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As Australia crashed out of the Champions Trophy in the group stage, the English crowd at Edgbaston jeered and cheered. But losing is not cause for humiliation.
If embarrassment should be felt at the timing and manner of the exit, it should be apportioned to a few cricketing acronyms: CA, the ECB, and the ICC.
Cricket Australia, or at least its executive staff at the pointiest end, would probably have been quietly pleased to see their national team knocked out.
This is an extraordinary sentence to write, and would doubtless be indignantly rejected by CA boss James Sutherland and his board members.
But it's pretty simple arithmetic. Had Australia's players won a global tournament and stood up on a podium being showered in glitter on the evening of June 18, it would have made Cricket Australia look especially bad when it sacks all those players on the evening of June 30.
That's the likely outcome when player contracts expire at the end of this month. Cricket Australia has declared it will leave all international and most domestic players out of work, after they refused to accept proposed changes in the way they are paid and employed.
Now that the national team has made a Champions Trophy exit, one with few bangs and a handful of whimpers at 3:00am on Sunday (Jolimont time), the bosses at least dodge the most jarring possible image in the PR battle.
Whatever the right or wrong of CA's push to change player payments, the way the board has gone about its campaign has been disingenuous and damaging.
Back in December 2016, CA withdrew from negotiations with the players' union after the Australian Cricketers Association publicised controversial clauses in contracts for female players.
At the time, CA announced that it would "not take part in a process which seeks to draw its players into a public dispute.
"Players deserve the opportunity to focus on the game, rather than being distracted by a negotiation that should be conducted in a professional and confidential manner... [that] cannot be assured if discussions continue under current arrangements with the ACA."
Fast forward six months, and just a couple of days before the elimination game at Edgbaston, CA publicly released a PR video and associated documents. The video featured executive general manager Kevin Roberts making arguments about why the player payment structure should be changed.
It wasn't sent to players, but was about them and effectively addressed to them. Whether the point was to win over players or public support was unclear, but either way it was provocative.
David Warner was unequivocal in his disapproval.
"We're here to win. If CA were trying to help us win, I don't think they'd be trying to release videos like that. We've got an important game coming up this week. That's our main focus," he said.
However well paid players may be, the uncertainty and notion of impending unemployment can't help but be a distraction. It's impossible to draw definite links, but Australia's scratchy batting performance could well have been affected.
The other factor, of course, was match rhythm. While Australia's bowlers got through 90.3 of a possible 100 overs in their first two games, rain ensured that the batsmen got 25 of 100.
Warner, Aaron Finch and Steve Smith had faced 60, 45 and 31 balls respectively before their third game. Moises Henriques was out from 14 balls against New Zealand. No-one batting below number four had faced a single delivery.
After 27 overs against England, Australia was 2 for 160, with those top three batsmen having perfectly placed the side to launch beyond 300. Instead, oxidation took over the middle and lower order in the face of good bowling.
Only Travis Head clicked, as Australia added 117 from the last 23 overs, limping to the end nine down.
This is where the other sets of acronyms come in: the England (and Wales) Cricket Board, and the International Cricket Council. When these eminent bodies got together to discuss staging this tournament, they decided to run it in England in the first half of June.
The tournament final will be held before the solstice. In seasonal terms this means it won't even be summer yet. That time of year in England, rain is always going to be a factor.
This doesn't mean you ban cricket in England. Rain has always been part of cricketing life here. It does mean, in a quick knockout tournament, you need to give yourself the best possible chance to play out matches.
Against New Zealand, Australia was listed to play a day game. This meant play was abandoned at 6:28pm. An hour later, the rain had cleared, the sky was bright, and the covers were being removed. The floodlights were already on.
There was no practical reason why play couldn't have continued, except for regulations that say it can't.
Against Bangladesh in London, the opposite problem unfolded. Unfathomably, in a tournament with 14 daytime games, the schedulers had added two day-nighters.
One on a Monday. One a Wednesday. The other was between Pakistan and South Africa. Neither attracted crowds any larger than usual. Both were played on days with clear mornings, and both ended early on rainy evenings.
It's the lack of flexibility and foresight that is frustrating, when surely every opportunity should be given to games to beat the weather that could so probably frustrate them.
People have argued that it didn't matter; that without rain Australia would have won against Bangladesh, lost to New Zealand, and ended up with the same number of points. But Australia's 3 for 45 chasing 292 against New Zealand was exactly the sort of situation that England recovered from to beat Australia, and that Bangladesh recovered from the day before to beat New Zealand.
Even if Australia had lost, at least its batting line-up would have had an innings on the Edgbaston wicket, which could have been invaluable on return to the venue. Sealing the likely win over Bangladesh could have been less important than the extra batting banked in the modest chase.
Smith said in his post-match interviews that his players make no excuses. Some readers will interpret this column as doing exactly that.
Others may take the more complex view: that rather than aiming or shifting blame, it's about acknowledging administrative errors that interfere with the game being played in the best, most effective, entertaining, fair, and competitive way.
Those are the acknowledgements that help drive improvement, just as players endlessly seek to do on the field. Off the field, we can only hope that July's weather brightens in tandem with CA's bargaining strategy, as Australian cricket turns next towards the Women's World Cup.
Topics: cricket, sport, england, australia
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