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There’s nothing easier than whacking away at a soft target, and didn’t our nation’s cricket commentators and observers do exactly that over the five days of the recently completed Hobart test?
I’m talking, of course, about the much-maligned crowd figures and lack of attendance from the Tasmanian public, who, if the vitriol and invective thrown their way is to be taken at face value, should be punished by death, or worse, forced to become a non-contiguous state of New Zealand instead.
And the cracks weren’t just from the cheap seats of the tabloid media either. The muckraking came from, and was in fact was led by, the most venerable cricket writers – Greg Baum and Malcolm Knox from The Age and Peter Lalor from The Australian.
In their respective columns each day we were subject to much cleverness and wit on the topic as they tried to outdo each other with eloquent insults and none-too-subtle put-downs.
I’d like to be able to say the great Gideon Haigh was immune from this disease, but even he couldn’t resist a little barb in some of his daily musings.
The ESPN CricInfo team also thought the Tasmanian public was fair game, and so too the ABC commentators.
It’s hard to say what Channel Nine cheerleaders thought, as they were too busy selling us Ed Cowan candy, Dave Warner watermelon, or asking us to vote for how many blades of grass were on the oval.
Oh, what a hardship it must be to get paid to watch a sport and have their thoughts on the days play broadcast to a vast number of people. A sport, which, based on their passionate and knowledgeable observations, I assume they love.
Twitter was also the source of much browbeating of the Apple Isle, most people whipped into a frenzy by those same journos and their mates.
It wasn’t really debate, because the bully boy approach of Victorians and New South Welshmen didn’t lend itself to such an even term. Melbournians can barely draw breath between announcing they live in the sporting capital of the world, and Sydneysiders are just the best at everything, or so they tell us.
“Give us a second Test!” they demanded. “If they’re not going to show up, take it off them!” they cried.
“How dare they disrespect the grand traditions of Test cricket in this country,” they intoned.
Well, even if the last one was true, Cricket Australia has already beaten them to it.
As a society we are being taught to be outraged by the bleeding obvious.
Tasmania will have supplied the lowest Test match crowds of the summer? From a state with the lowest, by far, population?
What a shock to the system this is! Someone fetch my heart pills and get me a cup of tea! Let me take a day off work to fully comprehend the magnitude of such an occurrence!
I think I watch my share of Test cricket, and yet over the course of the Hobart test I didn’t get to see as much as I like.
I spent Friday at work, and attended the company Christmas party afterwards. Saturday was spent minding my ten-month-old son while my wife went Christmas shopping with her mum.
Saturday afternoon and night was at a friend’s for Christmas dinner. My sister won’t be around on Christmas day, so a roast lunch with our dad was at her house on Sunday to catch up as a family before she goes away.
Monday was spent at work again (damn those responsibilities getting in the way of what I really want to do!), while Tuesday was more of the same followed by another Christmas dinner for my sister, this time with mum.
Sorry to bore you with the mundane details of my life, but it is that most wonderful time of year (you’ll note the word Christmas was mentioned five times in the previous two paragraphs).
Now, my Twitter followers will attest to my love of sport, particularly in the form of AFL and Test cricket, and I’d like to think my Roar readership would too.
Wasn’t a whole lot of time over that five days for cricket, was there? I doubt I was alone in this regard. Not at this time of year.
Never mind the many other factors at play either. There is only so much money to go around for working families at the best of times, and even less so at this time of year.
Yes, we’d all like to budget a bit better, yet there’s always one more present we’d like to buy for that someone special.
$43 for an adult and $118 for a family ticket are nothing to sneeze at.
Any hint of inclement weather will affect crowds in any city, and it’s nonsense to argue otherwise.
Hobart had its share of clouds and rain, enough to put off those inclined to walk-up, and the stop-start nature of play wasn’t in their favour either.
As for those from Melbourne and Sydney, how easy it is to smugly pontificate from the ivory tower of the Boxing Day and New Year’s tests, fixtures set in stone over the holiday period year after year.
Then we get to the hoariest of old chestnuts – per capita.
It’s always amusing how it divides people down one of two lines – if it supports your argument, it’s the most important basis of it, but if it doesn’t, then it’s ridiculed as “lies, damn lies and statistics” and a hundred and one factors are brought into play.
For fun, let’s quickly use this argument anyway. Based on day one crowd figures in Hobart, Melbourne will need to provide a crowd of something like 120,000 on Boxing Day.
What odds on it being half of that? And how many of those that don’t go will be heard to mutter “it’s only Sri Lanka”?
And you Sydney people? You’ll need to provide something north of 130,000 people. Make sure you get there early is all I’ll say, in order to beat that stampede.
But something tells me that this year’s New Year’s hangover might just take a bit longer to wear off. That will be one of the excuses anyway.
The same media laying into the crowd figures were bemoaning the ‘main course’ of South Africa being served before the ‘entrée’ of Sri Lanka, so our Southern neighbours hardly had the pick of the prime feast either.
Now, just in case some of you think that I’m a chip off Tim Lane’s shoulder, I’ve never actually been to Tasmania, and can barely think of anyone I know who is from there.
Of course, I’ll be forever grateful to the state for providing me with Matthew Richardson, my childhood, teen and adulthood hero from the age of 12 to 29.
Maybe the cricket wasn’t entertaining enough for the media at the ground. Perhaps they were suffering a let-down themselves after the engrossing South African series.
Or it might just have been that they were caught up in their own hyperbole and rhetoric after a month on the road covering cricket and, like Peter Siddle after Adelaide, needed a break.
Whatever the reason, those that continued to harp on the crowd figures were doing the people of Hobart and Tasmania a disservice, and were cheapening themselves in the process.
Some of these men are true greats with pen, laptop, or microphone in hand, so it is right to demand more of them.