As Australia went down in Perth like a fast-motion sunset, the undead zombie of our cricket culture rose out of the dark.
Our guys are too nice to win, we heard. Why are they smiling at the Indian players? Where is the fighting spirit of the olden days (asked the veterans of the olden days)? The cricket public is disappointed. It sees the veins popping in Virat Kohli’s neck, and it wants some of that from our side. It wants Australian mongrel.
We’ll hear more about it in coming days, because the zombie offers himself for selection whenever the Australian men’s Test team loses catastrophically.
For better or worse, the zombie has had a track record created around it. The teams of Ian Chappell, Mark Taylor and Steve Waugh not only defeated their opponents, they forced them to submit. In 2013, after repeated losses, the overly nice Mickey Arthur was replaced as coach by the combative Darren Lehmann. Soon, Michael Clarke was warning opponents about broken arms, even the sweet-natured Mitchell Johnson turned feral, and hey presto, a 5-0 Ashes win was followed by out-growling South Africa in the growliest place in the cricket world.
When under severe pressure, the “real” Australian cricketing character supposedly revealed itself – flinty, unyielding, willing to push sportsmanship to its limits – and the public applauded the victories. The ends justified the means.
The zombie was equally persuasive as an international origin story. England trounced Don Bradman’s Australia when they resorted to Bodyline. (Later, Bradman took revenge with parallel ruthlessness.) Clive Lloyd’s West Indian dynasty, Pakistan in the 1980s, Sri Lanka in the mid-1990s and the modern Indian teams became world-beaters when they asserted their testosterone. Cricket history began to be patterned as a morality tale, where the hero had to choose a fork in the road between being a nice loser or a brutish winner.
India celebrate their big win in the first Test at Perth.Credit: Getty Images
So here we are again. A limp performance, Australia having been ground into its home dust under the Indian heel, and a boiling temper from sections of the public and the veterans.
But the present doesn’t have to be a slave to history, and the history isn’t always what we think it is.
Today we’re in a mini-counterhistory. Australian cricket is a vertically-integrated corporation of nice. From Simon the Likeable at the head of the administration, nice support staff, a chairman of selectors whose only proven quantity is his niceness, nice coach, nice captain, nice players, nice everybody, winning with a pleasant smile.
We got here, of course, when the zombie crossed the line in Cape Town in 2018. Australian cricket set about killing the zombie. From then, sportsmanship would come first and winning would be a goal, not an at-all-costs need. It helped (a lot) that a generation of hyper-talented players were on hand to reinforce the message that winning and niceness did not have to be mutually exclusive.
But do nice guys really finish last? Isn’t the binary thinking – nice losers or nasty winners –built on false assumptions?
Cricket can be nuanced enough to look past the either/or. It allows for five-day draws, after all. History’s lessons are complicated, if we look for them. Bodyline tactics were only used sparingly in 1932/33. Douglas Jardine won mainly because he had Harold Larwood, Wally Hammond and Herbert Sutcliffe, three players who would still belong in an all-time England XI nearly a century later. The teams of Chappell, Lloyd and so on might have been hard-edged, but this was just a garnish on their overflowing talent. In the Taylor-Waugh era, it was always a bit puzzling why players like Shane Warne, Glenn McGrath, Ian Healy and the Waughs would raise the nastiness in times of stress. They probably would have won without it. Did it betray a hint of insecurity? Were the outbreaks of ‘toughness’ instead a revelation of self-doubt? We’ll never know, because by then the switch to nastiness, when losing games, had become something like a cult.
A similar pressure is now on Patrick Cummins and his team. Poorly coded messages have been sent from the commentary boxes and the town square. Their “body language” was weak. “Captain Woke” has softened them. There’s a team “rift” (nothing, supposedly, toughens a team like accusations of a rift). In the observation towers lurk characters who believe in the binary, not least the recently-retired opener who, as “Bull”, averaged 48.20 with a century every three Test matches and then, as “Reverend”, averaged 37.3 with a century every seven matches. Niceness wins praise but nasty made more runs.
So let’s see how deep that post-2018 dedication to the spirit of cricket runs. It was stress-tested at Lord’s last year. The nice guys ran out Jonny Bairstow and Captain Woke didn’t retract the appeal. Legal? Yes. Fair? Fair enough. Nice? No, not nice. It wasn’t that they did anything wrong, but they didn’t go out of their way to make nice. The Ashes, after all, were on the line.
As they consider their options, they might draw some unconventional “learnings”, if that’s the correct word, from history. Countless cricket teams have played “hard” after losing. Their body language turns macho and they begin sledging. But they lose anyway, because no amount of aggression can make up for a loss of confidence or the march of time, and because they lose, and they don’t fit the zombie mythology, they’re instantly forgotten.
Also forgotten, far too easily, are the overwhelming numbers of cricket champions who were also nice. If Cummins wants to draw on an Australian tradition, he can look to Victor Trumper, Arthur Morris, Alan Davidson, Neil Harvey, Richie Benaud, Brian Booth, Doug Walters, Adam Gilchrist, Mike Hussey – too many to name. Winners, exemplars of sportsmanship. Look at history closely, and the zombie might be a phantom.
As their powers, form and confidence decline with age, as they are challenged by opponents who might just be a bit better than them, Cummins and his players face a choice that will define their era. It’s easy to win with a smile. How about how to lose? That’s a test of character as much as skill, and they might have to decide if they want to be remembered for their strength of character and their commitment to an alternative ‘Australian way’.
But the zombie is agitating for his turn, and in Adelaide half the match will be played after sundown.
