Ugly Australians
are Back
In the pubs and the lounge-rooms of Australia, is there a more awkward bone of cricketing contention than that gullet-jarring, tongue-tying one about sledging?
All Australians want their team to do well. Of that, there’s no question and right now, they’re doing just that. They’ve pumped a historically-strong and highly-fancied English side then gone and beaten the world’s best on their own patch. Furthermore, everyone loves the way they’re playing the game - with an opening batsman and an opening bowler doing everything at lightspeed, a trio of old-stagers still producing the goods from the confines of the last-chance saloon. All this under an inventive, intelligent captain and a coach who is as chilled as he is tough.
How they carry themselves on the field, however, is a grey area.
As a rule, the schooner-supping pub-dwellers and the sofa-lounging front-roomers fall into two simple categories: those who rate how Michael Clarke’s team carry on, believing it is “Strayan” and gives them the edge. Then there’s those who don’t. The latter category believe such behaviour is unnecessary, boring, boorish and frankly embarrassing.
The charge-sheet, or roll of honour (depending on which side of this barbed fence you sit) against this Australian team is lengthy. Almost every Test of this glorious eight-match hot streak has seen some level of controversy through trash-talk, send-offs or face-offs. Whether you like it or not, the sledge has returned with a vengeance, on the field and off it.
Here goes: in press conferences Jonathan Trott was called “weak” and Vernon Philander “lazy”, while when the South Africans had the temerity to win a match, their wicketkeeper was not-so-subtly accused of ball-tampering. On the field, there’ve been send-offs aplenty - you don’t need to be a professional mouth-reader to work out what Davey says as a beaten batsman leaves the field. The captain was caught on camera threatening Jimmy Anderson, while Dale Steyn was pointed and shouted at. Faf du Plessis alone left the field to yelps and received an x-rated scolding for picking up the ball. In that brilliant final Test in Cape Town, a reviewed decision went against them and it wasn’t just the batsman who heard all about what a cheat he was, the umpires copped an earful, too. When Australia are in the field, the broadcaster’s expletive apology is becoming all too familiar.
Before getting in to the rights and wrongs of it all, it’s probably important to take a look at the history of sledging and to iron out some mistruths.
Has there always been sledging in cricket? As a game with gaps between deliveries and time for talk between teams, there will certainly have been chatter since the game began. No doubt WG Grace was one for a witty aside and Douglas Jardine supplemented Bodyline with a few choice words of encouragement, but to assume that’s what has gone in the past is the same as today’s expletive ridden rants is surely naive.
Ian Chappell, as strong and uncompromising a captain as Australia have ever had, and his “ugly Australians” of the ‘70s are widely thought to have given birth to modern sledging - the art of getting under an opponent’s skin and putting him off his game. They were tough bunch of buggers and dished out some dirt - some stories, of course, are apocryphal, some hold true and some, in the days before stump mic, never made it out of the middle.
By William Macpherson