There is a very clear line that when the team is weak they need a strong leader who can build the line-up and perform as a team player in the crisis situation every time. But this element is missing in the current line-up of Australia when they faced the defeat against visitors (India) in the second test match of Border-Gavaskar Trophy by 8 wickets. To put things into perspective one has to believe that the Australian team has lost before the start of the final day in a match. Such loss is definitely going to haunt the hosts for the long time when they can easily win the game against the average team India at Melbourne. Was the weak captain or was it a team failure? To be honest, it was everything from the captain like Tim Paine who has failed badly in his strategies and executions to implement any of them rightly during the second test match. Even the last time in 2018-19 when team India has won the series by 2-1 against Tim Paine and co the leading run scorer from Australia was Marcus Harris with 258 runs in the 4 tests which easily gives a brief about Australia line-up who were not near the leading run scorer Pujara with 521 runs. Even that time the players like Steve Smith and David Warner were not part of the Australia team due to a ball-tampering incident. We can say winning and losing is a part of cricket and don’t try to analyse the past performances of Australia team too much – but even there were cases when the strong captain with weak team has made the possible which was impossible. Tim Paine has lost that by 2-1 we can say it was still the early phase of his captaincy stint.
It's been almost two years and captains don’t like to repeat the same mistakes again for no reason or give any chance for criticism. Even if we remove the performances of Pat Cummins and Josh Hazelwood in the second innings of the first test match it was still not clear who will win this test match after the first innings of both teams. I don’t remember if any Australia great captains have ever performed like this before. They are the “predators” from the ages in cricket and the way they have dominated the opposition teams throughout the history in his style make this game of cricket more interesting to watch it out again and again. It is still so vivid in my mind when the team of Ricky Ponting have destroyed the opposition teams in every department if they have failed one department the other department had produced the performance to bring them back into the game. 11 players and 11 were match-winners of Ricky Ponting team and it’s all because of captain like Ricky Ponting with Never-say-die-attitude. If they have failed in one match they return in the most dangerous way before opposition teams were put into the shambles. It is hard to see that the current Australia line-up is almost the opposite of previous eras teams who can't even fight back after winning the first test match on the verge of losing it. The factor like a strong and determined captain is missing in the team because a strong captain knows how to implement the strike bowlers to get wickets and perform as a team player in a Crisis situation with the average team. The second test match at Melbourne was of Australia completely but they have lost the test match out of nowhere from team India. If still Australia goes with the captaincy stint to Tim Paine it would be very unfair to players like Steve Smith who has played 34 tests as a captain and scored 3659 runs at an average of 70.36 better than Australia can keep him on the bench and experiment with other players in the middle order. A player like Steve Smith not comes in every decade which even reckons by Adam Gilchrist who has said –
''I see no reason why someone shouldn’t have a second chance and if part of that is the captaincy for Steve Smith, if he’s the right guy and the most obvious candidate, I can’t see a reason why he shouldn’t be allowed to do it. If Cricket Australia and the selectors feel that way, and Steve Smith is keen to do it, I think they should make him vice-captain immediately.''
Even the former England captain Michael Vaughan has said –
“I think they are overthinking it - they are looking at what happened a few years ago - and thinking if everyone has moved on. Of course, everyone has moved on from the ball-tampering incident - we have all forgotten it. The game moves on really fast. If an opportunity arises in ODIs or Tests, then Steve Smith will definitely be Australia captain,” Michael Vaughan told Cricbuzz.
"Keeping him (Steve Smith) out due to the Cape Town situation which happened many, many years ago - I don’t understand that. You only need to see what he did with the bat when he was the captain and he was firing on all cylinders," Michael Vaughan said
