Australia reap what they sow as country turns on its cheating cricket team
Prime minister leads condemnation of a side who are pivotal to the nation’s sense of identity
Top of the list of countries lacerating Australia’s cricketers is Australia itself. Steve Smith’s homeland is undergoing an identity crisis that reveals how deeply the Baggy Greens are embedded in the nation’s psyche.
Outsiders might have considered it a bit cheesy to say Australia’s cricket captain is junior only to the prime minister. Now, you had better believe it. When Smith’s team won the Ashes in Perth in December, it was hardly national rejoicing and car horns all night. But the low-key reaction was misleading. The balltampering scandal pullulating in South Africa has sent the country into a spin and confirmed the misgivings that were already there about Smith’s generation.
“An earthquake of arrogance” was one front-page response. And any event that can make the great Jim Maxwell choke up on air during live commentary is bound to leave an indelible mark in Australian sporting history.
During the Ashes, Smith’s team paraded a renegade streak that was concealed by traditional hostility to the Poms. That cover is no longer there, and Australians have been piling in.
Before fighting back tears, Maxwell called the balltampering in Cape Town, “so blatant, so stupid, naive and immature”. He has also said: “I’ve started to become more and more offended by the arrogance of some of the players in the way they behave.”
Soon, there will be a rash of whataboutism and moral equivalence. Sick of being pummelled, some will look for comparable examples of cheating around the cricketing world. For now, though, Australians are unanimous. They reject the conspiracy as much as the cheating: the cack-handed plotting and dishonesty, which has cast a shadow over the world’s best batsman – the so-called new Don Bradman – the whole team and, finally, Australian sport. Malcolm Turnbull, the prime minister, said: “It’s their [Cricket Australia’s] responsibility to deal with it, but I have to say that [to] the whole nation, who holds those who wear the Baggy Green up on a pedestal, about as high as you can get in Australia … this is a shocking disappointment.”
And from Adam Gilchrist, a great Corinthian as well as wicketkeeper-batsman: “Australian cricket is the laughing stock of the sporting world. I remember being a current player and the last thing you wanted was ex-players putting the boot in, but I have the feeling we have been all really badly let down here.” Despair has spread like wildfire. Greg Baum, one of the country’s leading sports journalists, writes: “At stake is the integrity and honour not just of Australian cricket, but all of Australian sport. Typically, when scandal and skulduggery beset sports, Australia sets itself piously above the fray. Aggressive and mouthy, perhaps, but cheating?
“And so we arrive at the crux: the Australian cricket team just doesn’t get it. It didn’t get it when they arrived in South Africa and asked for the pitch mics to be muted between balls, virtually announcing the campaign of abuse to come. Perhaps it should have asked for the cameras to avert their gaze as well. It didn’t get it as the humour of the series deteriorated to the point of pathetic, marring an otherwise sublime contest and alienating fans in their own country.”
In Cape Town, another Australian cricket writer, Peter Lalor, tweeted: “This Test can’t continue. It is a farce. The Australians must at the very least declare their fourth innings before it begins.”
Richard Hinds wrote of the damage to Australia’s self-image: “This includes the juniors to whom the team is portrayed as role models in promotional and advertising campaigns, the club cricketers who form a vital part of the game’s ecosystem and the viewing public which is constantly sold the message that the Australian team represents the very best of what we are.”
Daniel Brettig added: “Seldom in elite sport has a team been caught cheating so clearly, so systematically, and so collectively. Seldom has a team normalising sharp practice, and enlisting the youngest members of the team to carry it out, been so wholly exposed.”
At play here is long-standing but suppressed disillusionment with this team’s conduct and demeanour, of which there were echoes in the Steve Waugh era of “mental disintegration”.
Historically, Australian cricket has often been conflicted. The desperate urge to win – especially against England – is at odds with the idea of cricket as a civilising force and badge of Aussie dignity.
This tension is breaking out all over, and thoughts are already returning to the Ashes, where Jonny Bairstow was subjected to “personal” (his word) abuse on the field in Brisbane, Cameron Bancroft and Smith hammed up the Bairstow “butt” incident and Nathan Lyon recalled “scared eyes” and “scars” and broken careers from England’s battering by Mitchell Johnson.
In New Zealand, England’s Stuart Broad has already taken a retrospective view of the Cape Town outcry, pointing out that Australia had occasionally produced reverse swing “in conditions you wouldn’t expect the ball to reverse”.
Darren Lehmann, Australia’s coach, remember, said the home crowd should hound Broad so relentlessly that “he cries and goes home”. This whirlwind is now being reaped, with Baum concluding: “Hard, but fair? You can scrap fair right now. The Australian way? It’s time to try another.”