Sentimental education

Illustration for Tom Brown's Schooldays by Arthur Hughes

Last night, I saw the Steve Smith press conference from across an RSL dining room and it was quite close enough to get the message.

On Wednesday, I spoke to my counsellor about some free-floating anxiety. It’s everything and nothing anxiety that gets hoovered up out of the ether, and it can be useful to spread the contents of the vacuum bag out on the floor and see exactly how ‘everything’ and ‘nothing’ it is and just in case there is, I don’t know, a lost earring in there.

Part of the everything-nothing was the ball-tampering crisis, and my counsellor said she knew quite a few people who were going through a bit of an identity crisis about themselves and being an Australian because of the scandal, and… I’m going to have to interrupt you there. There is nothing about this incident that challenges my sense of who I am or what being an Australian means. I have no idea how that even works. The sum total of my personal ball-tampering-related anxiety is a) feeling really sorry for Steve Smith, and b) a pathological conviction that any mess whatsoever is ultimately my fault and I have a responsibility to fix it.

What is crucially missing from my own existential make up in this equation is the experience of cricket through the eyes of a cricket-playing child. I have never idolised a cricketer, fantasised about being a cricketer, attempted to emulate a cricketer’s action. I have never had the experience of me being small and them being big. I have never bonded (or dis-bonded) with a parent, teacher or any other kind of authority through cricket. I have never gone through any complicated formative experiences to do with friendship, enemies, teamwork, or peer pressure through cricket. There is no Bildungsroman in my experience of cricket.

Some good articles have been written about the connection between cricket and the national Bildungsroman in order to explain the level of response to this incident. Ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny. Either way, it’s a narrative that leaves me cold or rather at room temperature, because I’m not trying to claim any moral or intellectual high ground from this fact, it just is what it is.

I am in awe of our cricketers in the sense that I am in awe of their extreme physical and mental discipline, their extreme personal sacrifice and above all their tolerance of extreme psychological exposure and pressure to perform. Early on in this saga, someone drew a parallel between Steve Smith’s “I’m embarrassed to be here, quite frankly” press conference of Hobart 2016 and his “I’m embarrassed to be here, quite frankly” of Capetown 2018. Their point was that “embarrassment” didn’t cut it, quite frankly, and Smith was going to have to do better to avoid embarrassment being the symbol of his weakness as a captain.

There’s something else to be drawn from this parallel. When do the actions of our national cricket team launch a thousand headlines and letters to the paper? When does public contempt rain down on them like hailstones? When they misbehave, yes, but also when they lose. Where do you think they get the message you must win at all costs from? People try to annex moral ground in these situations by making out that in both cases it is about playing the game properly and players showing appropriate respect for their position. Batsmen are losing their wickets out of some lack of character, not because of technical error or lapse of judgement. 

Somehow the amount of the money they are paid is invoked as both the reason they do not perform properly (what can you expect from mercenaries?) and the reason they must perform properly (I demand my money’s worth!). And the eternal, eternal refrain of “there are hundreds of others ready to replace you in a heartbeat, mate, so you’d better shape up quick smart.” Um, this kind of argument is why unions were invented. 

There is a moral dignity we expect from our cricketers because of the complicated ideology attached to sport in general, which is very much bound up with its relationship to children - the child we were ourselves, the children we see watching now, the adulthood training that sport is supposed to represent. Sport is inseparable from this dynamic, and the morality of players is important relative to this dynamic.

We are also all adults however, us and the cricket players and, as adults, not particularly big or small, or big and small in different ways and at different times. Good people do bad things. As adults in the ordinary world, there is a moral dignity we need to afford to cricketers, as we do other human-sized adults. However big your own existential angst in response to this situation is, I'm sure it is dwarfed by Steve Smith's.

Pandora's box

I have a friend who is gay and from a very traditional family. One day she told her family she was gay and all hell broke loose so she took it back and everything went back to the way it was before. I don’t know how you do ‘take back’ that sort of thing, but the fact that it worked shows just how much some people are happy to know things but need not to be told them - really really desperately need not to be told them. If you do tell them it collapses some membrane between what they know and want to know causing the two liquids to combine and combust.

This is the only way I can explain what is happening here. I felt the shock as much as anyone else when Steve Smith looked us in the eye and said yes, we tried to tamper with the ball, we talked about it at lunch. But when I break down the content of what he is saying I can’t work out why I should be shocked. Ball tampering is common practice. Under ICC codes it is a relatively minor offence. Players of all nations have been caught ball tampering, been shown to ball tamper or admitted ball tampering. Captains of many nations have been caught ball tampering. Shahid Afridi, in some sort of daze, bit into a ball on camera, making no attempt to hide it. We have to assume the incidents we know about are a fraction of what happens, and we do assume that, because ball tampering is common practice and something you are taught about as a schoolboy. We accept ball tampering as part of the game. We accept ball tampering as part of the game.

Shahid Afridi claimed he was trying to smell the ball. Faf du Plessis, captain of the team we are currently playing and filmed a few years ago engaging in sharp practice with a mint, mounted the defence that it isn’t ball tampering if it doesn’t work. It was fantastic. “Can I truly said to have tampered with the ball if my attempt to tamper did not in actual fact alter the condition of the ball?” They pushed poor Hashim Amla out in front of the cameras to say “um no you are.” Complete bullshit and everyone knows it’s bullshit. It’s predictable, laughable bullshit, which we predict, laugh at, and move on.

It seems then that this absurd evasive dance is also part of the game, as much as ball tampering itself. The absurd evasive dance of pretending you haven’t tampered with the ball. Dissimulating when you’re on the field, denying when you’re off it.

“Absurd evasive dance” might seem like a good description of poor Cameron Bancroft putting a bit of tape down his trousers, but there was no dance to it, and that was the problem. It was a good example of why lollies are a better tampering tool. Part of the absurd evasive dance is its elegance, genius, sleight of hand, gaslighting. Bancroft is no Shahid Afridi. Steve Smith made no attempt at absurd evasive dance whatsoever but looked us in the eye and said yes, we tried to tamper with the ball, we talked about it at lunch. He did not play the game. And all hell broke loose.

It seems we need - desperately need - to preserve a part of the universe which is free from the law of non-contradiction, a place where we can know and not know at the same time. Okay. So punish Steve Smith. So long as we are clear on exactly what rule he broke.