The Club with no Ears

The Club with No Ears

 
Shane Warne? Dead-set legend © Getty Images

What are you supposed to do when somebody falls out of love with you? No one knows. What do you not do? About this, the doctors and professors and the psycho-gazillions graduating out of the world’s universities do have a bit of a clue. You do not turn inwards. You do not retreat. You do not stick one’s fingers in one’s ears. You do not chant na-na-na-can’t-hear-you when someone with whom you do not totally agree says something. You do not ignore your elders.

It stands to reason that the same rules should apply when a couple of million people fall out of love with you. This is roughly what has just happened, if the opinion surveys and front-bar chatter can be believed. A cricket-loving public has fallen out of love with cricket the way Ricky Ponting’s team plays it. Yet there was Ponting being interviewed by Peter Wilkins the other night, on The 7.30 Report, on some golf course, his putter under one arm and a finger stuffed in each ear.

The interview ran six minutes. It had as much gristle in at as fairy floss. For a few testy seconds, though, all that pink sludge nearly made Ponting choke.

Wilkins had dared mention Shane Warne’s Ricky-what-are-you-doing? tweet about field settings. He tossed in Geoff Lawson’s theory that being relieved of the captain’s duties might be in Ponting’s best batting interests. And this is how Ponting replied: “You know, one’s a good mate of mine and someone I played a lot of cricket with and someone I have total respect for, and the other one I don’t really care too much about what he has to say.”

With respect, Mr Ponting, the psycho-gazillions would call that denial.

It was understandable. Ponting’s hold on something dear to him – the captaincy – had been challenged. Pooh-poohing the challenger’s credentials was an instinctive response. It was also symptomatic of a wider tendency among this most recent generation of Australian cricketers. They belittle and dismiss the opinions of those who did not play with them, those not in the club.

How this translates into everyday discourse goes something like this. Warnie? Dead-set legend. Geoff Lawson? Don’t make me laugh.

With old Australian cricketers, even the most macho and boofheaded, you used to feel a sense of privilege, of humility. They exuded a quiet awe for the giant cricketers of yore whose big boots they were filling. When that changed is unclear. Something seemed to shift after the Perth Test of December 2000, Australia’s 12th victory in a row. Suddenly the statistics said they were better than any cricketers who had ever gone before. They let themselves believe it. And not only that. They let themselves believe they knew better than any cricketers who had ever gone before.

You can detect it in their ghostwritten and immodest end-of-career doorstoppers. You hear it when Justin Langer walks into a radio commentary booth and a century-and-a-quarter’s cricketing history is instantly wiped out, nothing more than a conspiracy of a few old fogeys’ imaginations designed to sell fat yellow books.

Greatest opener who ever lived, Justin? “Me mate Haydos, naturally.”

Scariest bowler? “Shoaib Akhtar, who else.”

Deadliest swinger? “Erm … Simon Jones.”

Biggest crowd thriller since Trumper? “Trumper who?”

Reading a Dean Jones newspaper column is a similarly unsettling sensation. “I was sad,” Deano wrote last Saturday, “to hear that Merv Hughes was replaced by Greg Chappell as a selector. No problem from me with Chappell … But leaving Jamie Cox as a selector has caught my attention. Imagine if you have played 50 Tests or more and Cox came up to say you’ve missed out and you’re dropped. Here is a selector who has never played for Australia.”

That’s Deano’s opinion. It is his right to express it. It does, though, sit vaguely at odds with the plain-as-day reality that columns by Deano (52 Tests) are less interesting, fluent and thought-out than columns by his fellow Age columnists Greg Baum (0 Tests), Peter Roebuck (0 Tests), Brendan McArdle (0 Tests) and Darren Berry (0 Tests).

Jones’s last Test was way back in 1992. He is, therefore, struggling to scrape into the club himself, a couple of big partnerships with Tugga on some Ashes tour earning him a kind of fringe membership.

Generally speaking, if you are not in the club and you want your opinion on someone who is in the club to count, you have to have a job in the Channel 9 commentary box. John Benaud – brother of someone in the Channel 9 commentary box – just about gets away with it. Out of all the ex-players, Benaud, Lawson and Ian Chappell, who is in the Channel 9 commentary box, stand brave as Australian cricket’s wisest and willingest speakers of not-nice truths.

Others, honorary club members, whose opinions get heeded tend to be mates of Channel 9 commentators and fellows who embody supposedly admirable qualities. They include Doug Walters (booze and cards), Rod Marsh (booze and sing-a-longs), Jeff Thomson (pig-hunting, Pom-hating and swear words).

Even those three, when they played the game, carried with them, some of the time at least, that certain unmistakable sense of privilege and humility, of quiet awe. Debutant Marsh reckoned it “the ants pants” when he was taken on a pre-Test round of golf with the great Ray Lindwall – last Test 1960. He slammed his Centenary Test hundred with a photo of Jack Blackham – last Test 1894 – in his pocket.

Today’s smug disregard for those who came before seems not merely boofheaded but boneheaded, especially now that the victory music has stopped and the likes of Geoff Lawson might conceivably have a lesson or two to pass on. If they do not listen, how can they get better? For sure, the Australia of modern times fielded radiant cricketers who spread joy. The world they ruled, though, was one well stocked with spinners and essentially bare in all other bowling departments: swing, seam and speed. And the state of global batting health was, and remains, tricky to gauge. Cosseted in titanium headgear and wielding planks for bats, modern batsmen have so many advantages they are almost playing a different game from their predecessors. Suffice to say that the teams Australia demolished were a couple of rungs short of awesome.

All of which prompts another question. This question paraphrases CLR James, a member of no club (other than anti-colonialist, Trotskyist, Marxist and socialist ones) and player of no Tests. And it goes: what do they know of cricket who only thrashing-pissweak-post-1995-opponents know?