Convicts v Marxist Land Thieves - Crucket
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@donsteppa said in Convicts v Marxist Land Thieves - Crucket:
I suppose the cricketing autobiographies over the next few years will become more dramatic...
Bancroft should write his - i think the poor bastard will struggle to get back into the team after this. May as well throw every other bastard under the bus and go play in India
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@nzzp said in Convicts v Marxist Land Thieves - Crucket:
@donsteppa said in Convicts v Marxist Land Thieves - Crucket:
I suppose the cricketing autobiographies over the next few years will become more dramatic...
Bancroft should write his - i think the poor bastard will struggle to get back into the team after this. May as well throw every other bastard under the bus and go play in India
The way the talk is about Warner never playing for Australia again, you could be talking about him
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@virgil said in Convicts v Marxist Land Thieves - Crucket:
Integrity and Australian cricket team simply don’t belong together in the same sentence, never has never will.
If ball tampering is the marker then integrity doesn't fit many teams in cricket.
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@nta said in Convicts v Marxist Land Thieves - Crucket:
@virgil said in Convicts v Marxist Land Thieves - Crucket:
Integrity and Australian cricket team simply don’t belong together in the same sentence, never has never will.
If ball tampering is the marker then integrity doesn't fit many teams in cricket.
Think it goes way beyond ball tampering Nick, that’s why the backlash has been so over the top. ( especially back home in Oz)
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@NTA
Just watched AB and Brendan Julian being interviewed on Fox Sports 500.BJ (unfortunate nickname/initials) repeated the many asserions by others that this was a catalyst for a reaction to the loss of respect for the Strayan cricket team.
It's not about ball tampering only.
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I thought the CA response was tone deaf. I respect the need for process, and investigation, but Lehmann should have been on the plane home.
As many have said, this is about far more than just ball tampering. It's about culture. Lehmann has been the man who set the culture in this side, and the reason many of the rough edges have been allowed to remain.
CA need to see the bigger picture here, or else they will make the situation even worse.
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Just speculation of course, but I'm wondering if they're moving towards making Warner the fall guy. He's universally hated, pretty much always the cause of problems and also semi retarded.
I think that will satisfy the sharks. But I can't see Lehmann getting away with this. IMHO he's living on borrowed time.
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@rancid-schnitzel said in Convicts v Marxist Land Thieves - Crucket:
Just speculation of course, but I'm wondering if they're moving towards making Warner the fall guy. He's universally hated, pretty much always the cause of problems and also semi retarded.
I think that will satisfy the sharks. But I can't see Lehmann getting away with this. IMHO he's living on borrowed time.
Christ Rancid, why don't you tell us what you really think of Warner
Was pretty funny hearing Mark Richardson refer to him as 'Davy dumb dumb' on the radio.
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Could be mostly gossip but sounds about right, makes you wonder if they should have flown over more replacements. Will the bowlers hearts be in this?
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@virgil said in Convicts v Marxist Land Thieves - Crucket:
Could be mostly gossip but sounds about right, makes you wonder if they should have flown over more replacements. Will the bowlers hearts be in this?
It's almost like they are disintegrating, mentally.
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@majorrage said in Convicts v Marxist Land Thieves - Crucket:
Does it matter if he knew or not?
He's the coach, a selector and in charge of moulding the team. He is just as culpable.
But if he didn't directly know.
There's a big difference between being sent home immediately in disgrace, and being fired in the winter for not having a strong enough guiding hand on the tiller.
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Been hung out to dry, thrown under the bus, tarred with the same brush etc etc can do that to you.
Different circumstances but it has the same feel to it when the NZ cricket team were caught up in that blast in Sri Lanka I 92. Team was divided, some wanted to stay, most wanted to leave. Others threatened over their career if they didn’t toe the line.
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@virgil said in Convicts v Marxist Land Thieves - Crucket:
Could be mostly gossip but sounds about right, makes you wonder if they should have flown over more replacements. Will the bowlers hearts be in this?
Oh my word. Who does the editing for the hearld?
Aussie Test great Gavin Robertson told Fox Sports News on Tuesday night the morale within the dressing room is so bad that players want to leave the tour and abandon the Fourth Test, beginning Friday.
Bwaa haaa haaa
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This is another really good read, from a journo on the ground:
They’ll be taking Steve Smith’s faces off the cereal packets. Removing his image from the poles and buildings as if to signal the regime change. He’s fallen.
It’s heartbreaking — even if he does deserve everything that’s coming his way, although I suspect he doesn’t deserve all of it. This pile-on is unseemly but speaks volumes. I want to hug him and say it will be all right but I know it won’t.
The ceiling was sagging in the dressing room long before he entered it. The roof had been leaking for years. Nobody was interested in the rising damp because there was so much sunshine. Nobody noticed how low they had to stoop.
And then it caved in. And every indiscretion and negligence of past and current tenants fell on the head of Smith and whoever was with him that lunchtime on day three at Cape Town.
David Warner was certainly one. There’s a sense that every time there’s a bin fire in cricket the opener has been seen wandering from the scene with a pocketbook of matches, an empty can of petrol and a ‘wasn’t me’ shrug.
It’s not all him. The contempt has been building for years. Opposition players have danced a jig of delight that this has caught up with the Australians. They aren’t holding back in public and in private.
The blame game has started in Australian cricket’s inner circle. They’re under siege and turning on each other. Cameron Bancroft is collateral damage. A man in his eighth Test he knew nothing but the environment he walked into. He was stupid and he deserves punishment but the fact the match referee didn’t even see fit to suspend him for a game suggests something. He says he was “in the wrong place at the wrong time”. He was, Nuremberg style, just following orders.
Warner, the ball maintenance man, will argue that he has just been doing his job. The bowlers benefit from it. The team benefited from it. The coach, well, the coach sets the agenda. He’s not exactly the retiring type.
Smith’s clumsy attempt to protect the identity of his co-conspirator(s) had an unfortunate side-effect. Josh Hazlewood and Mitchell Starc were rightly upset and wanted it corrected.
Back to Smith because I can’t shake the sadness about his demise. Here was one of the most personable, least calculating, more talented and one of the more genuinely decent people to skipper the Australian team in recent decades.
That’s no knock on the others, but Smith has an openness, even naivety, that few of those men had.
Here was a man with no pretensions. An enthusiast. In Port Elizabeth he’d been out with his drone (the fad that’s keeping them occupied this tour) and he’d filmed a pod of dolphins swimming beyond the waves. It was spectacular footage and he couldn’t wait to show it, standing in his towel in the foyer of the team hotel, as excited as a kid with a new toy. Which he was.
Smith entered the highest office in Australian sport wearing shorts and thongs, opened the door and greeted all comers with a goofy grin.
And, boy, can he play. Gifted with natural talent but not on the scale of an AB de Villiers who has had his bat kissed by God, Smith worked and works and worked and works and grafted a goofy approach that has seen him achieve results in his career no batsman, Bradman aside, had.
The outrage is searing, crippling even. People are concerned for him. He cuts such a lonely, devastated figure in the corridors of the hotel. Most of the others have their families with them, for once he is flying solo.
It’s a mark of his character that he saw a bus headed for Bancroft, knew that it wasn’t right and attempted to throw himself in front of it. He knew he couldn’t completely protect the opener but he wanted to share his pain. How many would have done that? How much has it cost Smith?
If he’d kept quiet this could have been “managed”. Maybe if he had his time again he would. What sort of person voluntarily risks all they have achieved?
This time a few days back Smith had the world at his feet. He was the friendly face of Australia’s favourite sport. Indian franchises were willing to pay him the best part of $2.5 million to turn out for a month or so. Australia paid him around $2m just to play cricket. How good was life?
The ground that was at his feet has crumbled and Smith is plummeting, hitting a world at every plunge like the character in Emily Dickinson’s poem. There’s a funereal air around the Australian cricket team in Cape Town but there’s nobody sending flowers or notes of sympathy.
I want to understand what happened in the dressing room that lunch time. You might want to bury Smithy but it shouldn’t stop you taking the time to wonder how this god awful mess came about.
The pressures of captaining the Australian team are immense. Greg Chappell talked about the mental strain that led to the underarm moment that Trevor Chappell says has haunted him the rest of his life. Every time he enters a room there’s an announcement from the PA, “here is Trevor underarm Chappell, the man who brought disgrace on Australian cricket”. He’s almost an old man now but a moment in his youth, in another century, stalks him.
Captains go crazy with the strain. Most crack at some point. Sometimes it’s calamitous, other times just a little unsettling. Ricky Ponting turned on an England coach in unseemly scenes as the Ashes slipped away, he took a catch once and threw the ball into the turf as a World Cup slipped away. He did it because another fielder collided with him. Steve Smith was his name.
Allan Border is a simple man, an exception to life’s usual course in that he has grown less grumpy with age. He snapped regularly as skipper, said things to his teammates that he regretted, but it was his release valve. He blew up once and was briefly on strike over selection. Refusing to go with the team, yelling on the phone instead of playing.
Michael Clarke got himself into some dark places. His captaincy was hanging by a thread on the day Phillip Hughes died. He had gone off the reservation and Cricket Australia was considering disciplinary action against him.
In Joseph Conrad’s classic novel Lord Jim, Jim is a friendly young man who makes a critical bad decision in the heat of the moment. Unlike others who are possibly more culpable he faces the music, but the shame haunts him for the rest of his life.
Smith will be beating himself harder than anybody can beat him over this. He’s done something foolish and he’s paying for it like few before him. Politicians lie and cheat and stay in office unscathed. Everybody does something they are ashamed of.
The greatest shame is that moment of treachery is so out of character with everything else about Steve Smith.
Maybe I had him wrong, but I am pretty sure I don’t. He can’t remain as captain and he can’t play cricket for Australia again for some time, but he should not be exiled or excoriated forever.
PETER LALOR
