Cricket
Gelding the Lillee
Max Harris
It was Mush's contention in The Man Without Qualities that staged moments of climactic triumph automatically generate the secret forces of destruction The theorem is pedestrian enough in present times when we have become attuned to the assassination of presidents and preachers.
The Australians are attempting to invest the Great Centenary Test Cricket Match which begins in Melbourne this Saturday with such Habsburgian splendours as the Antipodes can muster. The geriatric greats of cricket will be shuttled forth and back across the world to ornament the occasion. It will be a magnificence of history's flannelled fools recalling past glories and signing new publishing contracts. At the same time Greg Chappell's and Tony Greig's men will be demonstrating on the MCC the willowy skill and the foxy grace that make cricket an unacknowledged branch of the performing arts. Bloody hell they will !
Radiant from their triumphs in India, and anointed from head to groin in Vaseline if they will, Tony Greig's team are marching onward like dumb Christians who have actually volunteered to nourish the lions.
The English team are going into a total gladiatorial situation which differs qualitatively from any of the controversial cricket crises of the past.
It is a situation which would seem to call for reasoned debate before the event. There are Australians who feel that the context of the three-test Pakistani series constituted a poisonous extension of ugly Australianism, and sympath ised with the Pakistan manager, Colonel Shuja, who was howled down by a noisome media when he raised the new issues of cricket ethicality.
When stumps are drawn at the end of each day's play, Dennis Lillee and Greg Chappell continue the strategy and tactics of the play into the night and early morning as journalistic commentators and interpreters of the game in progress. They can scarcely pretend to attain to clinical objectivity in their daily newspaper fulminations. No cricket group since the days of Jardine and Larwood have been so awesomely consumed by the need to win as Lillee, Thomson, Chappell and Marsh. Their public writings and television appearances during the course of the game can only be described by resorting to repulsive neologism—the Australians are psyching each other up for the next day's gladiatorial encounter. Chappell waxes lyrical about the fiery poetry of Lillee, while Lillee urges on his buddies to greater gladiatorial heights. The visiting team, insofar as it is mentioned at all, is psyched into a sense of uncertainty and insecurity. It is not so much that their per
formance, either winning or losing, is patronised, or diminished. It is rather that the visitors are substantially ignored as irrelevant to the psychological purposes of the journalistic exercises. Lillee and Chappell, consumed as they are by the heat of the battle, are uncomprehending that their post-play journalistic activities could be regarded as dirty pool.
They are certainly aware that the journalistic psyching draws the crowds, and generates a manic mob chant that accompanies every ball that Lillee bowls—a bloodlust that makes Indian or West Indian enthusiasms seem positively desultory. And Lillee, gifted with the showmanship of the classic snake-oil salesman, responds to the mob idolatry with magnificent wildness and exophthalmic ferocity. So much so that Garry Hutchinson, in Murdoch's quality daily, The Australian, devoted his entire weekly Showbiz column to Lillee, as against the latest rock spectacular or whatever. Psychological warfare has always been an element in the more highly competitive sporting activities. But when the warfare spreads beyond the playing arena and involves calculated use of the media, it would appear to involve principles and practices that could in the very short run totally disorder the acceptable character of international cricket. It is remarkable that the recent Pakistan-Australian confrontations over the issue have impinged so little in Britain.
After all, forewarned is forearmed; and discussions before the Centenary Test match could well have limited the practice, at least for an occasion which should be remembered for its exemplary modern skills rather than bitter ethical disputations.
The principle of cricketing protagonists as journalists and media stars permanently disadvantages all future British teams. There can be no quid pro quo for the Australians. Given the closed-shop principles of the NUJ there will be no psyching-up of the English players and the English public in the form of 'Tony Greig as told to' as a morning feature of the press before each day of play. This is not to suggest that brainwash cricket will always work. It can indeed produce a tightening of the ranks and a hardening of the heart—as it did with the genteel Pakistanis when they totally destroyed the complacent Australian batting strength in the third Test in Sydney. But when it does work it would seem to be patently unfair. There can be no pride in the wicket Lillee gains not because of the excellence of his delivery but because of psychological pressures imposed on the player by Lillee himself when off the field.
The longer the issue is left undebated, the more difficult it is going to be. The media in Australia are so free-wheeling and indulgently provocative, that even the most amiable professional observers view the phenomenon as unpleasantly ugly rather than improper. Jack Fingleton is usually' impeccably perceptive, but even he views it in the Sunday Times as merely the unacceptable face of Australian ockerism (the national term for the middle-class affectation of aggressive proletarian egalitarianism, which constituted the New Nationalism of the late-lamented Whitlam Labour government). 'Once upon a time only professional journalists were allowed to write on cricket, but the gates have been opened and now it's anybody. As a result, some players who have put themselves in the hands of journalists have been made to appear as braggarts and loudmouths, and this has not done any good. Australians have lost their modesty.' Alas, if only it were as simple as Jack Fingleton regards it. It is always fascinating to contemplate how tough old hookers (1?-0 pun intended) lost their virginity. It IS in fact, a somewhat more tortuous problem—. that of defining the proper limits within which the psychological skirmishing that characterises modern cricket should be confined.
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