Andrew Hamilton says the most striking feature of the recent ball-tampering scandal was the lack of recognition of any responsibility, other than that to win the game.
By Andrew Hamilton*
Cheating in sport has a long tradition.
A junior cricket team I played with was in trouble at the end of the first day, needing quick wickets to win.
A block of ice on the pitch overnight did the trick.
But it was a cold night, with the result that the ice block had not melted by morning.
First innings points were won, but in our team’s second innings every throw from fielders was directed at the batsmen’s head.
In an under 16 football final, too, many of the opposition team drove their cars to the ground.
And English village cricket was something else again, although less crude.
With a past like that I find it hard to condemn the Australian cricket team’s latest stratagem in South Africa too harshly.
People in glasshouses …
But we did then expect better of first class cricketers.
We saw them as playing in a competition that was clean, gentlemanly and played according to the rules.
They played the game in its ideal form to which we sometimes aspired but accepted that we would fall short.
They were custodians of its standards and good traditions.
And by and large State and national teams accepted that responsibility, at least in public.
The most striking feature of the events at the Newlands ground was the lack of recognition of any responsibility, other than that to win the game.
As with any activity that involves many people, cricket is shaped by multiple relationships — with other team members, with those in opposing teams, with cricketers at every level of the game in their own and other nations, with the public that supports them, with the media that feed off the public that supports them, with the technology involved in the game, and so on.
I would not expect that cricketers be able to articulate what is entailed in these relationships.
But I was surprised that some dim awareness of their importance did not make the players responsible hesitate before launching on such a daft adventure.
The interesting question is why this blindness.
I believe it reflects strands in the wider culture that emphasise competition and narrow self-interest and mistakes group loyalty for the common good.
The Royal Commission into the banks, which has run concurrently with the South African Test series, has offered a similar spectacle of self-interest in relationships with clients, sharp practice in the pursuit of profit, blindness to the common good and social contract, and sheer incompetence in manipulating technology.
Unlike the senior players in the Australian cricket team, however, the boards and CEOs of banks have insulated themselves from the tricks played in the name of their team.
The daily revelations of similar competitiveness, narrow focus on profit at all costs and denial of social responsibility displayed by political parties, Facebook and other big corporations suggest that Royal Commissions into their behaviour would reveal a similar culture.
Against this background we might expect very highly paid sportspersons exposed daily to the corporate values of the media and their cricket associations would identify the good of the game, the common good, with the good of winning games whatever that takes.
Perhaps, too, the Newlands debacle reflects the creeping militarisation of Australian public life.
This has been much remarked on in the public rhetoric surrounding Anzac Day and commemorations of Australian soldiers.
When the great heroes of Australian life are soldiers, there is pressure to deny the shameful deeds of soldiers and to vilify as unAustralian those who record them.
More gentle and peace making Australians, too, receive less acknowledgment.
Militarisation can also be seen in the transformation of the Immigration and Customs Departments into the Australian Border Force and the Department of Home Affairs.
New uniforms breed new practices.
Refugee and immigration policies do not reflect invitation and cooperation but exclusion and hostility.
It is not surprising, then, that cricketers representing Australia should conceive their test matches as battles and their tradition as a warrior tradition in which the goal is to win at all costs.
They will naturally see their relationships with other teams as fundamentally hostile, and will define their responsibility to the nation as winning.
We shall hear much of the need to change the culture of the cricket team in response to the ball tampering scandal.
But to do this perhaps we shall need to attend first to the foundation of the cricketing culture in the wider Australian culture.
* Andrew Hamilton is Consulting Editor of Eureka Street.
This article first appeared at www.eurekastreet.com.au.
