Steve Smith's Men: Behind Australian Cricket's Fall

by Geoff Lemon

If there’s one thing bullies love, it’s righteousness. They always know the rules. Find a technicality to claim they’ve been wronged and they can guard their own sins from interrogation: a pre-emptive strike against being held accountable.

‘Anyone else find this pre-Ashes trash-the-opposition talk childish? In cricket there is only ever one contest, and that is on the field,’ sighed Indian commentator Harsha Bhogle.

‘I’ve spent plenty of years on Warner’s trail since that drive to Matraville in 2009 and can vouch that he is not wired like anyone else,’ wrote Lalor. The reality is that Australia’s most controversial modern player is not two sides of a coin. He’s more like a handful of twelve-sided dice. Any combination of facets could be true. Any of it could change in an instant. All of those possibilities are simultaneous. He probably knows as little about them as anyone.

Test matches are often decided by how players respond to frustration, rather than by the performance that frustrated them. At Adelaide in 2013 Cook failed in the first innings, spent two days in the field, then impulsively hooked Ryan Harris to fine leg for 3. Brisbane this time followed the same pattern, ending with the exact same dismissal off Hazlewood for 7. Both times it showed a player whose decision-making was baked.

Curators are alchemists, commentators are astrologers: the former meld arcane physical ingredients with heat, moisture and time, and still have little idea how it’s going to turn out; the latter interpret the result using generalisation, assumption, history and hindsight.

We guess blindly then filter events through that lens. If you don’t rate the batsman, it was flat. If a spinner did well it was a Bunsen. Low score without wickets: dead. With wickets: unplayable. Physicists are rarely involved, but pitch talk is so vague it’s difficult to prove anything wrong. What if an unplayable track is played well? The day-night format is the Pitch Wanker Expansion Pack. More grass to protect the pink ball could add seam movement. More polish might swing longer. Moist evening air might hoop. Or none of those things might happen, but we’ll use confirmation bias to blot that out.

One of my favourite Steve Smith moments didn’t involve Steve Smith at all. In 2013 filming vox pops outside Lord’s, we spotted a punter in a terrible blond wig and replica team shirt. Smith had taken three wickets to claw his team back into the game, so I barrelled up and started interviewing the impersonator as the real thing. Worse for wear after a long day, he rose to the occasion magnificently.

‘This has been a culture that has developed over a generation,’ wrote a fan named Matthew Beggs. ‘It’s not going to change quickly. Australian cricket culture has always listened to loud voices. Maybe it’s time to listen to the quiet ones.’ The loud ones will keep insisting that aggression is the way of the world. That’s what they do. But accepting that means accepting cricket as another way to bring out the worst in people. Imagine if cricket was only a way to bring out the best.

To pre-empt the response that a business can do what it likes, CA is not a business. It’s a non-profit organisation exempt from paying tax. Notionally sport has a social benefit, so CA’s remit is to manage the game for the greatest public good. That makes it a public entity; effectively Australians own CA and are represented by the teams it manages.

Correlation and causation are famously not the same, but God, it’s easy to imagine that they are. No story ever ends: every ride into a sunset has a cold night’s camping ahead.

the team kept struggling though, Warner would be on the redemption list too. Ethics meet pragmatism very quickly.

There’s a chance things might change: they can when people try. It’s our blessing and our curse that even a pessimistic future usually sparks a flicker of hope. ‘Nothing is written,’ said TE Lawrence to Sherif Ali. ‘No fate,’ Sarah Connor carved into a tabletop. Look at least to the wisdom of these ancients.