A strong tone of temperance has characterised discussions about Australian cricket of late.
The tone got somewhat more excited with the announcement that Cricket Australia, after two decades, would end its relationship with Carlton and United Breweries, producer of Victoria Bitter.
A veritable whoop of delight could be noted through medical and activist circles: a chance to get a new sponsor, perhaps? An opportunity to get on the puritan water wagon?
The Royal Australasian College of Physicians president Catherine Yelland was one of the gloomier preachers insisting that Cricket Australia do right by health and morality. “It is well and truly time for Cricket Australia to consider a major sponsor that does not normalise alcohol for Australian children and is more aligned with the spirit of our natural sport.”
Sarah Dalton of the RACP’s paediatric division was similarly delighted at the ending of the sponsorship association. “So this is a great opportunity to look at alternatives and there are lots of alternatives.”
As always, children are the great obsession of Australia’s medical and hectoring classes. Rather than encouraging a responsible attitude to alcohol, such groups encourage temperance and prohibition, the very sorts of things bound to encourage future excess. If one ceases to discuss it, it supposedly goes away.
A keen glance at the literature on the subject finds a pile of moral assumptions. The Clearinghouse for Sport on the subject of alcohol sponsorship and advertising puts it in a rather preachy way, if we are to take Dr Ralph Richards, Senior Research Consultant, to be the main author of one particular report.
“Alcohol sponsorship of sporting organisations, teams and events, as well as advertising of alcohol products during sports events (ground advertising and broadcast advertising) pose unresolved ethical questions because of the health and social risks associated with alcohol consumption.”
A common theme is one of helplessness and conversion. Children and adults will see drink and its association with cricket or some other code and become inveterate, mad drunks.
“A generation of Australians,” rages Yelland, “have grown up and become accustomed to a sponsorship that has relentlessly pushed its product and left young Australians as collateral damage.”
The result is axiomatic: “alcohol marketing leads children and adolescents to start drinking earlier and makes young drinkers prone to binge drinking patterns.”
This, Yelland seems to forget, has as much to do with Australian attitudes to drinking as something specific to its cultural context. It assumes minimal education, minimal control and minimal awareness.
It also assumes that the advertising industry is a vast magician’s enterprise, wooing the innocent into drinking more because they so happen to like a particular sporting code and follow its sponsor’s habits.
Cricket Australia, however, won’t bite, suggesting that they will simply pick another alcohol sponsor. The neo-temperance movement, it would seem, has not got too far on that score.
There is little doubt that the VB relationship with Cricket Australia has yielded its fair share of influence and merchandise. Summer marketing campaigns were always vulgar, but they were undeniably expressive and lucrative. The nexus between sport and alcohol-fuelled money remains an undeniable fact: Australians like their sport, and their booze.
The other side ignored by the neo-temperance movement is how infuriatingly clean Australian sporting codes have become. If children or adolescents care for sport, it is surely hardly the alcohol than the exploits.
While generally being crude vulgarians, the Australian sports figure – and here, cricket is certainly typical – has become piously clean, even sterile in the pursuit of the healthy culture. Gone are the days when an Australian cricketer could boast, and be praised, for downing more than cans of beer on a long-haul flight from Australia to Britain.
Under Allan Border, Australian cricket began to witness new fitness regimes. Captain Grumpy made it clear that he would be leading not so much a team of drunks to defeat as a team of reformed athletes to the trophy podium.
Cricket, in that sense, has always been a gaggle of confused images, a contradiction that has fractured when imported into colonies and provinces of the British Empire. Gentry, on the one hand, always happy to pass the port despite being empire builders and representatives of Britannic superiority; the champagne break for lunch, the raising of a glass to a century scored.
None of this is conceivable in a modern game where the battle on where the money comes from is as ferocious as ever. More to the point, the idea that such money might have some root in the demon alcohol seems crudely simple.
For those of the medical lobby barracking for the body beautiful, athletes are meant to be backed by a clean image without recourse to outlets of pleasure, for release, or escape.
Professionalism entails Spartan restraint, gritty resolve before the wickedness of the bottle. In short, Australian sport is meant to be dull, paternalistic, and controlled, a penal colony of the senses, of the pleasures, witnessed by the immature and impressionable.
Dr. Binoy Kampmark was a Commonwealth Scholar at Selwyn College, Cambridge and lectures at RMIT University, Melbourne. Email: bkampmark@gmail.com
saul
Guest
I don't drink alcohol but i think young people are better off drinking beer than taking drugs so i really can't see the point in helicopter parenting.
Chris Kettlewell
Roar Guru
Uzzie has also had a few badly timed injuries that have stopped him getting the long run at things that would help to get him to the point of being a more guaranteed selection.
Pope Paul VII
Guest
PS love your use of "blotto". Great word.
Pope Paul VII
Guest
It's possible though I think this cricketing generation doesn't get much time to let their hair down and are concerned with their health. Warner has publicly declared himself in the non drinking fraternity a while back too. Cutting is another non imbiber that I know of. Indeed drinking is a big part of sporting life in our brown land and you are spot on. As you've probably guessed the pub after cricket is important to me but the team has a number of non drinkers who couldn't care less. Funnily enough when I was young and playing aussie rules and loving a drink I didn't like the club's drinking culture and left footy altogether to hang out with more civilised and likeminded drinkers! I think Ussie's problem remains with the coach (Arthur and Lehmann) and selection committee who never back him through a tough time. In 6 seasons, of all the people replacing or preferred to him only Smith, Voges (who almost everyone agrees is a unique case) and Handscomb (new) have a better average.
BigAl
Guest
I am amazed at a lot of the responses here. Maybe they're all youguns and were not around for that long drawn out saga re. tobacco sponsorship - pretty much the same signs/milestones/attitudes are re-appearing. Winter is coming for all alcohol sponsorship !
Chris Kettlewell
Roar Guru
I've often wondered if that's really hurt Khawaja's place in the team. It seems like there's always been a real drinking culture, around cricket (not just the national team, I've noticed it plenty wherever I've played, that being a non-drinker can easily make you feel on the outer) and drinking with the boys is considered a big part of it and if you aren't in that you'll never quite feel as much a part of the team as the others. Agree, would love to see UK win the Allan Border medal sometime soon.
steve
Guest
Hmmm lets just keep banning sponsors that are deemed bad for our health, morally bankrupt and socially unacceptable by the do gooders and the bleeding hearted souls until we end up with the major sponsored Mary's Sewing and Knitting Company Brisbane Broncos playing out of Barry and Wazza's The Poo Men Sewerage and Plumbing Services Stadium. That will be where we are headed. 1300 Smiles Stadium is already bad enough.
Oingo Boingo
Guest
Perhaps VB is tired of CA allowing certain players to dictate terms to them by refusing to accommodate the sponsor.
Baz
Guest
I'm sorry we are too much in the nanny state. Basically sponsors don't grow on trees if other companies wanted to throw lots of money to sport they would be the sponsors to be honest. We should not wreck the 10% who can't handle something to wreck things for everyone. I appreciate the companies that support my teams and do think about them when making a choice between similar brands.
Pope Paul VII
Guest
That is true Chris, Warney was embarrassing. Reminds me, I think it's when they award AB Medal or the Brownlow where they stand around awkwardly holding long tall glasses of Crown Lager? (always hope Ussie might sneak an AB just to make it more awkward). For one, champagne is the traditional toasting beverage and two, we get it, Carlton are the sponsors.
Chris Kettlewell
Roar Guru
Cricket sponsorship is pretty much always things that are bad for you. One might suggest that the sponsorship of a certain deep fried chicken chain could in many ways be much worse for public health. But as far as alcohol is concerned, the worse thing is how people talk about it than the advertising itself. Like after the world cup final where Shane Warne went around asking all the players who was going to get the most blotto, and basically suggesting that winning the world cup was just about the excuse to get as drunk as you could afterwards, and that somehow the person who got the drunkest was the "best" at celebrating victory. Compared to that, the advertising is pretty mild.
Pope Paul VII
Guest
"Here's to temperance" was my Dad's favourite toast, not that he was beholden to the demon drink. Maybe people like to drink various amounts because it's one of the most common and better ways to cope with being a tiny organism on a speck of dust in the middle of nowhere. Reformed drunks and gamblers and the wowsers are the most miserable people on the planet. As above, it might influence your brand but that's about it. Peeps will have to make their own decisions on the health issue.
Rob JM
Guest
Alcohol consumption is associated with an increase in life expectancy of up to two years unless you are a smoker or have a high risk of breast cancer. You actually need quite a high daily intake to have a negative direct effect. Its the indirect effects that are the main problem. Binge drinking and public violence along with alcohol dependency and the family problems it creates. Binge drinking is a cultural issue and interestingly the rates of underage drinking are rapidly decreasing due to social media createing a new normal via peer pressure. Alcohol dependency is a complex of socielogical and biochemical issues. Getting rid of alcohol didn't work during prohibition and wont work now. However you can sympathize with the people who have to deal with its consequences. As to sponsorship, the best outcome would seem to involve promotion of responsible culture rather than creating a vacuum (for gambling to fill)
Adrian
Guest
I doubt that anyone suddenly takes up drinking just because of alcohol sponsorship in sports. The reality is that virtually everyone over 18 years of age drinks at least occasionally, and, indeed, a fair whack of people underage, down to at least 16, and in some cases down to 14, 12 or even younger, will have the occasional sip. But that has nothing to do with alcohol sponsorship. Alcohol is nice to drink. It is bad for you, for sure, except for some myth that it might help heart disease in small doses, but nobody drinks it for that reason. It tastes nice, but, more importantly, it makes you feel nice. Nobody drinks it because they are under the illusion that it is good for you. Of course not. So what does alcohol sponsorship do? It most certainly doesn't convince people who otherwise weren't drinking (who are so rare that those few are defiantly non-drinkers and won't be manipulated) to drink but, at most, it encourages people who are already drinking to perhaps consider that particular brand. Perhaps underage kids, who were considering trying alcohol for the first time, might try a brand that was mentioned connected with their favourite sport. But perhaps not. They are there for the alcohol, not for their sport. And perhaps some adults who are bored of their current brand will try something else that is advertised on a sporting sponsorship. But most people have their brands and no amount of advertising is going to change their mind. Not to mention that if you try it and it tastes awful, you aren't going to try it again. So what is the point of sponsorship? It is advertising. It is getting that brand name out there. We have alcohol advertising in newspapers and in catalogues in our mail. So unless we are going to ban alcohol or at least ban advertising it, like we do for cigarettes (see what little difference that made?) then I say that it doesn't really matter. Oh, and FYI banning cigarette sponsorship didn't change things either.
James Ditchfield
Roar Rookie
At the end of the day, it's all up to personal morales and judgment. I grew up watching and obsessing over Rugby League, a game well known for it's drinking culture and love of gambling. Sponsorship were everywhere. But because I knew the downfalls associated with both of those vices I wasn't tempted. People can blame outside influences as much as possible, but at the end of the day it's down to the individual, and also the environment in which they grow up more than the sport they watch. Granted, this line can be somewhat blurry for some but I truly believe everybody must be responsible for their own decisions when it comes to indulging in gambling and alcohol, because they'll always be around. The various Australian sports would be broke if they weren't.