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“Are you trying to say here that sledging is a key to winning for Australia?” Radio National’s Fran Kelly asked cricket writer Daniel Brettig on her breakfast show this week.
Brettig’s response caught my ear:
“I think Australian cricketers do feel that, yes,” he said. “And one of the conclusions that I reach [in the book] is that the players feel there’s a certain way that they can be successful.
“It’s not necessarily a PC way of playing, and it’s something that if the administration and the Australian cricket public wants to see the team winning and being successful, there needs to be a certain degree of acceptance of that.”
“But why?” Kelly exclaimed. “If other teams can win without it, why is it such a part of the Australian game?”
Brettig, a senior editor at Cricinfo, was being interviewed about his new book, Whitewash to Whitewash, an account of the turbulent post-Shane Warne and Glenn McGrath period in Australian cricket, when a team suddenly deprived of its nucleus of battle-hardened stars was soundly beaten in Ashes series both at home and away, flogged in India, and beset by internal player ructions and rifts with the coaching staff; all of which conspired to bring us the infamous ‘Homework affair’.
The main thesis of Brettig’s book is that, in addition to generational change in the playing group, a change in team culture and coaching was also to blame for Australia floundering.
Under Mickey Arthur, and an administration that was keen to tone down the ugliness of the team’s behaviour following the ‘Monkeygate’ incident and the rancorous home series against India it was born out of, Australian players were instructed to be less aggressive on the field – i.e. to pull back on the sledging.
And this, according to Ricky Ponting, made the Australians feel like they were “playing with one hand tied behind their backs”, and strongly contributed to their lack of success.
According to Brettig, it wasn’t until the appointment of Darren Lehmann as coach, and a return to the ‘old ways’ of Australian aggression – sledging and mental disintegration – that the team was able to start winning again.
And this, in a nutshell, is the problem that I have with the Australian team, and the ‘Chapellian’ narrative of Australian cricket that has held sway since the 1970s. And it’s why, for long periods during the golden era of success under Steve Waugh and Ricky Ponting, I found myself barracking for the opposition.
I just couldn’t stand the way we played the game.
Gamesmanship and banter have always been a part of cricket, there’s no doubt. And like most other cricket fans, I know and love all of the amusing (and possibly apocryphal) comebacks that cricketers have dished out to each other over the years on the field.
But the unsophisticated verbal abuse we’re now told to accept as being integral to the Australian way – from Michael Clarke’s advice to Jimmy Andersen to “Get ready for a broken f***en arm” to David Warner telling Indian players to “Speak English” – is just lame macho posturing, and worse.
At the time of Phillip Hughes’ death, much lip service was paid to the idea of the players being custodians of the game, and that it was their duty to leave it in better shape than they found it. There were calls from many established figures in cricket to use the tragedy as a reset button: to do away with sledging all together, and restore some meaning to the phrase ‘the spirit of cricket’.
Hughes’ death seemed to show us, albeit briefly, the hollowness and indignity of the crass carry-on that many now equate with playing cricket ‘aggressively’.
But with David Warner – memorably described in The Guardian by Geoff Lemon recently as Darren Lehmann’s “spirit animal” for the Aussie team – now squaring up to opposition players like some hoodie on ice at a shopping centre, and Shane Warne telling Mitch Starc that he needs to start dishing out stink eyes and standovers if he wants to take wickets, it seems that we’re back to business as usual.
In what looks like an obvious media stunt, the New Zealanders have publicly announced they’ll be ignoring any sledging from the Australians in their crunch World Cup game on Saturday, and that they won’t let Australia’s “well known tactics” bother them.
This comes from a team that openly wept in a touching tribute to Phillip Hughes staged during their Test match against Pakistan.
Even if it is a stunt, I don’t care. I appreciate the sentiment.
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