All hail the Marriageables

Andrew Wu in the Herald today suggested this Australian team needed its own name in the style of the Invincibles and proposed the Unflinchables. I’d like to submit a counter-proposal of the Marriageables, as a nod to the alleged selection policy of Great Leader Justin Langer and—more to the point—to the fact that the entire world badly wants to marry Pat Cummins, whose dreaminess is of such magnitude that it bathes the whole team in its gentle glow.

That’s no endorsement of Justin Langer’s cheesy patriarchal paternalism. It is in fact vexing that all this is happening on his snaky watch. After the “good enough to allow them to marry my daughters” line, and his “These are like my sons” during the Lords Test (making him a father who would put his kid on a bike without a helmet even though he thinks they’re maybe-probably-haven’t-really-checked “mandatory”), he just needs to drop the “as a father of daughters…” chestnut to score the trifecta of enraging expressions that need to be consigned to the rhetorical garbage bin.

It seems inevitable though that in the light of the Ashes victory, the narrative of this team’s success will be that after the nadir of Australian mongrelism that was Capetown, it was born again as bunch of fresh-faced plucky contenders, many of whom, yes, you’d say were the sorts of bloke you’d be comfortable taking home to meet Mum, were it not for the fact that if you took Pat Cummins home to Mum she would whip him out from under your nose as soon as look at him (“Can you give me a hand in the kitchen, Pat?”), with Dad hot on her heels.

The fact that this victory was achieved with very little input from the doghouse duo of Warner and Bancroft will only cement that narrative. The fact that this victory was almost entirely reliant on the input of Capetown Captain Steve Smith… let’s not dwell. He’s nothing if not a Special Case. A captain again? People talked about Steve Smith as one of those batsman for whom captaincy only improved his batting, but maybe it was actually holding him back and we just couldn’t tell because we didn’t know how much more he was capable of. He looks comfortable. The great mystery of Tim Paine is that he has the look of the character in the Gallipoli film who dies with a letter from his Sweetheart in his top pocket, but who against all odds has ended up squadron leader at the end of the film, and he looks comfortable too.

The English team looked like hollow men walking out onto the field yesterday evening to shake the hands of the Australian team and like it would take a superhuman effort to even turn up on Thursday. There has to be another brilliant chapter in this series though, doesn’t there? It’s really the height of ingratitude to be banging cutlery on the table after everything that’s been served up so far, but there you go. Take this woman’s hand.

Steve Smith Feels Great, or the Follies of Lords

There were all sorts of problems with the headlines lauding the brave and valiant Steve Smith, many of them to do with the valorisation of toughness over brain tissue, but for me the glaring one was not that it’s the wrong message, but that it’s the wrong descriptor. “Brave” is when you don’t want to do something but do it anyway. Steve Smith wanted to do something very badly and was intolerant of anything and anyone who tried to stop him. I wouldn’t call him brave any more than I would call a Terminator “brave”.

Usually when a players is injured, you see two pains on their face: the physical pain and then the pain of realising that they might have to go off. When Steve Smith was hit on the arm, there was the physical pain, and then seven stages of annoyance: that he made the error, that he wouldn’t be able to play as well as he wanted to, that time was being wasted, that he wouldn’t be able to play as well as he wanted to, that people would pester him about going off, that he wouldn’t be able to play as well as he wanted to, and then maybe, just maybe, a tiny flicker of annoyance around the edge or back of his mind at the fact that he may “have to” go off. Because he must on some level know that’s a thing, right? Because it kind of looked like he didn’t.

And then he gets knocked off his feet by a ball hitting his neck at over 140 km/hr and the routine starts up again, a routine that is fuelled by a delusion: that if you will it hard enough, you can make it so that nothing has happened. And then, beneath the delusion, a kind of psychosis: a belief that what has happened has, in fact, not happened. “I Feel Great”, says the man with a head injury and what looks like a broken arm. A bit later, there was a moment where he seemed to believe that maybe, just maybe, being given out LBW when you were out LBW was not a “have to” go off situation. That maybe what happened had not, in fact, happened.

It was madness, and I feel like the core terror and fascination of this day, and the reason it will go down as the day that cemented his greatness as a Figure of the game and not just a Champion is because it was the day on which we beheld the naked face of the personal madness of Steve Smith. “Madness” isn’t really a thing, in any scientific sense. I don’t mean mental illness or concussion. We know now he was concussed when he was hit on the head, however delayed the symptoms, and lord knows any of us can have various degrees of mental illness and maybe sportspeople especially so, but above or beyond or beside any of that—and it was there before he was hit on the head—was something so personal and peculiar and powerful, and so removed from the real and the rational, that I can’t think of a better word than madness.

Some might say that “mad” is Smith’s brand. The fidgets and rituals, the unorthodox style, the time in the nets that goes beyond obsession to something like fixation. When people talk about Steve Smith as a “freak”, they are referring to things that anyone could see from the numbers on the page without knowing the person, but the word does double duty as a reference to his personal freakishness, because greatness is never just about the results on the page, but the presence of the person who gets them and the way they get them. Anything you can refer to as a brand though is far too manageable to be madness. This was a glimpse of a monster both appalling and touching, because what was the face of that monster, sitting in the stands? A stony-faced boy at the dinner table who has been made to come in from play.

There was a shift in the perception of Smith after the first test, where the edges of his personhood started to blur around the edges into something more and less than human in an attempt represent something that went beyond extraordinary. Steve Waugh compared him to a computer—“It’s like he analyses every ball, and it’s like a computer: he spits out the answer.” Commentators didn’t talk about personal and technical flaws when addressing the question of “how to get Steve Smith out” but arranged data into various clusters of points to try to crack that code and get inside the matrix. To say that Archer’s answer to the “how to get Steve Smith out” question came as a jolt back to reality is an understatement. What happens when an unstoppable force meets an immoveable object? It makes a horrible sound.

At the end of that day of the Lords test it was like everyone was dazed from a series of blows and wired on adrenaline, but the difference between the rest of us and Steve Smith was that we knew something had very much happened, even if it wasn’t entirely clear what. We absorbed all of the reality and gravity that Smith could not seem to see or accept. After every extraordinary match you ask yourself: what have I just seen, what just happened? It’s like they stretch the bounds of what is possible and comprehensible and this time it went beyond the physical to the two great Beyonds themselves flashing before our eyes: Death and Madness.

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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.

Forget Hotspot, what is going on with Short Leg?

More on that later.

Nigel Llong's decision? It seemed to be due to misplaced and exaggerated deference to Snicko and the on-field umpire. Llong was thrown by Snicko not backing up the suggestion of Hotspot, creating a doubt in his mind, the benefit of which he gave to the on-field umpire/Lyon. It shouldn't have happened: Snicko is more likely to give a false negative due to ambient noise than Hotspot is likely to give a false positive. On top of that, it's not clear that Llong should have even referred to Snicko after the positive reading of Hotspot: the directive of the ICC for the 2013/2014 Ashes tour was that Snicko should only be consulted if Hotspot shows no mark. That was then, I don't know what the directive is now. 

As I write someone from the New Zealand team is being ridiculously mild-mannered about the whole thing with Chris Rogers: no wonder their colour was beige.

Sexing the cherry

I find it hard to shake the impression the pink ball has something to do with Jane McGrath, so entrenched are those associations by now. In that respect, Pink Lady might come into its own as a suggested nickname, but otherwise I favour "gum ball", because it doesn't look like a colour that occurs in nature to me, or not on a fruit in any case.

Judi

Is doing well as both school boy and school master. He has a haughty way of raising his head and looking down his nose as a way of asking the question of the bowler when a review is in the offing, and also does a good lip purse.

Lookalike time

My take on Short Leg?

The WACA

(It feels a bit awkward to post at the same time as the unfolding events in Paris, but after a certain amount of time glued to the news it starts to feel a bit voyeuristic and there's nothing more to be gained, for the time being anyway. I decided I was better employed in my role as a cricket voyeur.)

Davey Warner after 20 years at the WACA crease.

You asked for a Test series, you got the Australian Batsmen Achieve their Personal Goals show. Rumour has it New Zealand actually won the toss but McCullum said to Smith “No, no, after you.”

When the New Zealanders finally got a second wicket at the end of the day, for a moment it looked it could have been a no-ball. When the foot landed safely behind the line I said “Oh, thank God” out loud and Mr Batsy thought this was probably echoing the thoughts of Usman Khawaja.

New (or newish) Grandstand voices

Dirk Nannes is settling in nicely as one of the few ex-cricketer “expert” commentators on Grandstand not to be basically cranky (Mr Batsy’s wail of “Oh no, it’s Terry Alderman” yesterday could be heard from the other end of the house). I think it’s because he never represented Australia at Test level. Once you get that cap, it leave a mark, there will always be residual wounds, knots and itches and how you work those out (whether you work those out) will determine what kind of commentator you will be. Some carry them on their shoulders and are cranks (Alderman, Boycott, Lawson), some wear them like a red nose and are clowns (O’Keeffe, Fleming). The TV ones seem more well-adjusted on the whole than the radio ones, presumably because (1) they rub shoulders with other ex-players, a group therapy that takes the edge off and means no one can carry the “No one understands” chip or put up the “I know better than anyone else” hand; (2) they have usually had more successful careers; (3) their target audience contains fewer grumpy old men.

Dirk is so easygoing and likeable that he managed to use the expression “ipso facto” yesterday and still sound like he was down at the pub. That’s a trick Ed Cowan can only dream of.

Simon Katich. What can I say? My old flatmate gave the definitive verdict on Simon Katich on another reality show over six years ago: “He’s very Straight, isn’t he?” Nothing has changed. It seems an iceman on the field is a wooden man in the commentary box. The thrill of the hawk-eyed menace on the field ultimately relies on an certain internal stillness and rigidity of focus, and that’s what comes out on air. “You’d never see this field placing on the old WACA” was his idée fixe yesterday, said alas more times than it needed to be. (I still love you, Kat.)

This summer’s ads

Doesn’t Mitchell Johnson make it look easy in the protein powder ad? Not the lifting weights, the being on camera. Sportspeople are generally awful as models and actors but the camera loves him and he seems completely at home. Contrast Steve Smith in the Commonwealth Bank ad trying to be himself and make small talk. It’s like a bad date.

Modestly onwards

All I know about this series is:

1. Burns and Khawaja are in the squad. 

I have seen this headline with a helpfully illustrative photo 4 or 5 times over the last week or so. I do not know how it can be a headline story that many times, but there it is. I wish them well.

2. McCullum and Smith: Worst. Trashtalkers. Ever.

McCullum: Rowr.
Warner: Grr.
McCullum: Rowr: the Sequel.
Smith: Um, grr.

This also seems to have been fleshed out into the limpest of "sagas". They're reaching, aren't they? I'm surprised no one has waved Chris Cairns under McCullum's nose, but that would just be rude, and these guys just aren't. Which is why it all seems very pumped up.

And Judi, Judi, Judi*, YOUR HAIR.

I've always thought a lot less happens in sport than there is media space to fill, so pretty much anything will do as a scoop. I look forward to something happening today, though I have also started wondering whether sport is like music: what was playing during your formative years always has a special intensity that later stuff won't ever live up to. You start going "it's not like it was before, they all look the same..." I've now been watching for long enough to have a "golden age" to look back on. It's an optical illusion, newness and shininess is in the eye of the beholder, but I suspect I'm going to have to accept a certain loss of magic.

* Steve Smith = Judi Dench IS A THING. If Ramiz Raja is with you, you are at the right party.