Word: testing
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...Inspired by his fellow batsmen, Justin Langer transformed from a grafter into an opener who scored as freely as his bludgeoning partner Matthew Hayden. When selectors ended Healy's Test career in 1999, Australians lost a record-breaking wicketkeeper who more than occasionally saved his side with his bat. His replacement, Adam Gilchrist, proved to be an improvement on greatness?an almost equally accomplished gloveman who became, if not his country's finest batsman, certainly its cleanest and most dashing hitter. Of all examples of Australian extravagance this past decade, none has been more demoralizing for opponents than the sight...
...Australian Test wicket-takers of all time, four have played in the period since the Caribbean triumph of 1995, with Brett Lee poised to join Warne, McGrath, Craig McDermott and Jason Gillespie on the list. At times, fans have been too spoiled to appreciate how good they've had it. Most Australians would choose Dennis Lillee/Jeff Thomson as the country's best postwar pace pairing. And for speed, menace and charisma, they were. But in tandem, Lillee and Thomson took 148 wickets; McGrath and Gillespie have 376. As the highest wicket-taker in Test history, Warne's clippings would fill...
...Hayden nearing 60,000 runs. True, modern players' high representation on these lists is due partly to their tendency to play for longer than their predecessors did. Even so, no one questions the extraordinarily high caliber of recent Australian sides, which have recharged as well as dominated the Test scene. As he settled into international cricket in the early '90s, Warne discredited the prevailing view that the only way to rout batting line-ups was to bowl fast at them. With his growing mastery of what had been the dying art of leg-spin, he reminded us that batsmen could...
...From the early 1990s, Australia's batsmen realized that many of the fast-scoring techniques used in one-day cricket could be applied to Tests, and as a group routinely began to amass 350-plus runs a day. Other countries copied them, to the point where the drawn match?the somnolent one, anyway, that blight on the game?has all but vanished. As Australia rose, then soared, so did the notion that Test teams should have a coach to complement the captain in finetuning their performance. Between 1986 and '96, Bob Simpson was crucial in taking Australia from the bottom...
...When England's Andrew Flintoff broke away from celebrations to console Brett Lee in the aftermath of last year's thrilling Second Test at Edgbaston, his gesture spoke as eloquently about Australia's moral limitations as it did of his own decency. Had the roles been reversed, would any of Ponting's men have done the same? In exchanges unseen or forgotten, Australian players since 1995 may have performed comparable acts. But the fact that Flintoff's gesture received so much attention suggests cricket fans are more familiar with displays of Australian triumphalism...