Australia lay down a marker, will others follow?

level of the game. Cheat happens, to misquote Forrest Gump, so let’s get on with it is how it has always been. It won’t be anymore.

That’s because CA thinks it is organised crime and must be punished as such. And organised crime it is because team sport is all about the collective, about the whole being greater than the sum of its parts.

Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull’s weighing in on the issue may seem like a politician’s bid to garner 15 seconds of fame and at one level it may be that. There have been questions about how someone so forthright about being upright hasn’t been vocal about detention centres in Papua New Guinea and Nauru that prevent asylum-seekers from reaching the mainland. But it is equally true that cricket is so much more than a sport in Australia.

“We may have been small boys

JAMES SUTHERLAND, CA CEO

from a callow race, but we knew there was at least some divinity to our cricket, which was the way out of our cultural ignominy, for the crowning glory to us boys was that although no Australian had written Paradise Lost, our Don Bradman had scored a hundred before lunch at Lord’s,” wrote Thomas Keneally. The world may know him as the author of ‘Schindler’s Ark’ for which he won the Booker and which was adapted by Steven Spielberg, but Keneally summed up what cricket meant to the country.

In his attempt to put Australia’s anger in perspective, ESPNCricinfo’s Byron Coverdale wrote Australia has a law against any company using Don Bradman’s name without government permission. “Rightly or wrongly, our sportspeople have stood on pedestals far greater than any other member of our society. And

LG SPOKESPERSON, on Warner

the primary obligation the public asks in return is simple: don’t cheat. Don’t abuse our trust,” Coverdale wrote on March 26.

Just like with Hansie Cronje, public outrage has everything to do with this abuse of trust. “Winning isn’t everything, it is the only thing,” is a quote attributed to gridiron football coach Henry Russell Sanders. Well, trust Australia, a country whose cricket teams have lived by that adage for so long, to show that it is time for a relook.

Sportspersons being role models isn’t unique to Australia. So would it be unfair to ask why, when Smith and Warner are barred from playing the IPL, an Indian cricketer accused of adultery and domestic violence be green-lighted for the same competition? Isn’t cricket much more than a sport in India? And aren’t our cricketers gods?

MIKE HUSSEY, ex-Aussie batsman