Australia faces West Indies-like decline as batting depth erodes despite bowling strength

For the best part of the last three decades, the West Indies have been cricket's cautionary tale.

If you are a team that is at the peak of its powers, they are the symbol of exactly what not to do.

The story of the West Indies' decline can be told through three separate series' against Australia between 1991 and 2000.

The 1991 series sees an aging Windies side filled with many of its greatest ever players hold off Australia to claim a 2-1 series win.

Four years later, with the Windies side looking markedly different, Australia manages to turn the tables and wins 2-1 in the Caribbean.

Five years after that, almost all of the class of 1991 is gone and the Windies are unceremoniously thumped 5-0 in Australia.

Since the 2000 series, the ledger of Test results between the two sides reads 22-2 Australia's way with a couple of draws thrown in there.

The current predicament Australia's Test team finds itself is eerily similar to that of the West Indies three decades earlier.

It is a comparison that would be a little too close for comfort for the Australians.

As Australia unveiled its Test squad this week ahead of a pivotal tour of South Africa, all of the focus centred around the inclusion of one man: Marnus Labuschagne.

Even when he was scoring Test centuries at will in his first couple of years in the team, there was perhaps no more polarising player in Australia than Labuschagne.

Now that the runs have well and truly dried up, he has become the easy whipping boy.

The numbers when it comes to Australia's No.3 are now no secret.

There have been no Test centuries since July 2023.

In 23 Tests since that ton in Manchester against England, Labuschagne has averaged just 24.69, yet somehow remains a fixture in the side.

Labuschagne, 32, has no shortage of support despite statistically being one of the poorest performers in the Australian side.

Australia's chairman of selectors, George Bailey, pointed the finger at the batting cohort that has underperformed as a whole and even explained how Australia has increasingly used the metric of percentage of team runs rather than batting averages in a bid to raise the confidence of a team that has become increasingly bereft of it.

The truth of the matter is that Labuschagne is a symptom of Australia's problem, rather than the root of it.

That problem is the depth of Australian cricket is nowhere near what it used to be.

Australia was able to completely take the mantle from the West Indies as the best team in the world three decades ago courtesy of boasting not only a tremendous first XI, but also a level of depth that made it plausible to suggest Australia A was once the second-best team in the world.

A look at the top 15 run-scorers in the Sheffield Shield from 1995-96 season shows names like Darren Lehmann, Justin Langer, Michael Hussey, Adam Gilchrist and Damien Martyn among them, names that would eventually become mainstays within the Test side.

The top scorers in the most recent Shield season are far less heralded. Of the top 15, only Sam Konstas (fifth) and Campbell Kellaway (15th) are widely considered to be serious Test mainstays over the next decade.

Konstas's brief Test career has so far provided mixed returns, while the 23-year-old Kellaway is yet to represent Australia at the senior level.

Other players such as Ollie Peake, Lance Morris, Fergus O'Neill and Nathan McSweeney have been touted as future Test cricketers.

As things currently stand, there is no proof that any of them will have sustained success at the highest level, as much as Australia hopes they will.

As was the case for the West Indies at the start of the 90s, Australia's problem is that its oldest players still remain its best and most indispensable.

The next generation simply isn't banging the door down.

Five players from the West Indies XI that played in the fourth Test of the 1991 series against Australia — Viv Richards, Gordon Greenidge, Gus Logie, Jeff Dujon and Malcolm Marshall — did not play another Test after that calendar year, leaving a massive hole in the side.

The departures left the likes of Richie Richardson, Brian Lara, Curtly Ambrose and Courtney Walsh with a burden too great to bear despite their individual greatness.

Once Ambrose, Walsh and Richardson went, it was essentially Lara against the world, a hill too steep to climb even if you are one of the most talented batters the game has ever seen.

Richardson, a legendary No.3, shuffled his way around the line-up as the Windies looked to plug hole after hole left behind by the departing greats.

After playing 67 of his 86 Tests at first drop, Richardson batted in four different positions, none of them at No.3, in his final year of Test cricket, even opening as Steve Smith briefly did a few years back.

It is a situation eerily similar to what Australia finds itself in at the moment, with no young opener seemingly ready to fill the void left by David Warner and Usman Khawaja, leaving Travis Head, Labuschagne and Smith to all have their turn at the very top of the order.

Whenever the collective age of Australia's Test side is brought up, the common retort from those within the camp is to list the team's accolades: Ashes series wins and Test Championship rankings.

The West Indies, too, were still formidable at the start of the 90s.

That provided little insight into what was to come at the back end of that decade.

Like the West Indies of the mid-90s, Australia's batting cracks have been papered over by an excellent bowling attack whose members remain elite well into their 30s.

Mitchell Starc, Pat Cummins and Josh Hazlewood still remain as good a pace trio as any, but the fact that they're relied upon to be so consistently excellent is an indictment on what lies beyond them.

It is a similar situation to Ambrose and Walsh, who both played until their late 30s and ultimately proved to be irreplaceable.

The problem for Australia is their most reliable replacements for their first-choice quicks —Scott Boland and Michael Neser — are also in the 36-plus age bracket.

So how exactly does Australia avoid the same fate as the West Indies?

Australia's superior cricketing infrastructure at the domestic level should ensure it doesn't completely crumble as a force.

Even in their pomp, the West Indies dealt with politics between the different Caribbean islands and severe financial issues, problems that have only intensified as the team has gotten progressively worse.

Australia does not have these issues.

Australia would ideally like to stagger its retirements as well, to avoid a situation like what happened to the West Indies in 1991.

However, selectors must tread the fine line between playing youth for youth's sake and hanging onto its older core for a little too long.

Transitioning away from a golden generation is hard, and it is a struggle that is not exclusive to these two Test teams.

South Africa has only begun to lift its head above water over the last two years after its own swathe of retirements, while Sri Lanka still finds itself in cricket's murky backwaters despite some of its best players retiring over a decade ago.

The good news for Australia is that it has experience of transitioning away from retiring greats successfully.

Almost 20 years ago, when the likes of Glenn McGrath, Shane Warne, Langer, Matthew Hayden and Gilchrist all departed within 18 months, the next generation was waiting in the wings.

This time around, as Australia gets set to bid farewell to another set of greats, the transition is almost certain to be nowhere near as smooth.