Opinion
The cricket world keeps expecting Australia’s Test team to act their age, and the players keep saying: “Not yet.”
Mitchell Starc’s hairline is the only part of him that looks as old as 36. Patrick Cummins and Josh Hazlewood, injury-free in Durban, bowled with the pace and freshness of men in their early 20s – or better, in their case, given how much of their early 20s they spent rehabbing.
Steve Smith, at 37, may refine his particular personal routines and conclude his restless search for perfection, but only in the distant future.
Young Matt Renshaw, a stripling of 30, saved the day at Kingsmead; a potential 10-year career lies ahead.
History says a team can’t thrive when none of its personnel is younger than 30 – unprecedented – or when its average age, 34.59, is higher than most of its batting averages.
The years overhaul all of us; history needs to be the final winner. But those of us who thought this team would have been timed out by now have been proven wrong.
There may be XI portraits of Dorian Gray in their attics. Or Test cricket’s 150 years might tell a slightly different story about age.
The oldest Test cricket teams were anomalies after the First World War. Australia’s oldest by average age (35.9) was a group who had lost eight years of Test cricket to the conflict, and were compensated with extended tenures in the 1920s.
Their batting leaders were Charlie Macartney (40), Warren Bardsley (43) and captain Herbie Collins (38). Leg-spinner Arthur Mailey, at 40, would have made Nathan Lyon (38) look young. This was also in a time of faster ageing and shorter life expectancies.
Test cricket’s only older teams were their opponents, the England teams of the 1920s spearheaded by Jack Hobbs, who had played his first Test match in 1908 and scored half of his 199 first-class centuries when he was past 40. He still holds the record as the oldest scorer of a Test century: he was 46. Smith would have to go for another decade to match him.
Those post-war teams were outliers. If we want the common thread between the past and today, we have to look at the reasons for careers ending (or not ending), and here is where we find a basic explanation.
Before WWI, it was normal for Test cricketers to play into their late 30s and beyond.
W.G. Grace finally stood down as England captain in 1899 when he couldn’t bend down to field. He was 50. Syd Gregory captained Australia at 42, Jack Blackham at 40. Fred Spofforth, though he played his last Test match at 33, volunteered to come back for Australia a decade later, when he was representing Derbyshire (Australia politely declined). Pre-war English greats Charles Fry and William Gunn played Test cricket past 40. James Southerton made his debut aged 49, a record that remains.
There was one good reason cricketers of that era played to such an advanced age. In real terms, adjusted for general inflation and relevant things like property prices, Test cricketers before the First World War earned more money than any generation, including the present one.
The Australian players owned the first tours of England. They were shareholders in lucrative ventures which netted them enough money to come home and buy two houses each in the eastern suburbs of Sydney or Melbourne.
In real terms, Grace is still cricket’s highest-paid performer, though he was, technically, an “amateur”.
Test cricket made some of its participants rich. Administrators, jealous of this wealth, brought about a series of bust-ups, breaking player power in Australia in 1912.
From then until the Packer revolution in 1977, Test cricketers’ income rolled downhill. Not coincidentally, cricketers retired younger. To raise families, they had to chase real jobs. Only the very cream of the crop, like Don Bradman with sizeable personal endorsements, or superstars like Garry Sobers and Vivian Richards who could play year-round professional cricket for English counties, lasted into their 40s. For the great majority, Test cricket couldn’t pay the bills. The retirement age reflected this.
In real terms, Test cricketers before the First World War earned more money than any generation, including the present one.
After World Series Cricket, professionalism brought an improvement in income, but it wasn’t until the advent of the Indian Premier League in 2008 that cricketers could again approach the earnings of their pre-1914 ancestors.
So money, which has flooded back towards individual cricketers since the foundation of the IPL, may not be the root of all evil. Money has always been the prime driver of how long top cricket careers can last. Combined with modern sports medicine and careful management of workloads (cricketers of bygone eras were worked literally into the ground), money can prolong careers.
As cricketers’ incomes continue to rise, we will have to change our ideas on what we think is old.
This Australian team has been given a grace period by the same economic forces that had Grace dominating into his sixth decade. The higher the pay, the greater the will and the resource to defy the years.
The cliff will come for these Australians, not so much because they are old as that their ages are so close together. The risk is that they’ll all pack it in at once.
The selectors’ claim to be “future-proofing” Australian Test cricket is still, to put it mildly, questionable.
Next year, if they stick together for the Ashes, Cummins’s team will become the oldest Australian Test XI in history. They will pass Collins’s team of 1926, who went to England and lost the Ashes for the first time in more than a decade.
History isn’t always a precise guide, but it tends to have the last word.
The Long Game: The Matches that Defined 150 Years of Test Cricket, by Malcolm Knox, is published by Pan Macmillan next month.
