Erring sportsmen and their crying shame
Idon’t know which is worse – the dastardly deed of the Australian ball-tampering cheats, or having to listen to their weepy mea culpas?
Sorry to sound hard but I’d give Australian cricket captain Steve Smith an F minus for the sobbing performance he turned in at his press conference. I heard Smith’s apology on the radio first and thought it sounded reasonably sincere, but when I watched his spiel on television, the optics looked decidedly hammy.
Smith’s lachrymose turn was followed hard on the soggy heels by a tearful resignation of ‘culture coach’ Darren Lehmann, who had to fall on his sword because he felt responsible for the moral fibre of the team.
Everyone was sounding terribly high-minded and highly principled after the event, with Smith insisting vice-captain David Warner wasn’t to blame because it was a captain’s call and the tampering had happened on his watch.Oh please, pass me the sandpaper and rub it in your eyes before fronting for the cameras.
Performance apologies of erring sports celebrities have become such a set piece that, if we must endure their contrition on the news, perhaps sporting bodies should consider setting money aside to hire acting coaches to train offending sportspersons to appear authentically remorseful. Where’s Russell Crowe and his thespian talents when you need them?
I suppose one could blame former Australian prime minister Bob Hawke, who wept several times during his leadership, for leading the weeping way into the country’s crying shame.
Some would applaud the tears and believe it a healthy sign for grown men to tear up, while others would call for the return of the stiff upper lip, to perhaps take a leaf out of the Russian doping cheats. You don’t see any of them snivelling into their hankies after being copped for a spot of state-endorsed cheating.
Seriously though, I’m no trouser watcher but how uncouth to have had the Easter news dominated by the sight of cameras trained upon the groin of an Aussie cricketer as he rearranged his bits trying to secret the bright yellow sandpaper about his privates as he bungled the sleight of hand.
In the olden days, during the Easter break we would have been glued to a corny blockbuster biblical epic, but since the secularists have taken over it’s all wall-to-wall sordid sport.
No wonder viewers have taken to the alternative of social media and Facebook, with the exception of the whistleblowing WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, so rudely cut off from the internet at Ecuador’s London Embassy.
What will the poor man do, deprived of his life’s blood? If any act could flush the pale man out from his six-year exile where he has made only the briefest Michael Jackson-style fleeting appearances from a Juliet balcony, this surely will force him into the cold light of day.
Imagine the state of the interior of his quarters and the collection of years and years of dead parched white skin lying about that dark chamber. Even lifers get an hour out every now and then to sun themselves in a yard.
I’ve always wondered if the embassy furnished Assange with a cleaner, or does he, like Donald Trump, like to keep his bedroom private and strip his own sheets from the bed?
Perhaps Assange has been left to his own hygiene devices and has let things go in the manner of the late Quentin Crisp? That most naked of civil servants famously declared housework was pointless because after the first four years, the dirt remained the same.
I was thinking the same when, this Easter break, I attempted to swap the summer wardrobe over to the winter and tried to penetrate the far recesses of the attic in search of a box of jumpers.
Two and a half hours later I was still up there and crouching uncomfortably over boxes, coughing through the dust and reading old diaries from the teenage years. One year I seemed to be obsessed with listing all food items devoured at every meal, and there was a month I stayed home for a week in case a certain boy might phone. At least these android days, a girl can get out and about and not waste vital hours waiting for a callow youth to phone home.
Another diary was chock full of complaint about having to hang round cold rugby pitches watching a boyfriend kick the bladder about. Then the interminable dreary after-match functions with the lads downing Steinies and stomping feet that had turned into ice blocks along to the uncouth strains of Deep Purple’s Smoke on the Water. What an appalling waste of time. It seemed to go on and on for boring ever. No wonder I hate sport.