BackAustralian cricket | As rugged as the Outback
Australian cricket, much like cricketers from its hinterland, continues to be symbolized by a never-say-die grit
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The outpouring of grief that followed the tragic death of Phillip Hughes, who had played 26 Tests for Australia, surprised many who don’t follow cricket closely. “People die every day," said some. “It’s not exactly Gaza, is it?" asked others. You could accuse them of insensitivity, but the fact was that their reactions owed much to a lack of understanding of what Hughes was a symbol of.
He wasn’t just a hugely talented young player struck down in his prime, or a death on a stage that doesn’t see many—he died from injuries sustained after being hit on the head by a ball. He was a representative of a way of life that’s fast disappearing in the Internet-PlayStation age.
Hughes wasn’t a “factory" product from one of the thousands of cricket academies that now dot the globe. He was a country boy from a banana farm in Macksville, with a playing style best described as “homespun".
Glenn McGrath, who took more Test wickets than any other fast bowler (563), was another Outback boy. “He carries on the great Australian bush cricketing litany, most famously represented by Sir Donald Bradman, and movingly depicted in Sir Russell Drysdale’s painting of two bush kids playing against a stone wall in the sombre ochre of the Australian Outback," says a Wisden Almanack profile from 1998. “Dubbo is a wheat and sheep-farming centre a couple of hundred miles north-west of Sydney, not quite the real bush, but McGrath’s father farmed in a succession of tiny settlements outside Dubbo with names smelling of gum-leaves: Eumungerie, Galgandra, Narromine. It was at the last that the young Glenn went to primary and high school, and where he started to play cricket."
Life in the bush and the Outback is hard, and the cricketers that have come from there have usually been as tough as the leather boots they wear. It has not been much different in the cities, where grade cricket provides young players with a crucible-like atmosphere in which to harden their skills. But Australian cricket, and indeed most Australian sport, is underpinned by something that goes beyond skill. John Arlott, the celebrated English commentator, described it thus in 1948.
“Australianism means single-minded determination to win— to win within the laws but, if necessary, to the last limit within them," he wrote. “It means where the ‘impossible’ is within the realm of what the human body can do, there are Australians who believe that they can do it—and who have succeeded often enough to make us wonder if anything is impossible to them. It means they have never lost a match—particularly a Test match—until the last run is scored or their last wicket down."
That toughness has never been at the expense of flair though. There is an innate mistrust of the maverick in England—look at what happened to the likes of Kevin Pietersen and Glenn Hoddle—but that isn’t the case in Australia. There, “characters" tend to be celebrated, as long as they buy into the team ethic, the cult of the baggy green. So, few cared if Doug Walters spent hours in a bar on the eve of a Test, or if Andrew Symonds went out hunting wild boar.
On my first tour there, back in 2003-04, the sledging, or “mental disintegration"—as Steve Waugh, former Australian captain, famously called the mind games—started as early as the immigration desk. “Come to watch your boys get another thrashing, have you?" asked the gent who stamped my passport. In front of the Gabba in Brisbane—a venue where Australia have not lost since 1988—a group of fans wondered what it felt like to follow the “second-best team", a reference to Australia’s crushing 125-run victory over India in the 2 003 World Cup final.
But there’s the thing. As much as they dish it out, Australians can usually take it too. Fortunately for me, England’s Rugby Union players had beaten Australia in the World Cup final a fortnight before that Gabba game. So when I responded with “Why don’t you ask your rugby team?" all I got were a few laughs in response.
Throughout this tour, the Australian players and many in the crowd have been on Virat Kohli’s case. India’s new captain doesn’t always help himself with his on-field antics, but the heckling is often tinged with admiration. On my Facebook page, I saw a comment from a Sydney-based acquaintance who insisted that Kohli must have some Australian ancestry, given the zeal with which he went into verbal jousts and confrontations. After his hundred in Adelaide, in the opening Test of the series, Steve Waugh tweeted that he “plays like an Australian". From one who epitomized Australian cricket in the modern era, there could be no greater praise.
Watching cricket in Australia is so much fun, however, because—unlike India—it’s not a one-sport nation. They love cricket, but there is no unhealthy obsession with it. Most states have another sport that’s equally, if not more, popular. New South Wales and Queensland both love their rugby, league and union, while Victoria and Western Australia have Aussie Rules Football. The Chappell brothers, Ian and Greg, who grew up in South Australia, both played baseball as children, while Andrew Gaze and Luc Longley were National Basketball Association stars in the US.
Nothing, though, captures the Australian imagination quite like the Ashes, one of the oldest sporting rivalries to still be contested on a regular basis. In December 2013, 91,112 people watched the first day of the Boxing Day Ashes Test at the Melbourne Cricket Ground. Few things give Australians as much satisfaction as putting one over the “Poms", and in that series, the home side completed their second 5-0 whitewash in seven years. The Australianism that Arlott spoke of was very much in evidence, and as India have found out this southern summer, it’s not going away.
Dileep Premachandran is editor-in-chief, Wisden India.
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