It is easy to feel sorry for Steve Smith. He’s a young, highly-strung man in a position of great responsibility in the public eye who is currently struggling under the tonne of bricks that fell on him from a great height. He allowed a ball-tampering scheme to go ahead, and lied to the umpires on the field, then lied to the public in the press conference where he was supposed to be coming clean. As a consequence, he has been stripped of the captaincy for two years and banned from playing international and interstate cricket for 12 months. His latest press conference saw him break down in tears, unsurprisingly.
Australian fans and officials have been accused of over-reacting. Perhaps, but I don’t think this is merely a response to one instance of ball-tampering and clumsy cover-up. This is a response to being embarrassed by the on-field behaviour of our national team for two decades. Ever since Steve Waugh announced that they were aiming for “mental disintegration” of the opposition, as if the cricket field was a early branch of Ahu Ghraib, the Australian cricket team have put an unholy emphasis on sledging. What is sledging? It is the organised, systematic, verbal abuse of opposition batsmen. Wow, you might think, that sounds a lot like bullying, which we’re all against. It does, because it is.
A lot of people confused sledging with the witty put-downs one used to read about in books such as “Chappelli laughs” or Max Walker’s “How to hypnotise a python.” It’s actually more along the lines of “How does Brian Lara’s cock taste?” as said to a young West Indian batsman by one of our best fast bowlers. And this was organised - he didn’t even think that up himself. They have team meetings to decide on their campaigns of sledging. They selected a keeper to bat and for his ability to keep up the chatter, not because he was the best keeper. In this latest series, they demanded the stump microphones be turned off so they could sledge. This would be time and energy I imagine better used in practicing batting, bowling, and fielding, but what do I know?
So why have we gone along with it? Why has it taken this long for the Australian public and officials to be angry? Simple - we were winning. Shame on us. Under Steve Waugh we were the best team in the world. Under successive captains, we’ve been less so. “Hard but fair” was their mantra, always claiming to know where the ‘line’ was. It was easy to spot the line actually; whatever the Australians did was on the right side, however the opposition responded was on the other. We were winning, so bad behaviour was called ‘professionalism’, ‘larrikinism’, ‘the Australian style of game’. As our success rate started going down, the number of people questioning the team went up. There were those who never liked it and said so - full credit to them. But it has taken this ball tampering incident for CA to realise for two decades they had been letting successive Australian teams bring the game into disrepute, and maybe they should do something about it.
The players were under a lot of pressure on this tour, far from home, and losing. Perhaps what the SA cricketer said to Dave Warner was horrible. But when you’ve been antagonising someone precisely in order to make them snap, and when you succeed they don’t snap in a way you like, I’m not sure the moral ground you think you’re on is all that high - or moral. Large sections of the South African crowds behaved poorly. Darren Lehmann, now thankfully Australia’s ex-coach, during the last Ashes series asked the Australian crowd to make a particular English cricketer cry and go home. It’s more like immoral quicksand.
Nor is Australia alone taking the game down this slope where it is now. Weak officials and powerful money brokers have seen cheating and corruption blight the game. There are plenty of people to look at beyond the three Australians at all levels across the globe. But I’m just focussing on the sledging, Australia’s specialty and pride. This summer I enjoyed watching some schoolboy First XI matches, games you’d imagine played in the best spirit of the game, with some of the players already enjoying representative honours. Yet batsmen were abused on the field by close-in fielders. Here’s one direct quote: “You’re a fucking ugly cunt.” Not all teams indulged in this behaviour but one is too many. There should be no place on the cricket field for that, but neither the umpires nor the coaches did anything about it. These boys are the future of the game. This is the legacy of these two decades of sledging. The Australian cricket team should be ashamed. It’s time international cricket took a deep breath and start to get the game back to what it was; a game of honour and fair play. Australia has a chance to lead the way.
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