WAUGH CRY RINGS HOLLOW
FORMER Test captain Steve Waugh should have spared us a sermon about the cheating scandal and said a “sorry” instead. See, both the tears of sacked captain Steve Smith and the evasions of sacked vice-captain David Warner last week suggest a rotten culture in our Test team.
And cultures are not created overnight, are they, Mr Waugh?
But there was Waugh last week, announcing he was “deeply troubled” by Australian players’ hatching of a plot to sandpaper the ball in the third Test against South Africa.
“The Australian cricket team has always believed it could win in any situation against any opposition, by playing combative, skilful and fair cricket,” he said. “However, some have now failed our culture.”
Yes, but who are those “some”? The guilty surely cannot be just the three players who last week cried in front of the cameras: Cameron Bancroft, who did the sandpapering; Warner, who allegedly cooked up this scheme to make the ball swing; and Smith, who failed to stop it.
I’m not necessarily buying Warner’s hint at his disastrous press conference on Saturday that other teammates may have been in on it.
Reporter: Can you, hand on your heart, say no other players, coach, knew about your plot …?
Warner: I’m here today to accept my responsibility for my part.
Yet even if only Warner, Bancroft and Smith were directly involved, they cannot be the sole authors of this disaster that’s made Australia’s name mud.
Recall the first press conference Smith and Bancroft gave on the day TV cameras caught Bancroft stuffing sandpaper down his underpants.
The duo were embarrassed, but certainly not as shattered as they were on their return.
That suggests they’d been marinated too long in a whatever-it-takes team culture to feel the deep shame of so many other Australians.
No one can claim such a culture was suddenly invented by Smith, at heart a good man punished too severely, or by Bancroft, in just his eighth Test, or even by Warner.
So back to Waugh — and others like him.
Waugh as captain was the first to dignify the team’s notorious abuse of opposition players with the pseudoscientific label of “mental disintegration”.
Former South African captain Graeme Smith once described what that felt like as young rookie, facing the Australians under Waugh.
Australian opener Matthew Hayden had “stood on the crease for about two minutes telling me that I wasn’t f---ing good enough”, and close-in fielders — Justin Langer, Ricky Ponting, Adam Gilchrist, Mark Waugh and Shane Warne — kept up the sledging.
“All Warne does is call you a c--all day,” said Smith. So, allegedly, did Glenn McGrath. And bowler Brett Lee warned that if Smith touched him again while taking a single, he “would f---ing kill” him.
This wasn’t unusual. McGrath once sneered at the West Indies batsman Ramnaresh Sarwan: “What does Brian Lara’s d--k taste like?”
Sarwan, angered, retorted: “I don’t know, ask your wife.”
McGrath’s wife Jane was then very ill, and McGrath blew up, shouting in Sarwan’s face and jabbing a finger at him.
Culture repeats. The very same thing happened on this South African tour, when Warner sledged Quentin de Kok, allegedly about his sister, and then went crazy when de Kok hit back with even worse about Warner’s wife. Did that inspire Warner’s sandpaper plot?
Waugh’s team set other examples, too, which Smith’s team just embroidered upon.
Check YouTube and you’ll see Waugh himself claim at least two catches that he’d clearly dropped.
His team did have one truly great sportsman — wicketkeeper-batsman Adam Gilchrist, who walked against Sri Lanka in a big game, despite being given “not out”.
But captain Waugh made clear this was not an example to follow.
“Most of the time you’ll find that players don’t walk, and I’m one of those,” he said. “There’s other ways of showing good sportsmanship.”
Because Waugh’s team kept winning, complaints about its boorishness were dismissed, even when they came from former Australian great Neil Harvey.
“I was at the SCG during the Test and … (former players) Sam Loxton, Ian Meckiff, Lindsay Kline and Alan Davidson all indicated they were disgusted with the way this team carries on,” Harvey said in 2001.
“They are the greatest bunch of sledgers there’s ever been … I’m disgusted.”
With such a tradition and a culture, what did you expect Smith to do when Warner, more forceful, suggested he cheat?
Maybe those cricketers who helped create that culture should now take some blame, too.
It can’t all be Warner’s work.