Wanderers show Aussie cricketers how to win away from home

MIDDLE Eastern contrasts: Western Sydney Wanderers show how to win away from home while Australia’s Test cricket team is humiliated in the desert.

Western Sydney Wanderers goalkeeper Ante Covic (C) saves the ball during in the second leg of the 2014 AFC Champions League football final against Saudi Arabia's Al Hilal at King Fahad stadium in Riyadh, on November 1, 2014. AFP PHOTO/ FAYEZ NURELDINE

THE contrast was staggering.

On a day when the Western Sydney Wanderers rewrote the handbook in how to win away from home, Australia’s Test cricket team was given the most brutal mugging in Test history.

One team has mastered the art of playing tough off shore, the other is still searching for clues.

Australia are being slaughtered in its series against Pakistan like few Australian cricket teams have ever been and Mishbah-ul-Haq’s world record quick century last night was only a small part of the story.

The Western Sydney Wanderers stunning Asian Champions League triumph in far off Riyadh featured two trips to each of China, Japan and South Korea and some devilishly uncomfortable experiences such as rival fans trying to slow down the team bus in China and disrupting the players sleep at team hotels.

Western Sydney Wanderers goalkeeper Ante Covic starred in the Asian Champions League win.

But they got there in the end because they were a group prepared to scrap, claw and scramble until they became an almost unstoppable force even though they had every right to be exposed as innocents abroad. It’s rousing stuff and one of the greatest Australian sports stories in many years.

But the Australian cricket team, by contrast, spent most of their two Test tour of Dubai and Abu Dhabi being beaten up like park cricketers playing against the big boys.

The temptation is to say “it’s just tougher in that part of the world’’ but that’s not the way the Wanderers look at it.

Of course it can be argued that soccer teams are not as influenced by pitch conditions as a cricket team but Australia knew what was coming.

Michael Clarke cannot stop the Pakistan humiliation.

Desert cricket is desert cricket. The challenges are the same as they were a decade ago and will be in 10 years from now.

The three certainties of this trip were that the series was likely to rest on who could best play and bowl spin and which set of fast bowlers could deliver the highest quality reverse swing. It’s a 3-0 slam dunk to Pakistan.

Where Matthew Hayden spent eight years refining three versions of the sweep shot that worked so well for him during his epic 2001 tour of India, many Australian batsman don’t even play the shot which gave Hayden 60 per cent of his 2001 runs. The batting roads which spinner Nathan Lyon toiled so unsuccessfully on seemed to sprout potholes when the Pakistani slow men had their turn.

Reverse swing has been the big surprise. The vicious Imran Khan inswinger that bowled Michael Clarke on Saturday would have been happily claimed by another Imran Khan — the legend — 30 years ago.

Michael Clarke is bowled by Imran Khan of Pakistan.

In the old days Australian teams landing in India and Pakistan felt intimidated and vulnerable the instant the wheels of their plane touched down — with good reason.

For a start, home town umpires often made their life a nightmare. Pakistan batting great Javed Miandad even used to torment bowlers after lbw decisions against him were turned down by local umpires, offering lines like “you can appeal as much as you like, it won’t make any difference”.

Modern players now luxuriate in the presence of neutral umpires and the DRS.

You could sort of understand Australia’s bowlers complaining of rehydration problems on Allan Border’s first tour of India in 1978 when there was no bottled water and the bowlers would drink soft drink after stumps.

Some hotels back then would have got the thumbs down from a Swedish backpacker — now they are luxury.

Pakistan have played and planned brilliantly, leaving just one question lingering — how on Earth were they beaten by Zimbabwe early last summer?

Originally published as Wanderers show Aussie cricketers how to win away from home