Word: crickets
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...Australians in a riveting series last year. And just in case it needs saying, England deserved to win. In some ways the 2-1 result flattered Australia, who at times resembled a weary pug in the ring with a killer. But while succession works simply in boxing, in cricket it's more complicated. Generally, a country that has ruled for a long time won't abdicate on the basis of a single defeat. It will maintain the kingly mannerisms until it loses again. So it is with the Australians on the eve of the rematch, a five-Test series beginning...
...celebrated teammates are in the twilight of their careers. The question is not whether Australia are nearing a fall but how bad it will be. "We won't ever be poor, but we will be normal," says former vice-captain Ian Healy. "We'll have to play really tough cricket to win games and save games." When Australia lose their great bowlers Glenn McGrath and Shane Warne, he adds, "opponents aren't going to be anywhere near as scared of playing Australia as they...
...Rivals have had good reason to be intimidated. While historians consider the present run to be the fifth golden era of Australian cricket, there's been nothing to match it for duration or the number of exceptional players it's spawned. Over this period greatness (or something close to it) has come in pairs; it has arisen in those apparently untouched and been replicated as if by decree. The country had not one Waugh but two?Steve the hardhead, who carved out cricketing immortality from the granite of his temperament, and Mark the aesthete, whose fluid strokes caused ancients...
...modern players' high representation on these lists is due partly to their tendency to play for longer than their predecessors did. Even so, no one questions the extraordinarily high caliber of recent Australian sides, which have recharged as well as dominated the Test scene. As he settled into international cricket in the early '90s, Warne discredited the prevailing view that the only way to rout batting line-ups was to bowl fast at them. With his growing mastery of what had been the dying art of leg-spin, he reminded us that batsmen could be killed softly with archaic weapons...
...From the early 1990s, Australia's batsmen realized that many of the fast-scoring techniques used in one-day cricket could be applied to Tests, and as a group routinely began to amass 350-plus runs a day. Other countries copied them, to the point where the drawn match?the somnolent one, anyway, that blight on the game?has all but vanished. As Australia rose, then soared, so did the notion that Test teams should have a coach to complement the captain in finetuning their performance. Between 1986 and '96, Bob Simpson was crucial in taking Australia from the bottom...