04 November 2018

Bat like nobody's watching, play like you've never been hurt

My least favourite interior decorating trend of the last decade is WORDS as wall decorations. In the kitchen: FOOD. In the bedroom: SLEEP. Jumping out at random: LIVE, LAUGH, LOVE. And who can forget those old favourites SMILE and DREAM?

Cricket Australia has not. It has really upped the ante in this game:

As Mr Batsy remarked to me this morning, “elite honesty” is like being “a lot pregnant”. You are honest or you’re not. Once you start qualifying things, it’s a very short step to “it’s complicated”.

And of all the qualifiers... “elite”?

When I saw the “elite mateship” and “like an exclusive nightclub” quotes being thrown around when Langer was appointed coach, I assumed it was dirt people had dug out of his memoirs to show how inappropriate his appointment was. That interpretation seemed so obvious to me that it was not until NOW, when I saw this infernal word “elite” again, that I realised my mistake.

The general feeling when the tampering crisis broke was that one of the problems was the way the Australian dressing room had become a sort of isolated bubble leading to a disconnect between players and the broader Australian public. A bit like, I don’t know, they felt they were an elite group inside an exclusive nightclub.

I also thought we were living in a time when the word “elite” is not usually a term of praise. Aren’t “elites” those book-learnin’ latte-sippers? There’s a lot of innocence in Langer’s use of the term. I suspect he was actually trying to come up with an arresting turn of phrase, trying to avoid the clichés he knows he is fond of (“The man in the mirror is almost a cliché…”), and landed on “elite” as fresh take on “gentlemanly” and a fancy way of saying “really good.” He certainly got the arresting turn of phrase bit right.

Clichés and abstract nouns have been the stock in trade of coach and player speak since forever. They are an expected and disposable element of any press conference, almost an in-joke. To see them plastered on a dressing-room wall almost divests them of the tiny grain of meaning they may have still held. If you are trying to internalise a value, the last thing you need is to have it constantly in your face. You stop seeing things you see all the time.

It’s again a kind of innocence. The public denounced the loss of pride, integrity and respect for the game. Cricket Australia’s response: no worries, we are going to make the players say those words lots of times, and just wait until you see how big we can write those words on the wall!

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