Australia in mourning for its national pride
The widespread feeling Down Under is that cheating cricketers have ‘failed the culture’
Autumn is gathering over Melbourne, and the fading embers of the cricket season are flickering their last. At the Junction Oval in St Kilda, a venerable old arena where Joe Frazier once fought Jimmy Ellis, this weekend’s Victorian final between Fitzroy Doncaster and Danendong heralds the summer game’s twilight, before the state religion of Australian Rules reasserts itself once more.
Across the city, at the country’s great sporting citadel, out-oftowners still queue for their tours of the MCG, where Steve Smith scored his 23rd Test century a mere 90 days ago. And over in Sunbury, in the northwestern suburbs, a strange fascination is still evoked by Rupertswood, the country estate where, in 1883, Melbourne’s ladies of high society presented to England captain Ivo Bligh a tiny urn containing the “ashes of Australian cricket”.
It will take more than an urn to hold the cinders this time, after a week of sporting self-immolation like no other. While there are not yet any “say it ain’t so, Steve” signs on the streets of Illawong, the quiet, middle-class corner of outer Sydney where Smith grew up and played grade cricket, the scar tissue from the Sandpaper-gate scandal that he helped orchestrate is tangible. You could hear it, in recent days, in the quavering radio commentary of Jim Maxwell. And you could see it in the full-page advert that Australian businessman Jaimie Fuller took out in the Sydney Morning Herald, reminding the country’s lapsed idols: “Cricket is such a part of our national psyche that it helps define us.
“This extends beyond just the reputation of Australian cricket, and Australian sport. This is damaging to the reputation of Australians in general. We hold ourselves to a higher standard.”
Malcolm Turnbull, the prime minister and leader of a troubled coalition, has had 30 consecutive negative approval ratings, and yet when he described the cricketers’ ball-tampering in South Africa as a “shocking affront”, there was barely a word of demurral. Similarly, when Steve Waugh wrote that some members of the team had “failed the culture” of the Baggy Green, he was accorded the wisdom of Old Deuteronomy.
The howl of outrage reflects a pining for a lost gravitas, a lost attachment to the Spirit of Cricket document that Australia invoked in 2003 to encourage young players to respect the game. In the eyes of Steve Georgakis, a senior lecturer at the University of Sydney, with a particular interest in the history and sociology of Australian sport, events in Cape Town triggered a deep crisis of national identity.
“This is a social and cultural issue now,” he says. “People have a
‘Smith was loved before this. But that’s all gone. He won’t be forgiven’
lot of anxieties about the future of Australia. Society is changing fast, and we don’t like too much change. The more anxiety we have, we more turn to something that exemplifies the old way of life, like the institution of cricket. Traditionally, it is what unites us and shows us what it means to be Australian.
“Today, though, you have the complete commercialisation of the sport – by the junk-food industry, alcohol advertising, betting agencies. There was a backlash against last year’s pay dispute, too, which many Australians saw as a case of cricketers being greedy. Put the cheating incident on top of all that, and we have come to the realisation that cricket is as corrupt as anything else.”
Part of the blame is borne by Cricket Australia. For years, the governing body allowed unedifying excesses by a brutish sledger, in David Warner, and a braggart coach, in Darren Lehmann, to go unchallenged so long as the side kept winning. They even elevated Warner to the vice-captaincy.
Now, with his complicity in cheating exposed and his lifetime ban from any future cricket leadership roles confirmed, Warner elicits scant sympathy for his downfall. “The idea of David Warner complaining to anyone else about crossing the line? Well, sorry mate, who are you to tell us where the line is?” Fuller says. “Warner represented the very height of the problem, right down to his celebration of a century as if he had just cured cancer. It was obscene. If you’re Australian, you hit a century, you tip your hat and you carry on.”
For the cricket team, more than any other, to have perpetrated such perfidy is especially galling. Never mind the Wallabies, whose code of rugby union is increasingly marginalised in Australia, or the Socceroos, who will do well just to win a point at this summer’s World Cup in Russia, it is the cricketers who uphold national reputation and character abroad. In 2007, there was a minor uproar when the incoming Labor government considered dropping a question about Donald Bradman from the citizenship test. In the land of the “fair go”, cricket has long channelled an egalitarian spirit, by promising to exalt all those choosing to embrace it.
Reactions to the 12-month bans for Smith and Warner are doubleedged. On the one hand, such severe penalties satisfy a bloodlust that has raged ever since Cameron
Bancroft was caught trying to hide sandpaper down his trousers. On the other, there is a sorrow at how Smith, a great batsman and the most consistently prolific since Bradman, has ruined his good name.
Above all, there is incredulity at how a man with no past misdemeanours, who spent the days before his moment of infamy at Newlands taking drone footage of dolphins, has been dragged down to such base skulduggery.
Michele Mole, a resident of Illawong, speaks for many in Smith’s home community about the folly of his decision. “Why on earth would the players involved think that this was their only option to win the match?” she asks.
“Did they consider the consequences of being caught? Clearly not. For them to jeopardise their careers as well as their futures is just beyond belief. The incident has embarrassed the entire country.”
“We have taken a big hit as a nation,” Georgakis agrees. “It has hit our prestige. These guys are supposed to be our most important role models, and yet they’re frauds. Smith was loved in Australia before this. People were talking about him being the new Bradman, but that’s all gone now. There is no comeback from this. He won’t be forgiven.”
A tortured debate is starting to take hold about what Australian cricket can do to reclaim its place in the country’s affections. Some call for humility, for greater decency on the field, while Fuller suggests that there will only be genuine renewal once Cricket Australia accepts that there is more to life than victory.
The one certainty is that the egregious actions in South Africa have led, on this side of the Indian Ocean, to a mix of profound sadness and introspection. While Australia’s sporting soul is ultimately too strong to break, it has, after this darkest week, been horribly bruised.