I don’t know about you, but this ball tampering thing has hit me like heartbreak.
You know the feeling? When they leave, and change, and it’s like they were never yours to begin with? That’s the Australian cricket team to me now.
The fact is, like so many heartbreaks, while the actual end comes so fast and so sudden that you still can’t quite believe it’s happened even days after, with the benefit of a little perspective you can see that the cracks were forming well before.
You can see that actually, as much as you loved them – and still do, dammit – you had stopped actually liking them all that much a long time ago. The things that had made you fall in love with them in the first place had long ago dwindled to little more than memories you cherished and refused to look past. They’d shifted from lovable traits, to troubling tendencies.
Where you’d fallen for a hardworking battler who’d give his last breath to win, now you were seeing a belligerent bully, who’d give away the farm to be a ‘winner’.
You still love them – you’ve loved them for so goddam long – but who the hell is this person you’re having to spend your days with?
The Sydney Test against India in 2008 may have been the moment the scales first fell from my eyes. This was, I think, the first time I’d seen the Aussies cross that ‘line’ of their own making. This was the first time I’d felt like I couldn’t celebrate with them. That they no longer represented me.
Or even, represented the values I’d thought inherent to the baggy green. The values I’d come to love so.
That was ten years ago – but like a loveless marriage, I’d stuck with it. I kept waiting for it to turn back around – back to the things that stirred my soul.
Like Boonie copping them all over from Ambrose and, in seven kinds of agony, just adjusting his box and staring back at the man like is that all you’ve got? Like Deano vomiting on the pitch. Like Shane’s first ball in England. Like Taylor calling it on 334.
Like Dougie facing Willis on the last ball of the day. Like Steve a boundary away from a perfect day, and what do you mean he’ll come back tomorrow?
Like the never-say-die spirit that made for Amazing Adelaide. Like Gilly and Langer in Hobart, showing in deeds rather than words that Aussies can chase down anything. That we’re just damn well dogged enough to do the impossible. That we care that much.
In those ten years, I’ve felt the relationship slipping. And I’ve held on all the tighter because of it. But it’s been a love of diminishing returns. And I’ve had the object of my affection become not only a flat-track bully, but an outright one. Shifting from hard-nosed, to hard-to-bear. From ‘never satisfied’ to never gracious, never respectful, never sporting, never selfless. Never about anything but self-aggrandisement – and as long as we win the naysayers can jump in the lake.
(STR/AFP/Getty Images)
This latest scandal is simply the final straw. The moment where you know there’s no salvaging it, even though you still love them. When they cheat, you simply have to leave.
The worst of it is though, it’s not just my faith in them that’s been destroyed. I fear that I’ve had my faith in the sport seriously compromised as well. Test cricket, my favourite sport by miles, feels transgressed in a way that may never be rectified.
The Australian team’s long prevailing attitude of win-at-all-costs, of ‘making them feel bad’ to reduce their performance, of overt abuse, of sorry-not-sorry, of machismo gone mad, of slap-for-four-or-die-trying, of who cares how, of style over substance, of taking a chance rather than showing true character – it all comes from somewhere, and says something that I can’t ignore anymore.
The game has changed. The very tenets of Test cricket are being abandoned. And for ages I’ve felt it slipping – the flat pitches, the huge bats, the short boundaries, the lifeless balls, the artless tactics, the one-gear mentality, the inability to dig in, to do the hard work, and to acknowledge the hard times as uncomfortable but temporary, of disintegrating psyches rather than techniques – it’s chipped away and chipped away at my patience, and my affection.
Such that now – upon this most egregious example of impatience, petulance and narcissistic myopia – one is forced to accept the beginning of the end.
I’ve spent the last couple of days dealing with the realisation that Test cricket probably won’t survive as long as I will. And that I won’t get to live out my days in relationship with the sporting love of my life.
And I’m really bloody hurt, and I’m scared and I’m stuck in head-shaking disbelief – as one is when they realise their love is truly dead. That nothing will ever bring it back. And in all likelihood, nothing will ever replace it.
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