What’s the world coming to when we feel guilty about mocking the Aussies?

 
p70 cricket main edition 06/06 Australia's Shane Watson looks at the bails as he is bowled by India's Ishant Sharma during a warm up cricket match for the upcoming ICC Champions Trophy between India and Australia at the Cardiff Wales Stadium in Cardiff, Wales, Tuesday, June 4, 2013.
7 June 2013

The land of Australia, as advertised in its national anthem, ‘abounds in Nature’s gifts/ Of beauty rich and rare.’ Yet it would appear that nature’s gifts are starting to abandon their sportsmen.

The cocksure empire of the baggy green and the green-and-gold has been crumbling for a while. There are signs that over the next few months the whole thing is finally going to collapse.

It was 20 years ago this week, on a Friday afternoon at Old Trafford in June 1993, that Shane Warne bowled his first ball in Test cricket in England: the ripper now known as the Ball Of The Century.

That drifting, fizzing leg-break, which bamboozled Mike Gatting as thoroughly as if it had been fired from the bows of a visiting UFO, stood for something unique.

It was a symbol of everything that would make Australia brilliant and unbeatable for more than a decade: an act of audacity, self-confidence and peerless skill, delivered with infuriatingly blokeish insouciance from a podgy, bottle-blond waterhole bum with his shirt unbuttoned and a gold chain around his neck.

This said it all about the Aussies: not just in cricket but in sport at large. They were brash, tough and slightly scary. And they loved to win.

Between 1989 and 2003, Australia won every cricketing Ashes series, home and away. They won two rugby union world cups and five rugby league Ashes series.

At the 2000 Sydney Olympic Games, Australia finished fourth in the medal table, with more than twice as many medals as Great Britain. Even Pat Rafter and Lleyton Hewitt snuck a couple of tennis Grand Slam titles each. It wasn’t exactly Rod Laver and Roy Emerson reincarnate but it was another feather in the old corked hat.

During the last 10 years, however, the Aussies have been waning. Beaten by England in the 2003 Rugby World Cup, they have not been in a final since.

They lost three of the last four Ashes cricket series, were virtually laughed out of the 2012 Olympics and have sunk without trace on the tennis circuit, where their highest-ranked player, Bernard Tomic (below), is struggling at No61 in the world.

The Socceroos, held to draws in their last two competitive matches by Oman and Japan, are still some way from qualifying for the 2014 World Cup. Even in rugby league, the World Cup is presently held by New Zealand — the first time since the 1970s that it has not been in Aussie hands.

Only the golfer Adam Scott, this year’s Masters winner, is bucking the trend. For 10 years or so, this has been quite funny. After all, who does not like to see Biff Tannen crash into the manure truck? But it is getting slightly uncomfortable now.

If anything shows the embarrassing extent of Australia’s fall from grace, it is the 243-run murdering they took in Cardiff from India earlier this week, in a warm-up game for the Champions Trophy.

With serious injury worries dogging skipper Michael Clarke, it would be a surprise if Australia were to successfully defend their title in that one-day tournament; the chances of their Test side winning either of this year’s Ashes series seem even less assured. You would do well to find an Aussie rent-a-quoter backing them to whitewash England now. Even five years ago, these guys were 10-a-penny.

And then there is the Lions tour, where Warren Gatland stands an even chance of coming home with a series win for only the third time since 1974. The Australian team are weakened by injury and will be genuinely vulnerable to the Lions combination of fast, athletic back-row play and a hulking great three-quarter line.

This, of course, is all in the realm of punditry. Perhaps the Lions will lose 3-0 and England’s cricketers 10-0.

But I doubt it. The Aussies are in such a bad way that they are actually being defended in the English press this week, with spats breaking out between journalists over whether it is okay to make jokes about Australia’s supposed lack of culture.

Well, hell’s teeth. When we are reduced to pointing out that our Antipodean cousins may be crap at sport these days but at least Peter Carey wrote Illywhacker, something is seriously wrong.

We are supposed to be whinging Poms, desperately trying to blame the Aussies’ physical superiority on bad luck. Instead, we have started to consider the Aussies a charity case, deserving of our pity, where once we knew only trepidation and fear.

I do not know who should be more concerned: us or them.

Making a Tsonga and dance about Jo

Jo-Wilfried Tsonga’s rampaging win against Roger Federer at Roland Garros this week may just have brought the tournament alive. It is sobering to think that since 2008 only five men outside the ‘big four’ — Tsonga, Robin Soderling, Juan Martin del Potro, Tomas Berdych and Andy Roddick — have contested a Grand Slam Final. Well, either Tsonga or David Ferrer will be there in Paris this year — a happy curiosity, even if the odds of winning the thing will be stacked against them.

On an equal footing ... with just one leg

Those of us who champion equality in every sphere of life were delighted this week to see a video circulating of a massive fight at an amputee football match in Belgium. While we could not understand a dickie bird of the commentary track, there was not much to mistake about a load of one-legged blokes going mental and launching flying kicks at one another. Banal? Maybe. Stupid? Certainly. But also welcome proof that what goes in regular sport goes in disability sport as well. Society is moving forward.

Pull up Sochi over Games pilfering

It is a rather depressing indication of the general level of trust placed in Olympic organisation that the allegations of multi-billion dollar theft from the Sochi Winter Olympics passed with barely a ripple. Russian opposition officials say up to £20billion may have been pilfered in preparations for the Games. But everyone just shrugs: yeah, well, that is just the way of it. Any large public Games will attract shady dealing and scams. But that does not mean we have to accept it as a given.

Gunners risk being shot down again

It felt as though this might be one summer where Arsenal would be untroubled by good players leaving. But both Bacary Sagna and Laurent Koscielny have made distinctly non-committal noises about their futures this week. And while this could just be agent talk to bump up the value of prospective new contracts, the threat behind it is real. For Arsenal to lose Robin van Persie, Cesc Fabregas, Samir Nasri et al was unfortunate. To start shipping the few soldiers they left behind would smack of carelessness bordering on negligence.

Twitter @dgjones

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