Curiouser and Curiouser

Curiouser and curiouser. South Africa thumped Australia in their own backyard. Twice. Okay, I get that, the Aussies have been deposed, bereft of their superstars, washed-up and entering a long period of rehab. All hail Graeme Smith, Micky Arthur’s a genius etc. Then Australia win in Sydney. Hmm. Well the Saffers were out partying all week, they’ve got planes to catch and Graeme hurt his hand. Consolation win, nothing more.

A month later, same teams, different venue, different result. Australia crush South Africa. Then they do it again. Now I really don’t understand. Obviously, the previous series was a blip. South Africa had their moment, like England in 2005 and that was it. The real story is of the resilience of Australian cricket, how those player cloning facilities in the outback are still functioning, how they learned the lessons, made their plans and came back fighting and how another decade of baggy green whuppings awaits us all.

Now Cape Town. Australia skittled out and South Africa, with new openers, a stand-in captain and an air of pessimism, somehow contrive to grind Johnson and his cohorts into the dust as though we were back at Perth or the MCG. I just don’t get it.

No doubt some of you will suggest, Mark Nicholas style, that this is the wonder of cricket. It is so unpredictable. It’s a funny old game. Isn’t it marvellous? Well, yes it is, from a spectator’s perspective. I’ve always preferred to watch two well-matched but ordinary competitors scrap for victory than a well oiled machine rolling over feeble opponents.

But the human brain also strives for patterns, for frames of reference. And that is my problem. I can’t work out if what we’ve been glued to for the last three months is two ordinary teams taking it in turns to beat one another up, or two fantastic sides engaged in a titanic struggle for world supremacy.

You see in cricket there is no form book. There is Wisden, of course, an entire universe encapsulated in the shape of a yellow brick. But the good editors of that august publication do not entangle themselves in the sordid business of telling you which team is best. In despair I turn to the ICC rankings. They tell me Australia are best, by a small distance from South Africa. I can live with that. Problem is they also tell me that both teams are better than India, by a slightly smaller distance, which I couldn’t even live next door to.

Eureka! The answer. It cannot be that South Africa, Australia and India are all fantastic. That would be a cricketing golden age and I refuse to accept that we have done enough to deserve one of those. Therefore, they must all be equally ordinary. Apart from India.

So there you have it. The ICC rankings are wrong, India are best and the rest are following them in ragged bunch, with England wheezing along in the rear and hoping that ominous pounding sound they can hear is the beat emanating from their I-Pods and not Bangladesh about to overtake them.