Saturday 15 June 2013
I was going to leave this alone, but a day’s road trip to Townsville gave plenty of time to ponder the issues, a FaceBook tag from Angry provided the excuse and the story continues to unfold, leaving plenty of entrails to sift through.
A couple of points, however, before we move on to the implications of Mr Warner’s latest indiscretion.
The first of them is the old saw that a champion team will always beat a team of champions. Call it Point One, if you like.
Point Two comes with my perception of the Australian cricket team’s job description, The job, as far as I can see, is to ensure that the Australian team sits as close as possible to #1 in each of the three forms of the game.
Point Three is my long-standing belief that anything less than a two, three, four or five-nil whitewash in a two, three, four or five Test series means there are probably things that could have been done or managed better.
So, in a ten Test Double Ashes series unless there’s a score line that reads 10-nil in our favour we’re looking at a performance that could have been better. A nine-nil or eight-nil scoreline without a ball being bowled in the other two Tests would probably rate as well, but there’s still the possibility that something could have been done better.
Finally, Point Four, straight from my Sports Psychology bible: Pressure is something that you put on yourself.
In the light of those four points, and in response to Angry’s very thoughtful act in directing my attention here, my short response is that Warner should have been on the next plane home. A phone call from the manager of three of the four NQ Primary Schools teams I coached produced an Of course he should in response to a statement of that opinion.
By the way, I read that article before the road trip, and it had a fair bearing on the conclusions I drew from the cogitations.
When Jarrod Kimber wrote: Warner's punch isn't a one off for him, and many young Aussie players are doing things that are either blatantly stupid, or amazingly unprofessional way too often over the last couple of years, I couldn’t agree more.
One also notes that the article, apart from David Warner, also cites incidents involving Mitchell Marsh, Luke Pomersbach, Daniel Christian, and Chris Lynn and, of course, the Homework Quartet (Shane Watson, Mitchell Johnson, James Pattinson and Usman Khawaja) and claims the Homework business followed on from the World Twenty20, where a player was heard undermining the captain George Bailey to opposition players.
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