contested as any that spans centuries.
The novelist L.P. Hartley famously wrote that “The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there.” Whether you treat history as reality or mythology, it remains unreachable. We live somewhere different now. And we owe it to this generation of players not to demand that every outing for their country becomes a tired attempt to keep up with an expired model of Australiana. A new method of inclusivity, rather than a reflex lurch towards an imagined legacy, might be the true way to make something great again. If we try it, we might just be surprised.
