John Passant, socialist, reviews events ahead of the final day in the Second Test: There are decades, said Lenin, when nothing happens; and [then] there are weeks when decades happen. Cricket can be a bit like that. Sunday was one of those days. Pakistan rolled Australia for a meagre 127 runs. Like the Taliban in Afghanistan, Pakistan humbled a great cricket power that day. It doesn’t mean they’ll win the war but it places them in a position to do so.
Like the Taliban? The gay-murdering, woman-hating, progress-loathing, suicide-bombing, random-killing Taliban? Do please continue, Mr Strange Person: Sometimes real leadership means taking decisions that are outside the expected. Ponting won the toss in Sydney and elected to bat. This is the orthodoxy. An arithmetic thinker will tell us that no one sent in at Sydney has won there in the past 17 years. And the last time Ponting sent someone in — in England — Australia lost the Ashes. But this is conservative thinking. What has been will always be. It doesn’t take account of the particular weather conditions at the time, the relative strengths of the two teams, the state of the pitch. It substitutes concrete thinking with abstractions based on straight line analysis. It also ignores the similarities of history. In 1977 Imran Khan destroyed Australia on a green top in Sydney like the one on Sunday. As French revolutionary Georges Danton said: “Pour les vaincre, messieurs, il nous faut de l’audace, encore de l’audace, et toujours de l’audace ...” To defeat them, gentlemen, we need audacity, still more audacity, and audacity forever … And, I would add, the balance of the forces at hand. It is a lesson Ponting and politicians could learn.
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