Cheating skipper diminished the revered position
FORMER prime minister John Howard was fond of saying that he held only the second-most important job in Australia. The pre-eminent leadership position, he said, was captaining the Australian cricket team.
Mr Howard’s observation was part wry humility, part adoring enthusiast of the great game of cricket. But it was also astute analysis of the collective Australian psyche, which unlike many other nations, spurns agents of authority and places greater stock in our performance on the sports field.
No other game is more integral to our national identity than cricket. While we fervently support teams in all manner of domestic competitions such as rugby league, AFL and netball, and are tribal with interstate rivalries such as State of Origin, cricket enjoys a rarefied position. In part, that’s because cricket is one of the few uber-popular team sports that we play and dominate on the international stage. But cricket also has a unique historical context given Australian teams were taking on “the Poms” at their own game before we removed the yoke of British rule and became a self-governing nation.
It is this history, and the exalted status the Australian cricket team enjoys because of it that makes the ball-tampering scandal that has erupted in South Africa such a profound episode of national shame. Cricket fans yesterday would have been aghast at waking to the news that our cricketers had admitted to tampering with the ball on day three of the Third Test in Cape Town. Rubbing salt in this wound were screaming front-page headlines from the Old Dart’s parochial newspapers labelling our team “CHEATS”.
This is not the Australian way. Other cricketing nations maybe, but surely not Australia? Sadly, that’s now not true. New Zealand may still bemoan the infamous underarm incident in the 1981 World Series when Greg Chappell told his brother Trevor to deliver the last ball underarm as not in the “spirit of the game”. Technically speaking, it was not, at the time, outside the rules. But opening batsman Cameron Bancroft’s premeditated decision to stick grit from the pitch on tape he’d brought on to the field in an effort to rough up one side of the ball and generate reverse swing for the bowlers certainly is.
Now Australian cricket finds itself in the grip of one of its greatest scandals in many years, bigger than the underarm incident or the notorious “John the bookmaker” debacle when Shane Warne and Mark Waugh were caught making tidy sums on the side feeding pitch information to an Indian bookmaker.
That’s because captain Steve Smith has admitted to being among the ringleaders of the ball-tampering efforts. Smith says it was a “big mistake” taken by the team’s leadership group and he must now “take control of the ship”. “It’s “something that I hope I can learn from and come back strong from,” he says. By trotting out the same hackneyed cliches that every sportsman in trouble uses (while also insisting everyone move on) showed Smith did not understand the gravity of the offence in the immediate aftermath. But the white-hot anger of Australians changed all that and last night Smith and vice-captain David Warner stood down from their positions for the remaining two days of the Test.
After earning comparisons with the great Don Bradman for his incredible batting feats and winning plaudits for reclaiming The Ashes, Smith has had an incredible fall from grace and tainted his reputation forever. More importantly, he has tarnished the standing of the baggy green and the venerated position of Australian Test cricket captain. Every child who likes to pick up a bat in the back yard and dreams of emulating Smith will learn he tried to cheat.
It’s also worth mentioning that this is the same man who just days ago was berating cricket’s officialdom for overturning South African bowler Kagiso Rabada’s match ban after the pair bumped shoulders during the previous Test. So far, Smith won’t name the leadership group who concocted the ill-fated ball tampering plan while also insisting coach Darren Lehmann was clueless about it. If true, then perhaps the old adage that the only coach a cricket team needs is the one that gets them to the game is correct.
Time and again the current generation of international cricketers has tested the public’s patience. They are among the highest-earning sports stars in Australia. They’re paid extraordinary amounts playing in domestic Twenty20 leagues around the world, sums that many of their more talented predecessors never came close to. Yet players such as Warner repeatedly fail both on and off the field to act as the kind of role models that Australians expect of our cricketers.
Given the swift condemnation by the global cricketing fraternity, including some of Australia’s greats from the immediate past, it is possible Smith has lost the captaincy for good.
Malcolm Turnbull may have made a call on the career of a sitting prime minister when he removed Tony Abbott a few years ago, but he shied away from taking a position on whether Smith should walk permanently. When even the Prime Minister tip-toes around the issue of the Australian cricket captain cheating, it’s obvious that the position remains revered. If only the man who holds the captaincy mantle showed it the same respect as the rest of us, then Australian cricket wouldn’t be in this mess.
EVERY CHILD WHO LIKES TO PICK UP A BAT IN THE BACK YARD AND DREAMS OF EMULATING SMITH WILL LEARN HE TRIED TO CHEAT