I’ve deliberately avoided this site for a couple of days following the end of the Test as I figured the fall-out would be unbearable and that mass hysteria and over reaction would at least equal if not strongly overpower reasoned comment and debate. Having read through as much as I could of this thread – though I haven’t had anywhere near enough time to read it all – it’s safe to say that I wasn’t to be disappointed.
Reflecting on the events of Sydney one of my overwhelming feelings has unfortunately been one of resentment, yet very little of this resentment is directed toward the twenty-two men who played themselves into the ground for their countries. Indeed, it was the quality of the cricket on show over those five days that just makes the aftermath all the more disappointing. My resentment instead has been directed at what I’ll call the three Ms – the Mediators, the Media, and the Muppets. Indulge me while I explain…
The Mediators, otherwise known as the Umpires, are the first and certainly easiest target. Team India is furious and this is hardly surprising – they have every right to be so. The two men in white both had poor Tests, this cannot be disputed. That they made many mistakes is without question, nor is the fact that most of those mistakes – though not all, it must be said - went against India. I have more sympathy with the Mediators though than I do with the other two Ms who have incurred my ire if for no other reason than that umpiring is a tough job and that I genuinely believe there was no conspiracy to screw the visiting team over – they were both just poor. Where the resentment is exacerbated for me is that their faults over the course of the Test has given the world an excuse to cast doubts on what was a record-equalling win, and by doing so to diminish the achievement. I wish I could enjoy such an historic victory more than I have done, but the cloud hanging over the whole affair has prevented this. This cloud began with the Mediators. Unfortunately for us all, the cloud was darkened and magnified by my other two Ms – the Media and the Muppets.
The Media’s role in all this has been commented on at length, suffice it to say that the disappointment almost lay less in the fact that the hysterical hyperbole and over-reaction has been so prevalent and more in the fact that this kind of reaction wasn’t at all a surprise. The witch hunt that seems to be being conducted against Australian cricket, its players and its fans, and by extension Australia as a whole, has been such that you have to remind yourself that a) it’s only a game, and b) what’s more it’s a game where poor umpiring and conspiracies of home-country advantage from officialdom have existed since its birth.
Yes, Australia got the benefit of the majority of the poor umpiring decisions in Sydney. What’s more, a number of Australia’s cricketers behaved with an abject lack of grace and class in both the pursuit and achievement of victory – the whooping and hollering after the final catch was claimed was nothing short of cringeworthy, particularly given the fact that Anil Kumble was allowed to walk unacknowledged all the way to boundary before someone had the plain good manners to shake his hand. I couldn’t help but compare these scenes with Edgbaston in 2005 when Andrew Flintoff immediately went to commiserate with Brett Lee after England’s narrowest of wins. Kumble’s wonderful and so very nearly successful rearguard deserved at least the same respect.
I make no excuses for any of this, and any criticism directed toward the men in the Baggy Greens for this or other indiscretion is both warranted and in order. Yet the pure mud-slinging sensationalism of the likes of Roebuck and others, as well as some of the articles in the Indian press, are doing nothing to add reasoned comment to the debate and everything to fan the flames of controversy, hostility and international tension. The fact that a number of cricket writers and commentators from both sides have provided fair and balanced comments just goes to highlight further the raging torrent of tabloid-style sensationalism from the others. It’s lowest-common-denominator reporting…
…which brings us to the Muppets – plenty of whom can unfortunately be found right here on CW. I’m talking here about the members of the public, from both sides of the fence, who take the sensationalist and hyperbolic “reporting” at face value, lap it up and run with it – casting aspersions over events on which they have precious little factual knowledge but a whole lot of conjecture and emotion, instead offering knee-jerk reactions and throwing around words like “cheat” and “racist” to make themselves feel better. The “cheating” accusation has been levelled at Australia in this Test, but I would be interested to know how it is that acting in a boorish and unsavoury manner (as they unquestionably have done at times) is the same as cheating. It’s not that criticism of Australia’s players of methods is unwarranted, it’s the inconsistency and hypocrisy displayed by so many outraged punters clamouring to have their say that I have issue with. At least try to give the impression that you’re doing your best to avoid such blatant double standards – and this is directed at least as strongly at those Australian fans rabidly defending their boys as though they’re angels who’ve done nothing wrong. The blindness and hypocrisy permeates from both directions – this is unavoidable, I suppose, and many would say simply a product of human nature. To a point this is true – we all have glasses of a certain colour over our eyes to some extent, and yet I’ll never accept that this is an excuse for the jingoistic extremism we have been seeing from a sizeable and vocal section of the populace.
At the end of it all, the bottom line here is a desperately sad one. We’ve just seen what most of us dream of – a truly, genuinely great Test match. Two outstanding cricket teams – augmented by a string of memorable individual performances - going all out at each other and playing superb, tough cricket for over after over, session after session, momentum swinging back and forth between the combatants all the way until the final dying moments of the fifth day. It’s what we love about the longest and purest form of our game, and the stuff that cricketing legend is made of.
We should all be celebrating. But no one is.
They let Slater keep his number but I'm quite surprised he was happy to be out of sequence, tatoo or not.
