‘Australians don’t like teams standing up to them’
Graeme Swann plans to take his positive approach to playing into the commentary box, he tells
Graeme Swann has vowed to bring a bit of ‘When in Rome’ to our friends Down Under when he enjoys his first stint of Ashes commentary next week.
“When you listen to Australian commentary it is one-eyed and parochial, but you have to say it is brilliant because they really do back their team and are amazed by how amazing their players are,” said Swann, on commentary duty for BT Sport during the series, which starts next week. “Even bang average players get pumped up by their commentators.
“In English commentary, we are always waxing lyrical about the opposition and bagging our own players. It is so English. It is what we do. So hopefully I can bring a fresh spin, because I am a naturally very positive person and I believe we should look for the positive side in our cricket, and in everything, actually.”
As a cricketer, Swann was that rarest of butterflies: an attacking, world-class spinner from England. He is used to swimming against the tide, and is doing so with regard to the general pessimism about the tourists’ chances.
“I think we are in with a very good shout despite all the doom and gloom,” he said. “I think everyone has got seasonal affective disorder in England at the moment because of the seasons changing and it getting dark early. I’ve just walked through London, it’s a lovely crisp morning and everyone looks like they’ve have just had their sweets stolen.”
There have certainly been a few long faces in the England camp, and especially the physio’s room, but Swann is a man who has met both of the Twin Impostors on his trips to Australia: in 2010-11, when he helped spin England to a famous 3-1 victory, and then – crushingly – in 2013, when he retired after the third Test, lost en route to a 5-0 whitewash.
“That first tour was the best of my life and the other I should never have been on because my arm was gone,” he recalled. “Still, there was no way I was not going to go. I convinced myself that the fact I couldn’t feel my fingers was because it was the end of the summer and I was just a bit tired from all the cricket.
“But all this ‘it’s a tough place to visit once things are going wrong’ stuff, that’s all hype. It’s no tougher than anywhere else if things are not going your way. When your dream fades away, all you ever wanted, to play for your country… you could be in Timbuktu, wherever.”
In Swann’s view, the image of Australia as a hostile land filled with cruel hacks, baying mobs and moustachioed cricketing supervillains who feast on the flesh of Englishmen is a sales job by the media.
“The Australians don’t like teams standing up to them, or sides that just meet them on an equal footing and say, ‘OK, we are going to play cricket and we are going to try and beat you.’
“They want you to be a rabbit in the headlights so they can steamroller you. That’s why you get all this phoney bravado from people in the build-up.
“But I will say, David Warner’s comments about ‘hatred’ and ‘war’, I think that is absolutely ill-advised and ill-conceived. I know, in fairness, he did come out and say he regretted it. But that is the media manipulating players into believing it really is a war.
“If you honestly hate someone because he’s from England or Australia and he plays cricket, then you really are the most inept individual. That is one thing you will never get from me when I am commentating, I abhor anything like that.”