Punishment doesn't fit crime Camping rough on a beach in the Sinai in a previous, indolent long-ago life, I met American marines from a vast nearby base who would come in the twilights looking for company and cheer, offering in exchange beer. What struck me about them is that many said candidly that they had led lost and listless lives until joining up, and the military had given them purpose and direction. It also did for them the thinking that they were unable to do for themselves, which meant that they readily obeyed orders, which made them a formidable fighting force. I thought of those congenial marines again this week as two Australian forces on duty in central and south Asia leapt into the headlines. One was the Australian Defence Force in Afghanistan, the other the Australian cricket team in India. I'm aware that the scale of their respective missions are incomparable, that even this juxtaposition risks trivialising one and glorifying the other, and that all they might really have in common right now is the question: "What on earth are we doing here?" The soldiers were in trouble for irresponsible and even mortally dangerous skylarking. The cricketers were in trouble for slackness in following an order. For most of history, you might have expected the inverse of these critiques. Despite this week's frivolous imagery, I doubt that the ADF is being run along cricket team lines. But it does increasingly appear that the cricket team, and indeed many professional sporting teams, are being run as militaries. This is problematic. I understand that a sports team generally functions better when all its members march in lockstep, and feel a level of esprit de corps, although I also know of highly successful teams that were internally riven, but whose dysfunction never became public because they kept on winning. Winners are grinners, losers talk earnestly and gravely about culture. Australia's crushed and cowed cricketers were asked by coach Mickey Arthur to present individually on what they did for for the team, and what else they might do. Four failed to, and were punished by suspension. But their sin, as gazetted by team management, was not that they lacked ideas, but that they failed to comply with an order. It was announced in those terms: they had breached team rules, and moreover, this was part of a pattern of dutiful dereliction. It is a wonder they were not court martialled. But we never did hear about the ideas that were forwarded, which surely is more salient than the ones that were not. Sport is not war, and a cricket team is not an army. Soldiers must work in concert, under precise orders; for them, it is life and death. Cricket is an individual sport played by teams. Cricketers must be conscious of team, but in the game's core disciplines, batting or bowling, are always one-out and must be able to think for themselves. Really, the only fully co-operative exercise in the game is running between wickets, and perhaps negotiating about a high catch. From afar, it seems the problem for the Australians in India is not that they are not following orders, but that they are, mindlessly. In Hyderabad, they were read a lesson in patience by Cheshwar Pujara and Murali Vijay, who scored merely 49 in a session at the start of their partnership, but built it to a gargantuan 370. Promptly, two Australians swept rashly and fatefully, precipitating early defeat. Afterwards, Matthew Wade repeated the mantra of the moment, that Australia's batting needed to be even more aggressive. Now, sweeping propositions abound about this beleaguered team. Australia's cricketers are said to have a sense of entitlement. I've been on enough tours to know that this does not set this team apart as a generation. Shane Watson is said to be self-obsessed, which again is not unusual, even in recent times. More to the point, Watson is guileless, impolitic, probably distracted by imminent fatherhood, an uncomfortable fit as vice-captain anyway, but most of all barely worth his place at the moment in a barely worthy team. This is the truth from which Australia recoils and against which it lashes out. Gutted by retirements, the Test team has become fragile. Selectors churn through players, without ever pleasing everyone. Perversely, rotation serves one worthwhile purpose, to destroy the myth that there is at all times an XI that is incontestably better than any other that might be picked, and that it is just a matter of identifying it. Like a football team, the answer will be different every week henceforth. In that sense, regimen does matter. There must be rules, but there must also be reason. The now infamous quartet were neglectful, but their offence surely was worth no more than a hefty fine. Suspension, accompanied by "line in the sand" rhetoric, smacked of heavy-handedness. Arguably, James Pattinson already had tabled his dossier, by his big-hearted bowling in the first two Tests, a more eloquent submission than any he might have made on paper. Talking of lines in the sand, those marines couldn't play beach cricket for nuts.