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The media is ruining Australian Cricket

30th November, 2009
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Roar Guru
30th November, 2009
14
1838 Reads
Australian cricketer Mitchell Johnson celebrates dismissing Prasanna Jayawardane. AAP Image/Julian Smith

Australian cricketer Mitchell Johnson celebrates dismissing Prasanna Jayawardane. AAP Image/Julian Smith

Mitchell Johnson recently attributed his lack of form during Australia’s recent Ashes defeat to personal issues involving his bitter mother. Will his be another whose life is destroyed in the public domain?

Today’s sportsmen and women are subjected to intense media scrutiny. Every action is replayed from any number of angles, lip-readers are contracted to interpret player’s words on the field, photographers follow the stars on their private holidays and some of the more trashy tabloid journalists have resorted to filtering through garbage in the hope of breaking an exclusive story.

What many forget when reading the daily paper or watching the evening news is that these athletes, the men and women, the sons and daughters that fill our magazines and are talked about on our airwaves, are still human beings, albeit well paid human beings.

But is that to say, we, the public have a right to pry on their private lives?

Johnson’s anguish stemmed from the public comments made by his mother regarding his girlfriend. Her claims are irrelevant. What is important here is the avenue that Ms Harber selected to air her grievances – the media.

Why would she subject her dearly loved son to further scrutiny? To make a buck? To feel important? Because he didn’t answer his phone?

Regardless, she obviously has no idea what it is like to live in the limelight and has put her own twisted agenda ahead of her son’s – and Australian cricket’s – wellbeing.

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Whether Johnson’s poor display was affected by this outburst, whether it was coming to grips with the Duke ball or the added pressure of leading the Aussie attack, his mother did not need to talk to a journalist about her son’s private life.

Andrew Symonds is another whose trial was by media.

His career was marred by what would appear to be numerous brain fades, but look a little further, think a little more.

Why should a patron in a pub come up and hassle Symonds while he’s having a beer? Because he is a professional cricketer, everyone has the right to get stuck into him?

All of the commentary regarding his idiocy being in the pub in the first place misses the point again, that cricketer’s are human.

Why shouldn’t he have a beer with mates without being harangued by idiots when you or I would expect that for ourselves?

Shoaib Akhtar is yet another example.

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A man with undoubted talent who could bowl the cricket ball faster than any other, in his prime he was as lethal as any other bowler in the world, but his life off the field has taken its toll.

The pressure on the man to take over from Wasim Akram and the constant prying into his life in cricket-mad Pakistan have impacted upon his life and created what is now a Britney Spears-esque story where every week we await a scandal to outdo the last.

Just how he can surpass liposuction is anybody’s guess.

All this scrutiny, all the column inches, it all adds to the pressure on these young people.

Players need a private life and they need stability off the field. The old adage “behind every good man is a great woman” rings true, but these women are expected to let their rich and famous husbands and partners gallivant around the world, for huge parts of the year and still have a healthy relationship?

Children are meant to grow up without their fathers because the ICC wants to schedule 12 months of cricket a year?

If we expect our national team to fulfill their potential, then we’ve got to give up the gossip. If you don’t read it, they won’t print it.

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