Baggy Greens on sticky wicket with sticky tape
At the start of the various football seasons, and with the test team playing in South Africa, Australians would normally be settling into armchairs and enjoying our selfcongratulatory status as one of the world’s great sports-loving nations.
Instead the entire country now resembles the scene from a gothic movie where villagers carrying torches and pitchforks storm the castle looking for Frankenstein’s monster or Dracula’s coffin.
Bring us Steve Smith! Bring us Cameron Bancroft! Bring us these cheating ball tamperers who have stained our reputation and made us the laughing stock of the entire sporting planet!
From the moment we woke on Sunday morning to the disturbing and faintly comical video of opening batsman Cameron Bancroft hiding a sticky piece of tape — or Exhibit A as it is now known — in his undies, Australia went into collective meltdown.
Even Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull has had his say on the nefarious plot devised to alter the condition of the ball. Which for those aware of Turnbull’s modest sporting intellect, was a bit like Harvey Weinstein weighing in on feminist politics.
Meanwhile serially outraged TV pundits and social media magistrates demand the imposition of ever-more draconian punishments. Some are even proposing life bans for a breach that, after the correct implementation of ICC regulations, left Smith with a one-match ban and Bancroft with three demerit points.
This tub-thumping outrage at Australia’s low tactics will, no doubt, be the source of wry amusement among Kiwis of a certain age — those who remember the moment when Greg Chappell mistook one day international cricket for lawn bowls and ordered the infamous underarm delivery.
These same observers might consider with glowing satisfaction that, 37 years later, the Black Caps were conquering England as the shame-faced Aussies suffered a chastening defeat in Cape Town. A long delayed instance of sporting karma, perhaps?
But if there is a delightful sense of schadenfreude in the countries that have suffered the Australian team’s hard-nosed and occasionally obnoxious approach, this is nothing like the wrath brought down upon Smith and his men by the Australian public.
To understand this industrial strength outrage you need to grasp how much success means to a country that considers itself a world class sports playing nation, but suffers a shaky sense of international self-esteem.
No team has fortified Australia’s sense of global worth quite like the Baggy Greens.
This is partly because, unlike the Wallabies, the cricketers are Australia’s team. The one that represents a nation divided on geographical lines between the various football codes — rugby league, rugby, soccer and the home brewed Aussie Rules.
This has given Australia’s cricket stars a lucrative national focus, but also a responsibility. The Baggy Greens not only have to win, they must do so in a manner that reflects the nation’s sporting culture — or, more accurately, an idealised version of this culture.
Australian cricket’s mission statement could be described as “hard but fair”.
From humble park ground to Lords, Australians cricketers prided themselves on having the (somewhat incongruous) ability to sledge, provoke and intimidate, while never crossing the behavioural “line”.
In recent times, however, this line has been blurred.
Even those who justified the underarm incident on the grounds that Trevor Chappell’s delivery was within the rules have squirmed as Australia’s behaviour deteriorated,
The Baggy Greens not only have to win, they must do so in a manner that reflects the nation’s sporting culture.
particularly during the 1990s and early noughties when “mental disintegration” was a euphemism for foul-mouthed sledging.
Even before the cameras exposed Australia’s ball tampering plot, there was unease about the behaviour and leadership of the team in South Africa. The abuse of South African crowds and the robust send-offs of South African bowler Kagiso Rabada provided some camouflage.
But just as Bancroft could not conceal the incriminating evidence, Australia’s bare-faced cheating is now there for all to see.
Accordingly, the team’s disgrace is shared by an entire nation. Because to bask in Australia’s cricketing glory means also having to squirm in its shame; to endure the taunts of ex-England captains Michael Vaughan and Nasser Hussain who were quick to put the boots into their old tormentors.
So, inevitably, the mood in Australia quickly went from shock and anger to bloodlust, with the proposed penalties of the critics more in proportion to their own sense of reflected shame than to the cheating itself.
Most likely Smith will lose the captaincy and he and others will serve bans imposed by Cricket Australia. Their penalties will thus be heavier than for any other player convicted of similar offences elsewhere.
But Australian cricket team’s crime is not merely to have attempted to make an old ball swing. It is to expose a truth lurking in the Australian sporting public’s subconscious. Really, beneath that “sacred Baggy Green”, we’re just like everyone else.