Four years ago, the International Cricket Council — as boring and dogmatic a sports body as you will find — decided to do something radical. It announced that Australia — the undisputed leaders of the cricket world at the time — would host a Rest of the World XI for three one-dayers and a special, never-seen-before six-day Super Test. This would be the mother of all series, it proclaimed, “a Titanic among cricket tournaments.”

Considering the fate of said ship four days after it sailed from Southampton in April of 1912, it was almost prophetic that the Super Series sank without a trace in October of 2005. Australia won all three ODIs without breaking into a sweat, and the so-called Super Test didn’t need six days as Matthew Hayden and Stuart MacGill ended it in just three-and-half despite facing a galaxy of international stars ranging from Sachin Tendulkar and Brian Lara to Andrew Flintoff and Muttiah Muralitharan.

A number of timeless lessons were learnt from that experience — the most important one that a team of collected greats cannot compete with a side that plays together, trains together and grows together. This is why when all three IPL teams crashed out of the inaugural Champions League — thereby reducing the tournament to an extravaganza nobody cares about — we shouldn’t really have been surprised. Cricket, despite its peculiar nature that allows a batsman and a bowler to battle alone on the pitch, is still a team game; and in a team game, history, tradition and professional bonding are usually more important than individual skills.

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