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Is it befitting that sports journalists produce rhetoric that leaves the audience with more of an opinion of the author than of the subject, as Peter Roebuck does every summer in this cricket obsessed nation? Discrediting the Australian cricket team and, in particular, Ricky Ponting has been the pursuit of Roebuck’s diatribe for countless seasons.
His disdain for the current vintage of Australian men wearing the baggy green shows a pretension and apathy usually only indulged in by long serving NSW governments (but that’s another issue entirely).
Roebuck shows not so much an arrogance in his assessment of the game but rather a condescending presumption that the cricketing audience will swallow his crusade against Ponting and his team as methodical analysis.
A writer who patronises their audience is almost explicitly blinded by their determination. Is it spawn out of dispute? Jealousy? Fear?
Without straying into the realms of psychoanalysis too far, it would not be drawing too long a bow to suggest that Viv Richards and Joel Garner wore the brunt of similar motivations back at Somerset in the 1980’s in Roebuck’s campaign to have them omitted from the side.
Why then, one might ask, is the audience left to ponder such a “complex” mind as opposed to the content of the opinion?
One can’t help but attribute some of the Roebuck rants on Ponting and his peers as a deeply held belief by Roebuck that the current XI are no match for the mere mortals of eras past.
You could feel the pain it took for him to pen in a piece on the 8th January in the Fairfax press that Ponting was the best Australian batsmen in a decade. One could deduce that if the statistics didn’t conclude as such, he would be loath to write it.
This exposition does not argue that successful public sports opinion/journalism is the product of corresponding success in that sport. Is it fair, however, to recognise that Roebuck’s inability to consistently play cricket at international level has left him with the conclusion that if indeed ‘his’ natural talents weren’t enough to play at the elite level then how can the current crop of players even be mentioned in the same breath as those that did in generations past.
Unless, of course, it’s to highlight the shortcomings of Ponting’s batting when contrasting the upper echelons of cricket greats who have graced the crease.
Opinion should, by its very definition, leave the audience with an author’s view, but should it take the liberty to push an agenda which leads the reader to distraction as to how the author sustained such a dislike for a subject.
Maybe Ricky Ponting and Viv Richards will ponder it over an ale in a time to come (if they actually cared).
Then, of course, there is the shallow attempt to hide such scathing articles behind the notion of an independent perspective. One could almost imagine the footnote on Roebuck’s every summation; “why would a lad from Somerset, living in South Africa and Australia have the inclination or the prerogative to be anything but independent?”
Conclusively, it’s a shame that Ponting and Australia toss the coin of “heads I win, tails you lose” whereby Roebuck is seldom seen or heard attributing an Australian fight back win to the merit of the players but rather the implosion and failings of the opposition.
Nor, in honour of independence, should every win be celebrated and filled with hot air. For when all is said and done, just as a stand in Taunton bears the appellation of Viv Richards, Roebuck’s name might fade in insignificance to that of Ricky Ponting’s. Roebuck might take his own medicine and “…take stock. The alternative is worse”.
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