Cricket - This business called Elite Honesty

Osman Samiuddin in Cricinfo

Here is some elite honesty, a very elite example of it. Australia 238 for 5 against Pakistan in Hobart, needing another 131 for the win. Justin Langer, on 76, edges behind to Moin Khan but is not given by the umpire Peter Parker. Doesn't walk. Fine. That's the difference between elite honesty and regular honesty, understanding that it's the umpire's job to make a batsman walk.

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Langer's dad asks him about the edge. Nah, no edge, just a clicky bat handle. He tells his partner on the field and good mate Adam Gilchrist the same thing. Even his captain, elite honesty manifest as human, his mentor and idol, he tells him it was the clicky bat handle that dunnit.

These are elite mates and elite family, who deserve a bit of elite honesty and that's what Langer gives them. For the next decade and a half, this elite honesty is maintained. Then one day he downgrades it to mere honesty and reveals that he had smashed the hell out of the ball. He couldn't help it. He'd copped a bad one in the first innings. He was under the pump for his place. But while it lasted, the honesty was really elite.

If that was the only time you were elitely honest, then how elitely honest could you really be? Not very. So here's another quality bit of elite honesty. Notice how upright Langer is as he walks up to the stumps while fielding. The ball is dead and Hashan Tillakaratne in his crease. Langer deliberately tips a bail off the stumps and then watches his elite team-mates appeal for hit-wicket.

That we can identify this as elite honesty is only thanks to the ICC and their match referee Chris Broad. "Justin was disappointed that the charge was brought and explained his position in a very honest and succinct way," said Broad, following a hearing. You might call Broad's decision elite stupidity but I certainly won't. It's elite judgement.

Some say there is also elite honesty in how Langer ran Western Australia and Perth Scorchers, but I think the most elite example of elite honesty comes from Langer's idol, the true father of the modern Australian way. In a recent interview with Steve Waugh, our very own Melinda Farrell broached this idea of elite honesty (though we called it culture then). She asked Waugh about a couple of catches from his career that he dropped but claimed.

How do you look back at them now?

"Well, I don't really," Waugh responded, which is absolutely rule No. 1 in maintaining elite honesty. About the catch ("catch" used here in a way that also indicates drops) to dismiss Brian Lara, he continued: "It's just part of the game. I mean, at the time I still remember the catch. I still believe I caught it. It was inconclusive but in my mind it bounced off my wrist, but you know, that's all life. You don't want to look back at stuff. I try to look forward. You know, people have their own opinions on what happened there but I'm not going to change my opinion. My opinion was I caught it on the day."

You see why this is more elite? You understand? It's because from his response we end up learning something. We learn that catches are opinions, not facts. If your opinion is that the catch was good, then what business does the fact that it was a drop have anything to do with it? If you're asking yourself how you've managed life so far not abiding by these rules, console yourself that you're not alone. As the great man says, that's all life.

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Us mortals alas, we aspire to mere honesty. Non-elite stuff. Proletariat. So here, humbly and hopefully, is some of it. 

This business of elite honesty - and Langer's elite mateship and elite humility - this is all elite BS. So is the Players' Pact. And the "hard but fair" act. It's classic corporate-speak - high-sounding words put together to sound and look pretty but that end up meaning nothing.

We're not talking about airplane seats where even economy can now be premium. Honesty is honesty. You either are or you aren't. There is no elite level to which you and I are not welcome and only Australian cricketers are. The truth is, and if it is not, then it is a lie; no number of demagogue leaders, politicians or cricket captains are going to change this fact (not opinion). In today's world, more and more people might not be accepting the truth, but that says something about a changing people and society, not the truth.

All that these words 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.

What Langer's words and the set of associated ideas among which they float - about the exceptionalism of Australian cricketers - do is set Australia up, at some point down the line, for another fall and greater unpopularity. Look at the sniggering already - magnificently played, by the way, Graeme Smith. Imagine now the next time one of them stuffs up, delivers a nasty sledge, or bullies an umpire, or tampers, or surreptitiously tips over a bail, or claims a dropped catch, or doesn't walk when he's out.

Of course it'll happen. They may be Australian cricketers but - and here's the big reveal - they are also human. They are humans like the rest of the cricketers they play with and against, ones who also do all of these things occasionally, ones they used to always beat and now ones they don't beat so often. They are humans like the rest of us who watch them, envy them, criticise them and worship them; humans who are fallible; humans who are striving for some regular honesty, sometimes succeeding but other times failing.

To this eye, and perhaps many others, all Australian cricket should stand for is Australian cricket, because that has always been more than enough. The way their openers and one-downs come at you, the way they don't stop producing super-fast fast bowlers, the way their keepers yap and catch, the way their slips stand chewing gum like they're a street gang, the way they think leggies are the normal ones and offies the ones to be suspicious of, the way their grounds can feel simultaneously so big and so small, and the way no game is over for them until the very last of them has physically sat on the bus and left the stadium. It has never needed any buzzwords or catchphrases beyond that.

What's with the sanctimony, Mr Waugh?

Osman Samiuddin in Cricinfo


Bless our stars, Steve Waugh has weighed in. From his pedestal, perched atop a great moral altitude, he spoke down to us.

"Like many, I'm deeply troubled by the events in Cape Town this last week, and acknowledge the thousands of messages I have received, mostly from heartbroken cricket followers worldwide.

"The Australian Cricket team has always believed it could win in any situation against any opposition, by playing combative, skillful and fair cricket, driven by our pride in the fabled Baggy Green.

"I have no doubt the current Australian team continues to believe in this mantra, however some have now failed our culture, making a serious error of judgement in the Cape Town Test match."

You'll have picked up by now that this was not going to be what it should have been: a mea culpa. "Sorry folks, Cape Town - my bad." One can hope for the tone, but one can't ever imagine such economy with the words.

Waugh's statement was a bid to recalibrate the Australian cricket's team moral compass, and you know, it would have been nice if he acknowledged his role in setting it awry in the first place. Because there can't be any doubt that a clean, straight line runs from the explosion-implosion of Cape Town back to that "culture" that Waugh created for his team, the one cricket gets so reverential about.

First, though, a little pre-reading prep, or YouTube wormholing, just to establish the moral frame within which we are operating. Start with this early in Waugh's international career - claiming a catch at point he clearly dropped off Kris Srikkanth. This was the 1985-86 season and he was young and the umpire spotted it and refused to give it out. So go here. This was ten years later, also at point, and he dropped Brian Lara, though he made as if he juggled and caught it. The umpire duped, Lara gone.Steve Waugh: sanctimonious or statesman-like? Depends on which side of the "line" you stand on Getty Images

A man is not merely the sum of his incidents, and neither does he go through life unchanged. Waugh must have gone on to evolve, right? He became captain of Australia and soon it became clear that he had - all together now, in Morgan Freeman's voice - A Vision. There was a way he wanted his team to play the game.

He spelt it out in 2003, though all it was was a modification of the MCC's existing Spirit of Cricket doctrine. There were commitments to upholding player behaviour, and to how they treated the opposition and umpires, whose decisions they vowed to accept "as a mark of respect for our opponents, the umpires, ourselves and the game".

They would "value honesty and accept that every member of the team has a role to play in shaping and abiding by our shared standards and expectations".

Sledging or abuse would not be condoned. It wasn't enough that Australia played this way - Waugh expected others to do so as well. Here's Nasser Hussain, straight-talking in his memoir on the 2002-03 Ashes in Australia:

"I just think that about this time, he [Waugh] had lost touch with reality a bit he gave me the impression that he had forgotten what playing cricket was like for everyone other than Australia. He became a bit of a preacher. A bit righteous. It was like he expected everyone to do it the Aussie way because their way was the only way."

It was also duplicitous because the Aussie way Waugh was preaching was rarely practised on field by him or his team. So if Hussain refused to walk in the Boxing Day Test in 2002 after Jason Gillespie claimed a catch - with unanimous support from his team - well, you could hardly blame him, right, given Waugh was captain? YouTube wasn't around then, but not much got past Hussain on the field and the chances of those two "catches" having done so are low.


"Waugh created a case for Australian exceptionalism that has become every bit as distasteful, nauseating and divisive as that of American foreign policy"

As for the sledging that Waugh and his men agreed to not condone, revisit Graeme Smith's comments from the first time he played Australia, in 2001-02, with Waugh as captain. There's no need to republish it here but you can read about it (and keep kids away from the screen). It's not clever.

No, Waugh's sides didn't really show that much respect to opponents, unless their version of respect was Glenn McGrath asking Ramnaresh Sarwan - who was getting on top of Australia - what a specific part of Brian Lara's anatomy (no prizes for guessing which one) tasted like.

That incident, in Antigua, is especially instructive today because David Warner v Quinton de Kock is an exact replica. Sarwan's response, referencing McGrath's wife, was reprehensible, just as de Kock's was. But there was zilch recognition from either Warner or McGrath that they had initiated, or gotten involved in, something that could lead to such a comeback, or that their definition of "personal" was, frankly, too fluid and ill-defined for anyone's else's liking.

Waugh wasn't the ODI captain at the time of Darren Lehmann's racist outburstagainst Sri Lanka. Lehmann's captain, however, was Ricky Ponting, Waugh protege and torchbearer of values (and co-creator of the modified Spirit document), and so, historically, this was very much the Waugh era. As an aside, Lehmann's punishment was a five-ODI ban, imposed on him eventually by the ICC; no further sanctions from CA.

It's clear now that this modified code was the Australians drawing their "line", except the contents of the paper were - and continued to be - rendered irrelevant by their actions. The mere existence of it, in Australia's heads, has been enough.

You've got to marvel at the conceit of them taking a universal code and unilaterally modifying it primarily for themselves, not in discussion with, you know, the many other non-Australian stakeholders in cricket - who might view the spirit of the game differently, if at all they give any importance to it - and expecting them to adhere to it.They won trophies, but not hearts Getty Images

It's why Warner and McGrath not only could not take it being dished back, but that they saw something intrinsically wrong in receiving it and not dishing it out. It's why it was fine to sledge Sourav Ganguly on rumours about his private life, but Ganguly turning up to the toss late was, in Waugh's words, "disrespectful" - to the game, of course, not him.

Waugh created a case for Australian exceptionalism, which has become every bit as distasteful, nauseating and divisive as that of American foreign policy. Look at the varnish of formality in dousing the true implication of "mental disintegration"; does "illegal combatants" ring a bell?

What took hold after Waugh was not what he preached but what he practised. One of my favourite examples is this lesser-remembered moment involving Justin Langer, a Waugh acolyte through and through, and his surreptitious knocking-off of a bail in Sri Lanka. Whatever he was trying to do, it wasn't valuing honesty as Waugh's code wanted.

Naturally the mind is drawn to the bigger, more infamous occasions, such as the behaviour of Ponting and his side that prompted a brave and stirring calling outby Peter Roebuck. That was two years before Ponting's virtual bullying of Aleem Dar after a decision went against Australia in the Ashes. It sure was a funny way to accept the umpire's decision. Ponting loved pushing another virtuous ploy that could so easily have been a Waugh tenet: of entering into gentlemen's agreements with opposing captains and taking the fielder's word for a disputed catch. Not many opposition captains did, which was telling of the virtuousness sides ascribed to Australia.

That this happened a decade or so ago should, if nothing else, confirm that Cape Town isn't just about the culture within this side - this is a legacy, passed on from the High Priest of Righteousness, Steve Waugh, to Ponting to Michael Clarke to Steve Smith, leaders of a long list of Australian sides that may have been good, bad and great but have been consistently unloved.

It's fair to be sceptical of real change. The severity of CA's sanctions - in response to public outrage and not the misdemeanour itself - amount to another bit of righteous oneupmanship. We remove captains for ball-tampering, what do you do? We, the rest of the world, let the ICC deal with them as per the global code for such things, and in that time the sky didn't fall. Now, on the back of CA's actions, David Richardson wants tougher punishments, thus continuing the ICC's strategy of policy-making based solely on incidents from series involving the Big Three.

Waugh was a great batsman. He was the captain of a great side. The only fact to add to this is that he played the game with great sanctimony. That helps explains why Australia now are where they are.

Captaincy

	Andrew Strauss: undemonstrative on the field, but he gets the job done © Getty Images Enlarge
Related Links Saad Shafqat : The new, cautious face of Pakistan cricket Players/Officials: Misbah-ul-Haq | Andrew Strauss Teams: England | Pakistan

Ed Smith in Cricinfo 15/02/2012

A few years ago, I played in a charity match with an Australian cricketer. He was captain for the day and casually told the fielders to just "spread out". As we walked off at the end, after a laidback game, he said (at least half-seriously): "How can Tugga [Steve Waugh] get paid so much extra money just for doing that?" 

The view that captaincy is easy - perhaps even irrelevant - is not uncommon. Professional sport is a macho culture that prefers to deal in physical realities rather than abstract concepts. That bowler is quick, that batsman is powerful, that fielder is fast - as skills, they are all easy to admire. Leadership, in contrast, is an elusive thing to identify. That captain is shrewd, that one is subtle, that one encourages the players around him to be themselves - sportsmen are not trained to recognise or celebrate those gifts.

But the evidence is overwhelming: leadership matters. Look at the turnaround in Pakistan cricket. Two years ago I was at Lord's on the Saturday before the News of the World published their scoop about spot-fixing. Pakistan were not merely losing, they were broken. When Salman Butt was bowled, he initially stood his ground, as though he was waiting for some outside intervention that allowed him to have another go. When Mohammad Yousuf was caught on the boundary, hooking, he too stood still in disbelief. It was sad to watch.

Now, under the captaincy of 37-year-old Misbah-ul-Haq, Pakistan are revived and victorious - and able to beat the world's top Test team 3-0. It is a powerful riposte to the critics who argue that no one should be selected as captain if he isn't an automatic choice as a player. In fact, the best team is simply the 11 players who produce the most effective cricket. If the presence of a good captain improves the team by a greater margin than the advantage gained by picking a slightly superior player, then it is obviously rational to select the superior captain. The best XI is the most effective team: end of story.

The next question is much harder to answer: what makes a good captain?

It is easy to fall back on familiar clichés: "the natural captain", "the leader of men", "the alpha male". But it is striking how many effective captains do not fit that mould. Take Andrew Strauss. When Strauss was appointed England captain in 2008, several English cricket legends criticised the appointment because he "wasn't a natural captain". What did they mean? They meant that Strauss is unshowy and undemonstrative on the field. Off the field, he is not the biggest, loudest man at the bar. Tactically he doesn't go in for flashy, "original" field-placement. In press conferences he avoids controversy. In short, he is isn't Mr Obvious or Mr Born to Lead. Strauss - we now know - has gone on to win two Ashes series as captain.

The whole business of captaincy is misunderstood. It tends to be thought of as a list of qualities, a set of boxes to tick - as though a good captain has to be x, y and z. In fact, all captains are different. Perhaps the only essential characteristic for any captain is the one that cannot be taught or emulated: he must be himself.

Instead, pundits look for qualities they recognise in themselves and assume that's what makes a good leader. When I was appointed captain of Middlesex, a senior figure at the club asked me what "kind of captain" I was going to be, as though I had a list of adjectives up my sleeve. When I asked what he meant, he said, "You know, are you going to be a strong captain?" I replied that I'd have to be seriously stupid if I announced at the outset that I wanted to be a weak captain.

We have captaincy in the wrong box. We should not think of captaincy - or leadership in general - as a characteristic or even a quality. Instead, it is an effect. If the captain has a positive effect on the group then he is leading effectively. That doesn't sound like much. But it is, of course, mighty difficult.

	Off-field stability, good management and strong relationships at the heart of the team are infinitely more important than moving silly mid-off half a yard to the left

Captains are always being judged, but most of the analysis focuses on largely irrelevant side issues. During the deciding Test against Australia at The Oval in 2009 - it turned out to be the very day that the Ashes turned in England's favour - I bumped into a former England player who has become a leading voice in the media. "What a stupid mistake of Strauss', not using the heavy roller!" he began. "Schoolboy error! You just can't make mistakes like that!" I was surprised at the vehemence of the reaction. Despite many years as an opening batsman, it was often unclear to me when to use the heavy roller, or indeed if the decision was worthy of much analysis or energy.

Many "talking points" about captaincy are complete red herrings. Should he have a third man? Why is gully standing so deep? These "controversies" are often just convenient distractions to fill the airwaves and newspaper columns. Yes, very occasionally an inspired field placing can strangle a batsman, or a shrewd bowling change can lead to a wicket. But much more often we read far too much into surface decision-making, and radically underestimate the underlying foundations that lead to success: off-field stability, good management and strong relationships at the heart of the team. They are infinitely more important than moving silly mid-off half a yard to the left.

Captaincy is both overrated and underrated. It is overrated because people expect too much of it in the short term. Very few losing teams can be galvanised by a single stirring team-talk. "Gee them up!" is the commonest (and stupidest) advice given to captains.

But captaincy is underestimated over the long term. Losing teams often think that they should change the captain every five minutes "until the right person emerges". Quite the opposite happens: the latest captain merely takes over an unsteady ship. In contrast, successful teams quickly forget their debt to their captain, imagining that they would be just as good - or better - if they axed him. When you're winning, it's easy to underestimate the culture that helped you to win.

When it comes to leadership, cricket teams should remember a line from Bob Dylan: "No matter what you think about, you just won't be able to do without it."