Did Australia crack under unexpected pressure at the Twenty20 World Cup?
Australia’s No. 1 Twenty20 bowler Adam Zampa has made a frank admission about the failed World Cup campaign that strongly suggests they did.
In addition to being a very fine wrist spin bowler and a stalwart of the white ball team over the past decade, 33-year-old Zampa is a straight talker.
Australia’s Adam Zampa reacts.Credit: AP
Following a lopsided final victory over Oman that enhanced the sense of opportunities missed, Zampa effectively admitted that a long run of bilateral wins over the past 12 months had not stood up under the heat of tournament play. He didn’t use the word “choke”, but went close.
“I think looking back, it’s probably just under pressure,” Zampa said. “We’ve been able to do it in bilateral series. You look back six months ago to the West Indies, we won 5-0 and we played unbelievable cricket. The guys hit the ball out of the park.
“You can look back and say there was probably hardly any pressure compared to what we can’t come up with in a World Cup and once that was on the line we weren’t able to do it unfortunately so it’s really disappointing.”
One of the justifications offered by the national selectors for the squad and teams picked in the World Cup was that aforementioned run of strong results. After missing the semi-finals of the 2024 event in the Caribbean, Australia thrashed Scotland, tied with England, swept Pakistan at home and West Indies away, beat South Africa and New Zealand and fell narrowly short of India.
But Zampa’s comments open the question of how relevant those results actually were. Certainly, they were nothing compared to the long run of must-win matches that fronted Zimbabwe to qualify for the event. And it is that game where Australia’s Cup went awry.
Zampa also noted how the Australian white ball team’s games are increasingly played off-Broadway, whether home games in the Top End out of season, or away fixtures often played in the dead of night. Add the fact that Amazon Prime holds broadcast rights for World Cups until the end of the current cycle in 2027, and “seeing the white ball fly” is nowhere near as big a spectator deal in Australia as it used to be.
“I think the Australian public struggle with the fact that they don’t get to see much of the white-ball cricket we play,” Zampa said of formats that have been paywalled in Australia since 2018. “We play like three to six games in the summer.
Adam Zampa in flight.Credit: Getty Images
“We do a lot of our work away from Australian time, so they don’t get to see the way that we kind of play and have prepared for these World Cups.
“And we’ve done some – played a lot of really good cricket up until now so it’s yeah it’s disappointing that it’s ended like this, but I think that the work and the time is as much effort as the other formats.”
Among the players who struggled most for Australia were multi-format members of the team, who had recently gone through the rigours of a draining Ashes bout. England were comfortably beaten at home in the Test format, but not without some battles along the way.
Neither of Cameron Green or Josh Inglis were able to get a score in any of the three games that led to elimination before the fourth, while Travis Head’s 50 against Sri Lanka was not followed up by the rest of the order.
Zampa, though, backed up the assertion of head coach Andrew McDonald that the World Cup failure did not come through a lack of attention to detail or planning.
“It’s totally false, yeah,” Zampa said. “The time that the coaches and the staff put into how we’re going to play our T20 cricket and who’s going to play each role and our preparation is, I think they’d probably put as much time into that than they would Test cricket. I think, potentially even more.
“I don’t know, but potentially even more time because T20 cricket, one-day cricket, everyone’s a lot tighter in the world, whereas Test cricket, Australia and top two or three teams are quite dominant, so I don’t think the work is needed as much, whereas with this format in particular, it’s a lot tighter. So the work is definitely there.”
The work was there, but not the performance. That’s a worry for Zampa and Australia.
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Disclaimer : This story is auto aggregated by a computer programme and has not been created or edited by DOWNTHENEWS. Publisher: www.smh.com.au
