The sight of Australian cricketers reduced to tears as they apologise for their involvement in the ball tampering controversy has got us all thinking. Reading Stephen Wagg’s political history of cricket recently, I was introduced to the term larrikin. It has a lot to offer us in understanding the fate of Messrs Bancroft, Smith, Warne and Lehman.
Australian cricketers celebrating in better times
Australian sport has always had a larrikin tendency; a streak that does not take itself too seriously. The word itself is derived from the turn of the twentieth century and means a mischievous, uncultivated, rowdy but good-hearted person who acts with apparent disregard for social or political conventions. Australian cricketing history has been littered with larrikins. In the 1970’s, it was fast bowlers Jeff Thompson and Dennis Lillee that led the larrikin line but with Merv Hughes, in the 1980’s, larrikinism possibly discovered its archetype. The ‘big, hairy, macho, moody, lippy and fast’ bowler typified the hard-playing Aussie whose competitive spirit was only matched by his irreverent attitude to the stuffiness of the cricket establishment. In the Ashes series of 1989, his beer dripping moustache stared down at all and sundry from advertising hoardings announcing that Australians really didn’t give a XXXX about anything other than winning a game of cricket. A deeply ironic slogan given the events of the past week or so.
Australia in the era of Merv Hughes. 'A travelling troupe of glowering, disputatious, drooping - moustachioed, lager drinking white males'.
But all ideas have their counter idea. For every head there is a tail. And in Australia the opposing cultural force to the larrikin was the wowser. This term was used to describe a stuffed shirt, a person who seeks to deprive others of behaviour deemed to be immoral or sinful. It emerged at the same time in Australian history as the larrikin and became culturally bonded to it in what became known as the ‘larrikin-wowser nexus’. The pious hypocrites of the Australian establishment needed the coarse rebels to justify their belief in a strong hand. The rebels needed something or someone to rebel against. Don Bradman, a conservative autocrat as an administrator and an anglophile to boot, was the general of cricket’s wowser tendency in the post war years.
Bradman. Not a players player nor a players administrator. A wowser and an anglophile.
So, what of today and the ball tampering crisis. Who are the wowsers and who are the larrikins? Australian Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull was the first to express his outraged piety. His ‘shock and disappointment’ matched the feeling other politicians who were ‘bloody furious’, demanding Cricket Australia act decisively. Cricket Australia, for their part, talked of due process but did not disguise their deep sadness on behalf of Australian cricket fans. More surprising was the intervention of Steve Waugh. The ex-Australian captain loved sledging so much that he discovered a new euphemism for it, calling it ‘mental disintegration’. In a news article, he talked about the current players failing the culture of ‘combative, skilful and fair cricket’ and talked of revisiting cricket Australia’s version of the spirit of cricket document first produced by Lords. In his piety, he managed to stick the boot in to his own players as well as the Poms.
Steve Waugh. The Australians have strayed from their spirit of cricket.
As for the individuals caught up in this themselves, Smith and Warner are not, in my view, larrikins. They have the hard-nosed gamesmanship that would suit such a description but they lack the humour and humanity that the likes of Merv Hughes and others brought to their cricket. Warner must be one of the few international cricketers who has a separate section on his Wikipedia page marked ‘controversies’. His approach could be described, as David Rowe did of the Australian team that overwhelmed England in the 2013 Ashes series, as ‘macho, malicious and merciless’. Seeing Smith and Warner go about their business is like watching two humanoid terminators playing the game. Ruthless in performance and execution; useless in dealing with the human side of competitive or indeed any sport. They get ‘combative’ but they don’t quite get ‘fair’. They have seen themselves through their own robotic eyes that seem pre-programmed to distort. This was why Smith’s initial response was so blasé, attempting to accept responsibility and move on without understanding the repercussions. In his powerful piece, Greg Baum described the team led by Smith and Warner as having a ‘cocoon mentality’. They are patently not emotionless, but they are emotion-lite.
Warne and Smith. Terminator cricketers?
Having said that, the emotions are not insignificant. What we have seen is three sportsmen suddenly caught up in a situation whose implications they had not even considered when they first contemplated their actions. The press conferences of Bancroft, Smith and Warner owed more to the practises of a religious ritual than a modern-day media event. The attendance of relatives, the prepared statements and the themes of ‘betrayal of trust’ and the ‘hope for forgiveness’ created a highly charged emotional atmosphere. These were not men owning up to making a mistake, they were sinners seeking redemption. Their tears were the tears of those confronted with something much bigger than themselves.
Warne in confessional?
So what does all this mean? What it doesn’t mean is that there is some sort of peculiar disease that afflicts Australian cricketers more than others. The pressures that moulded these players and informed this crisis could engulf other individuals in other countries and in other sports. English pundits and journalists have sometimes overlooked this as they engage in a version of Aussie bashing. Michael Atherton, keen to distance himself from his own actions in this sphere, described the premeditated nature what happened as carrying an ‘odious stink’. Michael Vaughan, the BBC’s main pundit and a man not unused to speaking his mind, believed it was a simple case of ‘bad behaviour’ always catching up with its instigators. Simon Hughes, of the Cricketer, went further and most disturbingly when he said the episode was evidence of ‘an upstart nation that takes itself too seriously.’ Australian commentators were perhaps understandably, closer to the mark. Waheed Aly in the Sydney Morning Herald quoted Donald Horne, who emphasised the importance of sport to Australia’s national identity when he said, ‘Sport was the first form of Australian foreign policy.’ Aly makes the point that the ball tampering crisis has severely dented this outward presentation of what it is to be Australian. ‘Australian cricket has just debauched our foreign policy, by which we construct our place in the world.’
It is now the time of the wowsers. Every cricketing puritan, in Australia and elsewhere, will get a ready audience for their prescription on how to clean up the game. As for the larrikin tendency, it has been delivered a mighty blow. In the modern game of international cricket, there will be less room for the buccaneer or the rebel. There is too much at stake for the authorities to allow that and the training of modern players conditions them to be and sound the same. Even Merv Hughes now wears a suit and tie. There will be much soul searching by Australians. As Rowe pointed out, ‘the scowling furry visage of a reborn 1970’s cricket masculine archetype’ is no image for the future. If it ever was, it has been drowned in a pool of press conference tears. A more thoughtful re-configuration of Australian masculinity is unlikely. These were the tears of getting caught, not gaining insight. Gideon Haigh, writing in the Australian, talked about how the modern cricketing parlance of ‘focus’ implied a narrowing of players outlooks so that ‘ethics goes easily by the board. And victory, of course, excuses everything’. The wowsers may be in the ascendancy but they still, as Haigh says, ‘have a very great deal to think about.’