Aussies take crossing the line to whole new level

NO GOOD turn, it is said, goes unpunished. And so it was with journalist Michael Davie when he took Groucho Marx to Lord’s. Davie, then at The Observer, had learned the comedy legend was bored with London. What better way then of lifting the spirits than a cricket match?

After a few hours, Davie asked

Marx if he was enjoying the game. “It’s great,” he said. “When does it start?”

That was in an earlier, gentler age. Cricket has moved on. As the present Test series with Australia has shown, it is so much more interesting, by which we mean cut-throat and vicious. Much like politics.

Even before the ball tampering at Newlands this was a series steeped in acrimony. The on-field insults and sledging had plumbed such depths we were now getting bizarre lectures on morality from David Warner, a player with a history of unruly behaviour and one of the three Australians who’d later be sent home in disgrace.

Warner, who had reportedly called Quinton de Kock a “bush pig”, had objected to the sledging he’d then received from the Proteas wicketkeeper. After the highly charged, and much publicised confrontation, Warner complained that De Kock’s comments were “vile and disgusting and about my wife. It was out of line”.

Ah, yes. The much-vaunted line. Here at the Mahogany Ridge, it does appear the Australians do go on abut that ever-shifting boundary between right and wrong, the one that separates them from everyone else. But what exactly is that line?

Cricketers have used insults to put one another off their game from the get-go, but the Australians perfected the form. They even came up with the name: an Adelaide cricketer who swore in front of a woman in the 1963-64 season was reportedly told, “You’re as subtle as a sledgehammer, mate.”

And there it stuck. Sledging hotted up in the 1970s, readily used to cow Australia’s opponents. “When you come back from Australia,” one New Zealand batsman remarked, “you feel like you’ve been to Vietnam.”

The practice was practically formalised under the captaincy of

Steve Waugh. “Mental disintegration,” he called it. If you couldn’t take it, you were either not man enough to play cricket or worse, a Pom.

Back to that line, it was the Australians who first resorted to insulting opponents’ family members. According to Simon Hughes, the English bowler who played for Northern Transvaal in 1982-83, the traditional Australian fielders’ greeting to new batsmen was, “How’s the wife and my kids?”

Of course, batsmen were giving as good as they were getting. Ian Botham, responding to the above during an Ashes game, told Australian wicketkeeper Rodney Marsh, “The wife’s fine, the kids are retarded.”

Perhaps the most memorable rejoinder came from Zimababwe’s Eddo Brandes.

Frustrated at his inability to dismiss the stoutish Brandes, Australian fast bowler Glenn McGrath asked, “Why are you so f***ing fat?”

“Every time I f*** your wife,” he replied, “she gives me a biscuit.”

According to Simon Barnes, writing in The Spectator, Brandes no longer tells that story: McGrath’s wife, Jane, died of breast cancer in 2008. It’s not funny anymore. “Real life,” Barnes noted, “always had a way of making sport look a bit silly.”

Sport has a way of making us all look a bit silly, something we should bear in mind as we settle down for the final Test in this sullied series. It’s all but warfare, what with the berkish nationalism and jingoist spluttering that comes with the territory.

With that in mind, one wonders what the late Clive van Ryneveld would have made of former captain Steve Smith’s tearful mea culpa at Sydney airport on Thursday.

Van Ryneveld, who died in Cape Town in January aged 89, captained the Springboks, as they were, in the Test against visiting Australians in 1957-58. Such was his sportsmanship that he infuriated supporters and teammates alike by refusing to run out a batsman who had been tricked into believing the ball was “dead”. On another occasion, he pulled his fast bowlers from the attack because they were clearly intimidating the batsmen. Even then it was believed such fair play would not have been reciprocated by the Australians.

He further annoyed South Africans by going on to co-found what is today the DA. But that’s another story.

At least we now have a clearer idea of that line. It’s not that Australians cheat, it’s when they get caught.