THE capital of Northern Territory is called Darwin because John Clements Wickham, the captain of the Beagle – the British ship that turned up at the top bit of Australia in September 1839 – had served as first lieutenant on an earlier voyage of the same vessel.
Also aboard for that trip, which lasted from December 1831 to October 1836, was one Charles Darwin, the naturalist whose research and theories would exert an outsized influence on our understanding of the evolution of humankind.
Doubtless Darwin, if only he had lived to 216, could have given us a detailed theory of the evolution of cricket from the gambling-fuelled mania it was in 19th century England to the global, T20-driven industry it is now. Not that gambling has become extinct in cricket. Quite the contrary. Maybe not a lot has changed.
Once Australia’s men’s T20I series against South Africa starts in Darwin on Sunday, Australians will hope there is change from their team’s five-wicket loss to South Africa in the WTC final at Lord’s in June. Silverware starved South Africans are less ready to let that singular success go, but Shukri Conrad advised them to do exactly that during a press conference on Friday.
“I don’t think the WTC will have much to do with [the T20I series],” Conrad said. “Whether it does for them, I can’t answer to that. But we’ve moved on.”
And so should all concerned. Conrad’s team will play 20 T20Is before the format’s World Cup in Sri Lanka and India in February and March, when all thoughts of what happened at Lord’s in June will be long gone. The Australians, who have won six ODI World Cups and one in the T20 format, are significantly more used to winning trophies than their opponents.
That they have moved on was apparent from their 5-0 thumping of West Indies in a T20I rubber in the Caribbean in June and July. Tim David hammered six fours and 11 sixes in his 37-ball 102 not out in the third match at Basseterre in St Kitts – the tiny ground where Herschelle Gibbs launched Dutch leg spinner Daan van Bunge for six sixes in an over during the 2007 World Cup.
South Africa are fresh from a T20I tri-series in Harare where they lost all three games they played against New Zealand. A mitigating factor is that they were without Ryan Rickelton, Aiden Markram, Tristan Stubbs, David Miller, Keshav Maharaj, Marco Jansen and Kagiso Rabada. Of those players, only Miller, Maharaj and Jansen are not involved this time.
What might Darwin – the scientist, not the place – have made of all that? Perhaps more than we might think. In The Voyage of the Beagle, Darwin wrote of what he saw after the ship docked in New Zealand in late 1835: “Several young [Maori] men redeemed by the missionaries from slavery were employed on the farm. In the evening I saw a party of them [playing] cricket.”
Where: Marrara Oval, Darwin
What to expect: Who can say? Sunday’s game will be the first senior T20I staged at this ground. The pitch is a drop-in, which adds to the mystery. What we can say with something like certainty is that the weather shouldn’t interrupt play: the forecast is for clear skies and a high of 32 degrees Celsius