Aussies Are Playing Their Trump Card In Ashes Year!

Adam Collins finds political and personal subtexts in Australia’s incredible destruction of India in the first Test in Pune.

- Adam Collins

It was a rough few days Hobart.First, Donald Trump got himself elected as the most powerful human on the planet. Then I had a tantrum, resulting in my girlfriend breaking up with me on the other side of the world. Then Australia were bowled out for 85.

She said I needed to become more dependable when times were tough. To keep my least constructive impulses in check. To grow and evolve into a more mindful, settled human being. It was confronting and painful, but correct. She invariably is. Annoyingly.

David Warner slashed at Vernon Philander’s fourth delivery of the Test. A ball that could generously be described as a rank loosener. It barely landed on the cut strip it was so inexact. For an opener of any persuasion, it simply had to be let go. Cricket doesn’t get uglier.

Scribe Richard Hinds said that in giving into his own unhealthy compulsion, Warner suffered a “brain eruption” more than an explosion. “If the subsequent batsman had trouble picking up the ball it was not the murky light. It was because the opener’s grey matter was splattered all over the sightscreen,” he wrote.

Warner’s meltdown defined the humiliating debacle.

By any measure, Australian cricket was in a crisis the size of which hadn’t been experienced in living memory. Like me, they also had plenty of that learning and growing to do when they left the island state. Once they stopped the blood from gushing, that is.