India 'Gate Crash' WTC final

Bit of click-baity headline but no harm intended...

Watching training sessions can be a dull business. Those with short attention spans rely on others with keener eyes to spot the relevant details. But before a Test match as important as this one, even those of us with ADD manage to gather a couple of interesting nuggets.

Great English fast bowler, Stuart Broad, was only supposed to spend an hour with the Proteas squad at nets on Sunday but there he was again on Monday afternoon – wearing team kit – and chatting to 11 of the squad sitting around him in a circle on the hallowed outfield.

Three others were receiving slip catching practise which is pretty much always a sign that they are certain starters in the XI. David Bedingham, Aiden Markram and Tristan Stubbs were in the cordon. Marco Jansen is the preferred gully. The player throwing balls is almost always the most likely non-starter – it was Tony de Zorzi.

There is a bee in the Australian team’s bonnet. Something has got their goat, and that something is the Indian cricket team despite having nothing to do with the World Test Championship final.

Australia’s media contingent has been pared down to its bare minimum for the WTC final in London this week – it is the height of the Aussie Rules season at home and the fight for eyeballs is intense - but that hasn’t stopped the few hardy specialists in London from unearthing some cracking ‘yarns’. Afterall, they’re not (only) here to jog around Regents Park and drink Cappuccinos.

Up until Sunday Australia’s preparation for the ‘Ultimate Test’ took place in Beaconsfield, a 90-minute round trip from the team hotel in London. It was not a venue of the Australians choosing. Indeed, they would have much preferred to use the facilities at Lord’s.

“Shame we couldn’t have been here yesterday,” one of the players said to a member of the Lord’s security team on Sunday. “Yes,” she replied, “it would have been all yours if India hadn’t been here training.”

It’s just glorious. The Indian team were booked in for training at ‘Head Quarters’ while the Australian team were told that the venue was “unavailable due to a previous booking.” The first of India’s five Tests against England this summer is at Headingly in Leeds on June 20. Their Test against England at Lord’s isn’t until the middle of July.

It’s time to stop moaning and whining about Indian cricket’s (off field) domination of the global game and have a chuckle about it instead. In the days before the “Ultimate Test” – the ICC’s excellent marketing slogan - the venue has been pre-booked for an Indian training session. That’s the way of the world. The biggest, richest and strongest call the shots.

Not that it was bothering the phlegmatic Steve Smith who was at his smiling, shoulder-shrugging best on Monday. There is a lot of nonsense spoken about many things in this charming game – batting positions is a particularly irritating one. With Marnus Labuschagne likely to move up to open from number three and Smith, having briefly opened, returning to number, did he think it made a significant difference?

“Not particularly, there’s no real difference – even when I was opening to number four either, it was the same sort of thing, it’s just a position. You could be facing the brand new ball batting at four. You could lose two wickets in the first over…”. He’s a good man, Smith, often unfairly maligned. Sandpapergate notwithstanding.

With 48 hours to go Lord’s was stocking up, literally. It remains the only international cricket venue in the world where spectators can take their own beer and wine – even in glass bottles, and the English crowds don’t mind a tipple. But given that a huge percentage of the crowd this time will be Australians or South Africans it looked like the hosts were banking on a simple principle: ‘If they’re prepared to pay for air-tickets and pay London hotel prices they’re not going to stop at paying for our extortionate drinks.’

For the many journalists in Conrad’s pre-match press conference who hadn’t encountered him before, there were appreciative nods and chuckles at his frankness. Asked about his reaction to criticism of South Africa’s ‘easy’ route to the final, he bristled: “I think enough's been spoken about that. I'm tired of speaking about it, to be honest. We're here now and that's all that matters.

“We get a chance to walk away as the World Test champions, playing Australia. It doesn't get any bigger than that. So, what's gone before counts for absolutely nothing at the minute.

“And we'll be quietly confident going into this game that we can pull one over them. We're a confident bunch. We play well as a unit. And if there are any vulnerabilities amongst them, I'm sure we'll be able to exploit that.”