Running away
Running away
How do we talk about sporting dominance? What the Australian women’s cricket team, the USWNT and the All Blacks have in common
Welcome to the 26th edition of Plot the Ball for 2023.
If you missed the previous edition, you can read it here:
When we first looked into Australian women’s cricket at Plot the Ball, their national team was on top of the world. That’s no longer so clearly the case — and they’ve fallen into a common cycle of discourse that many once-dominant sports teams are afflicted by.
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How do we talk about sporting dominance? What the Australian women’s cricket team, the USWNT and the All Blacks have in common
If you consume enough sporting media, occasionally the same concept will pop up in different contexts and become lodged in your head.
For me over the last week, it’s been the idea of a team and its ‘aura’.
It’s something which particularly dominant sides are said to possess — and seems to appear almost as often in the negative as the positive.
In the last few days, the All Blacks — New Zealand’s national men’s rugby team — were responsible for a positive instance of the phrase. After an astonishing 96-17 win over Italy1 in their World Cup group stage fixture, one Kiwi journalist asserted that it had “restored” the aura that used to surround the team2.
And negative instances of it have followed around a couple of historically world-beating women’s international teams — in different sports — this year.
A couple of months ago, the US Women’s National Team was said – by a former star player, no less — to have lost their aura during and after their struggles in the FIFA World Cup.
The same narrative is also starting to stick to Australia’s women’s cricketers — particularly in the Twenty20 International format, which until recently they had utterly dominated.
After losing a three-game T20I series against England in July, they were defeated in a match against the West Indies earlier this week — leaving a side which hadn’t suffered a series defeat in the format since November 2017 on the brink3 of losing two in a row.
To be honest, though, it’s not an idea I’m a particular fan of — mainly because it’s a very vague and imprecise way of describing what’s happened in a high-level sporting contest.
Talking about an ‘aura’ being lost by a once-great team doesn’t actually give you any insight into their performance; it simply provides emotional satisfaction to those with a preference for the underdog in general, or an antipathy towards the team it’s used against in particular.
Rather than starting with a vague concept and going to look for subjective examples which confirm it4, why don’t we start with an exploration of what happened on the field — and build an explanation from there?
In the case of the Australian women’s cricket team in T20 Internationals, the first place to look is at their bowling performance.
With the bat, they’ve never scored faster in their history than their last 30-game stretch: they’ve chalked up around 168 runs per 20 overs over this period.
But recently they’ve also started conceding runs to their opponents in the field markedly more quickly — with Monday’s match, where the West Indies successfully chased down a total of 212 in 20 overs, their worst ever bowling performance in the format by some distance5.
In 12 months, the average number of runs they concede — on a 30-game rolling basis — has risen from 129 per 20 overs to over 140.
What, then, will Australia do in order to prevent teams scoring as quickly against them going forward?
That would be how I would frame questions about the team’s future — and I think it’s a framing that’s more likely to lead to substantive, interesting answers than inquiries about fear, belief and auras of invincibility.
But, then again, part of following sport is learning that not every fan or observer wants substantive answers in response to such changes in fortune — and coming to respect that difference, up to a point6.
In a piece for The Athletic prior to the men’s football World Cup last year, Man City assistant coach Juanma Lillo captured it better than I ever could:
You can find the code for this piece on GitHub here
Astonishing in the sense that — during this year’s men’s Six Nations tournament — Italy’s aggregate points difference over five games was -60; New Zealand blew that out of the water in 80 minutes, winning by 79 points.
With British and Irish rugby having strengthened considerably — and the current iteration of the French national team proving to be a good one — the All Blacks have had, by their standards, a below-average recent stretch.
They play the series decider against the West Indies tomorrow.
In the case of the ‘aura’ conversation, these examples often take the form of utterly straightforward statements by opponents about having ‘belief’, putting the once-great team under ‘pressure’ and their players ‘having weaknesses’ — as if all professional athletes don’t have weaknesses, and references to self-belief and putting opponents under pressure aren’t made in every context.
Before this game, the highest total they’d ever conceded in an innings in T20Is was 187.
After all, it’s those followers — rather than the much smaller number of more analytically-minded ones — who ultimately sustain the ecosystem of professional sport at its current economic scale.