All that these words (like Elite Honesty) do is
maintain the pretence that Australian cricketers operate - or should operate - on a higher moral plane than non-Australian cricketers; that the Australian line is the line, never mind that nobody's ever been told where that line is. It is what has got them into this mess in the first place.
It is what the
extreme punishments to Steven Smith, David Warner and Cameron Bancroft were so much about. The rest of the cricket world was made to look like a collective of tree-hugging liberal halfwits for having - fairly maturely, actually - come to terms with what is an on-field code violation and not
a sign of moral decay. Sides tampered with the ball, sometimes they got caught and were punished and yes, sometimes they got away with it. That's all life.
Cricket, though, reactionary and conservative cricket, fell for it, responding by increasing the seriousness and stigma of tampering as an offence. Instead of doubling down, cooling the atmosphere, and insisting that tampering wasn't an existential threat to the game, it went the other way, aspiring to this elite Australian way.
It was a depressing reminder of the way cricket is still unable to drag itself out of the
streak of puritanism that has marked its operations for so long, where it believes it is not just a morally superior game but that it produces morally superior humans. That's the subtext of the Spirit of Cricket, which, lately Australia seem to have clung to tighter than others. But here's a truth bomb for all of us: cricket isn't morally superior to anything. If it ever was, maybe it was nearly two centuries ago. It's a great sport, no doubt, but that is all it is - a sport. If it expanded globally in reality, rather than just in an ICC mission paper, it may well loosen up and understand this.
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