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The Ashes in England was not a good series for the Australian cricket team. It reflected even more poorly on the Australian cricket public.
2013 has not been a marquee year for sport in this country.
There was the inability to claim a single Test victory in India or England, losing seven of nine matches in the process, resulting in a slide to fifth in the ICC world rankings.
This has been overseen by an administration that has lost sight of everything except the colour of money.
The Essendon and Cronulla drugs scandals have dominated all media.
The Bombers have openly co-operated with ASADA but refused to acknowledge their weaknesses and culpability, while the Sharks stand accused of treating the entire process with barely disguised contempt.
Stephen Dank is the rogue link between the two clubs, and we’ve seen more of his name in the sports pages than Gary Ablett, Billy Slater and Michael Clarke.
ASADA hasn’t covered themselves in glory either, refusing to publicly answer the most pressing question of this year’s sporting landscape – who was told what, and when, about AOD-9604, and where is the evidence to prove it?
The Wallabies are either embarrassing or irrelevant, depending on whom you listen to, and it’s entirely possible that they’re both.
But the biggest concern has been the lack of grace and class shown in these dire sporting circumstances by the Australian public.
What a pack of whingers we been shown up as when things aren’t going our way. The ultimate sore losers.
It was staggering to hear the bitching and moaning about England’s ‘go slow’ play on day three in the last Test at The Oval. A four-year-old whining “it’s not fair mummy”, couldn’t have been any more immature.
What happened to the Aussie way of ‘no quarter asked for, and none given’, ‘never give a sucker an even break’ and ‘copping it on the chin’?
Should the Poms have just thrown away their wickets to allow the Aussies to salvage a 3-1 series result? Don’t we want our sport played as hard as possible? Wasn’t this just England’s version of Steve Waugh’s famed mental disintegration?
This was a situation of Australia’s doing, pure and simple. If they’d been up 2-1 instead of down 3-0, then England would have been forced to set the pace.
They weren’t, so had to suffer the consequences. Tough titties.
The saddest part is the reaction was completely expected off the back of a series of whinging.
DRS. Dharmasena. Dar. The pitches were tailored. We couldn’t win the toss. All the 50/50 decisions and reviews went against us.
Of course, the biggest one of all was Stuart Broad not walking after he ostensibly edged Ashton Agar to Brad Haddin.
Shock! Horror! Alert the press! A batsman didn’t walk when he edged it to the keeper!
There’s no issue with people responding irrationally on Twitter in the immediate aftermath of such an incident. Emotions are running at fever pitch in a series with such high stakes.
But to see the continued whinging and complaining last several weeks was simply embarrassing. It was nothing short of stupefying to see supposedly learned cricket people bemoaning an opponent for doing something that is as Aussie as a Vegemite sandwich.
If the circumstance was reversed with Broad bowling and Agar batting, the Aussie youngster would be returning home to an Order of Australia medal.
Essendon fans, by and large, have been victims of the whinge mentality too, looking to blame everyone else but those ultimately responsible. The AFL and various media felt their wrath, but seldom the people within their own club.
The opposite of the delusional Bomber fans has been seen in the continual booing of one of the most respected footballers in the game, Essendon skipper Jobe Watson. The lack of class shown in the behaviour toward Jobe, a man who epitomises it, has been truly saddening.
Collingwood supporters, for instance, have taken great pleasure in tearing the Dons down, maintaining all sorts of false moral views. If it was their club under siege, their opinion would be shaped 180 degrees in the opposite direction.
Continuing on the AFL theme, many Melbourne supporters have been intolerable over the past two seasons while their club remains pathetic. Never has the term ‘misery loves company’ seemed so apt.
The NRL and their fan-base is hardly blameless either. All we’ve heard from north of the Victorian border is conspiracy theories and complaining about the AFL receiving preferential treatment from the authorities over the drugs in sport allegations and investigations.
It smacks of a jealous little boy with a chip on his shoulder over an older brother’s glory. I can assure all rugby league fans that no-one associated with the AFL could care less what the NRL is doing.
After all, Tiger Woods doesn’t spend a second of his time wondering what Peter O’Malley is doing with his game.
Union isn’t my field of expertise, but the heading of Spiro Zavos‘ piece for the The Roar on Monday was “Wallabies need to stop whining and start winning.” It’s clear this is a plague affecting multiple sports in this country.
England is responsible for giving us the “whinging Poms”, but is also, perhaps counter-intuitively, the origin of the fabled “stiff upper lip”. We’ve certainly taken the former label off them. If only we could find some of the latter.
Stop whining. Stop moaning. Stop whinging.
To put an Aussie spin on it, suck it up princess. Learn to lose. Or better yet, shut up and win.