Yes it has finally happened. The Aussie Empire, built over 13 years of sheer class, brutality, a loud mouth, uncouth arrogance and physical and mental disintegration of the opponent, has collapsed like a pack of cards, washed away like the sands on the shore, blown away like a leaf in a gale and burgeoned to death like an elephant crushing an ant.
It's not that it's been done. It's the way in which it has been done. Beaten 2-1 in a Test Series that could have been 2-0 if not for severe injuries to the visitors' captain, and 4-1 in the ODIs. And in Australia. Inside the lion's own den.
The Deliverers are South Africa, once a nation hounded into cricketing wilderness due to an inhuman regime of apartheid; an exile that truncated the careers of some of the would-have-been greatest players in cricketing history: Graeme Pollock, Barry Richards and some more. It's a great moment for the rainbow nation, and even more heartening is to see Makhaya Ntini and Graeme Smith embrace, Hashim Amla and AB De Villiers do likewise, for it shows that the wounds caused by apartheid are healing, that they are not incurable, that AIDS, poverty and economic crises cannot keep the determined ones down. It holds the promise of a wonderful world, amidst the atrocities of fundamentalists, economic downturns and global warming. It gives us all HOPE.
Now back to Australia. What a team they were. And what a team they have become. When this Colossus ran roughshod over the cricketing world, nobody else came within a whisker of eternal glory. The massacres were unparalled, and the few indiscreet times became great epics, so invincible were Australia and so rarely lacklustre. An Australian defeat was a cause for great celebration; today it runs the risk of becoming just another target for another expletive thrown out with glee or indignation, depending upon your loyalties. Not that it hurts us, for with all the class and spectacle that was Australian cricket, it was not loved, nor disliked, but hated. The Aussies never knew how to conduct themselves; they were downright rude, "strutted about like peacocks" as one ex-player himself put it, and never showed any apparent regard for the opposition's calibre. They also talked, before the series, during the series, after the series-they talked a lot and performed a lot. The occasional opposition victories, or near-misses, became the stuff of legend, for sometimes the bloodied, heroic vanquished are greater than the victors. But no reign, and certainly not a scorching, oppressive one, can go on for ever. The Aussies shot themselves in the foot against India in Sydney last year: they cheated to win, they were despicable, unsportsmanlike, unforgiveable. It exposed a baffling desperation, as if they knew Sydney would be their Waterloo. The disintegration started the very next match in Perth, Australia's now-erstwhile strongest bastion, when they lost convincingly and deservedly. And it has continued. The freefall seems so endless that one begins to feel pity for the wreck of a once-great side. The world wanted competition. It got annihilation.
But in many ways that might be a really good thing. What goes up, must come down, and every sunset must give way to a new sunrise. I cannot thank Australia, for their twilight is glowing with bloodstreams of bad legacy, but I can welcome the South Africans and the Indians into the glorious dawn of a new era.
