The long road from Bradman's moral lesson to Bancroft's ball tampering

Updated

When did Australian cricket adopt a win-at-all-costs culture? After Don Bradman said playing cricket was a moral lesson, and Allan Border demanded toughness but also integrity, when did things turn toxic?

It was difficult to watch.

Steve Smith, the 45th captain of the Australian cricket team, a broken man.

Baring his soul. Taking responsibility. Pleading for forgiveness.

Just days earlier Smith had been cast a villain. The captain who had sanctioned blatant cheating then lied to cover up his misdeed.

His emotions overwhelmed him.

A good man who made a mistake. One that has cost him his reputation, the captaincy, his place in the side for the next 12 months and millions of dollars in wages from various teams and sponsorship deals.

Now he could be seen as something else: a victim.

Of a toxic, win-at-all-costs ethos at the heart of Australian cricket. Of an aggressive culture ignored or tolerated when the side was winning, but exposed when results faltered. Of a negligent administration "sleeping at the wheel".

Just how did it come to this? What is so wrong with the morals of the Australian cricket team that its captain and vice-captain were willing to trash their ethics in pursuit of a minor on-field advantage?

What has become of the Bradman creed in which cricket is "more free from anything sordid, anything dishonourable, than any game in the world"? Where to play the game "keenly, honourably, self-sacrificingly is a moral lesson in itself"?

"It's sullied the reputation of our country and we're going to have to live with that," former Test captain Kim Hughes told Caught Out, an ABC documentary.

"And that's all of us."

Captaincy 'a bit like being PM'

Hughes knows well the pressures of leading the Australian Test team.

He was vice-captain in 1981 when Greg Chappell instructed his brother Trevor to bowl underarm to New Zealand batsman Brian McKechnie to deny him the chance of hitting a match-drawing six.

The infamous act of unsporting — though not rule-breaking — conduct was a stain on our national game.

Hughes was elevated to the top post at 25, the same young age as Smith, thanks to rare ability with the bat.

Hughes' own reign was undone, in part, by his inability to command respect from uncompromising team-mates like Dennis Lillee and Rodney Marsh.

"It's a bit like a prime minister," says Hughes. "It's very, very lonely, not many people are coming up to you saying, 'Jeez you're doing a good job', they usually tell you you done shithouse."

His own exit, in 1984, also came with tears.

It was announced at an emotional resignation press conference after a poor run of personal form and a series of defeats to the then-mighty West Indians.

"[The captaincy] is a heavy burden. There's no doubt about it," says cricket writer and author Gideon Haigh.

"Everyone looks to you in times of crisis. You're the first person who gets the blame when the team fails. You're also the one who's built up the most grandly. And the kudos that comes with being the captain is disproportionate.

"I don't think people quite understand how great an honour it is."

Hughes did. Though it eventually ate him up.

The crown worn comfortably by the likes of Don Bradman, Bill Woodfull, Warwick Armstrong and Richie Benaud can be heavy on the head of the ill-prepared.

On the path to domination

Hughes's successor, Allan Border, was more suited to the office. He set in motion a shift towards an era of absolute domination by Australia.

His defining series came in 1989. The Ashes won for only a second time in seven attempts. It would be 16 years before the urn left Australian hands.

Border was as tough as teak. Conviviality with opponents was frowned upon from that England tour, setting a template for great sides that followed.

"During my time, particularly with Allan Border and Mark Taylor, integrity and doing the right thing was paramount," says Craig McDermott, a fast bowler who played for Australia from the mid-80s to mid-90s.

"They were very tough task masters, so you know you'd toe the line and you never really thought about doing anything untoward other than probably giving a batsman a gob-full every now and again."

Border's reign was followed by Taylor and then Steve Waugh, the three men's captaincies covering the 1990s in which Australia were near untouchable on the field.

Waugh spoke of 'mental disintegration' of opponents. Breaking their spirit as a precursor to breaking their bails.

Verbal attacks on opposition players were the norm.

"I think we were regarded as ugly Australians at different times because we were aggressive," says John Buchanan, coach of the Australian team from 1999 to 2007.

"We played the game hard. I guess we pushed the boundaries at certain stages. And we were dominant."

Few people concerned themselves with team culture in those glory days. The culture was success.

"With the Australian captaincy, winning hides all sins," Hughes says.

However, there was no hiding an ugly confrontation in Antigua in 2003. The sight of the towering Glenn McGrath leaning over the diminutive Ramnaresh Sarwan in a state of fury was shocking.

A vulnerable McGrath was rightly incensed when the West Indian had mentioned his sick wife as they traded insults. But McGrath had been at fault with his own slurs prior to that.

Buchanan admits episodes like that fuelled the idea that Australia "were good winners but we were poor losers".

"Both teams were testing each other, both technically and physically, but certainly testing each other mentally. And McGrath, in this case an unbelievable competitor and also going through some incredibly personal times, was quite vulnerable at that moment."

It was a bad look. Cricket Australia, then as now, was moved to act.

The players signed a document produced by Cricket Australia CEO James Sutherland to commit to honouring the 'spirit of cricket', with distinctions drawn between competitive and inappropriate behaviour.

"I think everybody really embraced that," says Buchanan.

"I don't think we necessarily delivered that 100 per cent of the time. But nonetheless, there was a real sense that the game, the game's integrity, needed to always be protected."

An exodus of legends

In truth little altered in terms of style and discipline but a forced change of another kind was to have a more telling impact.

In a relatively short period of time a number of legends — Matthew Hayden, Adam Gilchrist, Justin Langer, Warne, McGrath and others — retired.

Their reliable match-winning runs and wickets went with them.

"They had this team of outstanding and unbelievable cricketers who were once-in-a-generation cricketers, but there was about five or six of them in the one team," recalls former Test player Bryce McGain.

No longer. A country used to winning became acquainted with defeat.

It was into this environment of reduced on-field success coupled with a legacy of expectation that Smith and his vice-captain David Warner stepped once Michael Clarke, Ricky Ponting's successor, had called time on his career.

"Having that same mental disintegration with a group of players that aren't quite at that elite level requires a different approach," McGain says.

"I haven't really seen an enormous change in the way we go about it, but it's always very publicly said, we need to play aggressive, we need to push the line, we need to play in that manner to be successful. Times may have changed."

An aura of invincibility was lost. But the shadow of it was long. And coloured the thinking of the new generation.

A child of cricket's modern age

Born a week before Border led his team to Ashes victory in England in 1989, Smith is a child of Australian cricket's modern age.

"A very, very determined cricketer, only a little guy, a real fighter, stroke maker, a little fidgety but not to the extent that he is now. I found in my two years that I took him [to be] a tremendous trainer, very dedicated," says Peter Schofield, one of Smith's first coaches in the junior game.

"Didn't look for any short cuts, all hard work and he was prepared to do that."

Having grown up watching and idolising those great teams of the '90s and early 2000s, it would be natural to take his cues from how they operated.

"He's still, in a way, the obsessive boy that he began [as]," says Haigh, who has watched Smith's career closely.

"He's still the player who spends longer in the nets than anybody else. He's still the player who just eats, drinks, breathes cricket, never seems to tire of it, has an inexhaustible appetite for it.

"So, he was prepared by God for modern professional cricket and unfortunately, I think he's actually becoming a bit of a victim of it."

Best batsman, but a callow leader

Smith is the best batsman in the world. He proved as much during the recent Ashes series.

And yet concerns persisted, even before this week, over his callowness to lead, despite a barely credible improvement in his already stellar form with the bat.

"We have always tended to choose the best player in the side rather than necessarily a player with alleged leadership and management attributes," Haigh says.

More concerned eyebrows, however, were raised when Warner was named his vice-captain.

Just two years prior Warner had been stood down from an Ashes match in England after throwing a punch at now England captain Joe Root in a bar.

Warner proved a loyal deputy. His hard work on the field was valued.

Now married and a father, "the Bull" became known as "the Reverend" to teammates as he attempted to craft himself a more mature figure.

It was to prove an exercise in self-deception.

The problem for Smith was one of authority. Warner, three years his senior, was the only player whose record stood up to the captain.

"It certainly feels that David Warner's a stronger personality than Steve Smith, and Steve Smith may be not able to question things maybe that David Warner was saying," says BBC cricket commentator Ali Mitchell.

The path towards implosion

If that unbalanced leadership pairing suggested vulnerability, what happened in Hobart in 2016 can be viewed as an aggravating catalyst that exposed it.

In hindsight it put the pair on a path towards their implosion in South Africa.

Little over a year into the reign of Smith and Warner, ignominy was heaped on the side. Australia was bowled out for 85 by South Africa — whose captain, Faf du Plessis, ironically, was later charged with ball tampering — the lowest score on home soil for three decades.

Sutherland and high-performance coach Pat Howard gave the side a dressing down in the sheds. Five defeats in a row would not stand.

Smith, who wrote in his autobiography of the shock of seeing "suits" talking down to the side in the change rooms, was disappointed and hurting. And came out fighting.

"I need some players willing to get in the contest and get in the battle and have players who have some pride in playing for Australia and some pride in the baggy green," Smith said at the time.

Things would change. Half the side was replaced. Smith and coach Darren Lehmann would mould the new team in their image.

A throwback to old ways

Lehmann had taken over following the sacking of Mickey Arthur, the South African always seen as an outsider, a dull technocrat of a coach.

Lehmann, by contrast, was a link back to the golden days. A proponent of the rough and tumble game.

And not without his own chequered history, having been banned for five matches for a racist slur in a match against Sri Lanka in 2003.

Under "Boof" the mood lifted, but the arrogance and raw aggression returned, viewed as a corollary of success.

He did little to rein in the worst excesses of Warner's and others' sledging and verbal unpleasantness because they were methods of his own time playing the game.

There was no genuine censure when Michael Clarke threatened James Anderson with "a broken f***ing arm" during the 2013-14 Ashes. Or when Brad Haddin — now a member of the coaching team — got in the faces of dismissed Kiwi batsmen during the 2015 World Cup final win on home soil.

The justification was that the New Zealand team's "nice" reputation had angered him and made the Australians "uncomfortable".

Lehmann was exonerated by the Cricket Australia inquiry into the ball tampering affair.

But questions over his leadership style, the tone he sets in the dressing room, have nonetheless come in to sharp focus.

"I think what is clear is that Darren Lehmann as coach has presided over a dressing room where a senior player has felt that it was OK to instruct a younger player to change the condition of the ball deliberately," Mitchell says.

"That says to me there's something wrong about the ethos of that team as a whole."

Two sides spoiling for a fight

Before a ball had been bowled in this fateful series, there was already a sense of two sides spoiling for a fight.

The Australians were battle-weary.

A hard-fought tour of India in early 2017 was pockmarked with rancour, accusations of cheating and on-field confrontations.

Smith's opposite number Virat Kohli, never one to hold back from conflict himself, claimed dishonesty was endemic in the Australian side.

In the Ashes this summer, ill-feeling and conflict persisted throughout the series. Australia played hard and won convincingly but relations between the two sides were typically petty.

In Durban, bad blood from previous meetings, including the 2014 tour in which South African batsman du Plessis had branded Australia "a pack of dogs" in the field, left the series as tinder waiting for a spark.

It didn't take long to ignite.

Sorry, this video has expired Video: David Warner involved in verbal stoush with Quinton de Kock in Durban (ABC News)

At each other's throats from day one, the whole thing erupted when Warner squared up to Quinton de Kock in a stairwell after the South African had made remarks about his wife, a foul act but in response to provocation from Warner.

"A siege mentality seemed to have overtaken the side after that incident," ABC cricket commentator Jim Maxwell says.

"The skirmish in the stairwell in Durban and the lack of maturity of the leadership and the narrowness of their approach to the game, particularly in dealing with their emotions, made sure it was going to be some error of judgment which unfortunately came to pass."

The drama escalated across the first two matches, with local fans classlessly goading Warner. Fast bowler Kagiso Rabada barged Smith, was banned, then let off. The sense of self righteous indignation, of victimhood, burned within the Australian team.

Self-awareness was conspicuous by its absence.

Australian teams have long talked about the line. A notional limit to tough play beyond which they would not go. But the position of which they seem to feel they alone can dictate.

When Warner showed Cameron Bancroft how to use sandpaper to alter the state of the ball and Smith stood by and allowed it to happen, there was no ambiguity that it had been crossed.

"The winning at all costs [ethos] has been there in the last 20, 30 years," says Maxwell, "but the competitive nature of the game, the combativeness of cricket and the amount of money I suppose, and the risk to players of being dropped from the side if they don't perform has perhaps intensified this.

"There's been some arrogance attached to it as well out of a very successful period but it's tough to be arrogant when you're not as good as your predecessors."

The failure of Smith to stop the plan at its inception, Maxwell says, is "a sign of weakness, stupidity".

"It was probably one of the dumbest things an Australian captain has ever done," he says.

A team with an 'identity problem'

The reaction to this watershed moment in Australian cricket has been instructive.

Heartening, even, in one sense.

Australian cricket fans were this week uniformly appalled. Absent from the conversation were voices defending or minimising the act.

"We will be known as a cricket team that cheated in South Africa and that doesn't sit well with any of us," says former Australian Test player Simon O'Donnell.

Australian cricket has been forced to look at itself in the mirror. And it is not enjoying what it sees.

"This Australian team has a huge identity problem," says former England captain Michael Vaughan.

"They've got a problem in the way that they are, they're very self-righteous, they have been for a while, they talk the game that they feel it should be played like and then deliver what we saw at the weekend in Cape Town."

The side has lost its captain, vice-captain, an opening batsman and its coach, after Lehmann reversed his decision to stay on after watching the emotional outpourings from Smith and Bancroft.

Further changes might be needed to truly reinvent the way the game is approached.

Crisis stretches beyond the boundary rope

"It's about the integrity and reputation of Australian cricket and Australian sport," Sutherland said this week.

"Ultimately it's about whether Australians can feel proud of their sporting teams. That depends as much on the way players conduct themselves as much as it does about winning or losing."

The right words but, for many people listening, words they've heard before. Little more than unconvincing rhetoric.

Sutherland has been in charge of the game for 17 years. Culture is defined from the top of any organisation. This crisis stretches much further than the boundary rope and dressing room.

"James Sutherland has been a very worthy chief executive," Maxwell says.

"He's done some wonderful deals for Cricket Australia and the game with television rights and sponsors but he's had a long time in the job and I don't think it's any surprise for most people who follow the game to feel, to think the administration has been a bit sleepy at the wheel in the last couple of years, so it's probably time to refresh the leadership."

Sutherland and CA Chairman David Peever declined the ABC's requests for interview for this story.

It is a view held by many, across the full spectrum of the game.

"I think James Sutherland and the people running Australian cricket are equally as responsible in my opinion," says Schofield, a true representative of the grass roots game.

Whoever does make the changes will need to placate people like him, who find themselves heartbroken.

"Older players must just cringe, people like Neil Harvey and Brian Booth and Bill Lawry, they must just absolutely cringe, when they see the way they go on when we get a wicket today," Schofield says.

"It's as if they've just won five million in lotto, they bounce the tail ender and then all run up and I honestly thought something bad would happen.

"They've just let the whole lot go completely out of control … I think it goes a lot deeper than sacking a few guys and getting a few other coaches."

Never waste a crisis

There exists now a thirst for root and branch reform of how cricket is cared for by those charged with that duty. To use the moment to make real, lasting changes.

"It's not merely the offence that's in front of us," Haigh says, "it's an accumulation of disgruntlement over years about the way in which Australian players have behaved. All of the chickens have come home to roost at once."

Much work will be needed over the coming weeks, months and years to repair this damage.

"I think there's got to be some education from five-year-olds upwards that we've got to reinvest some energy into the ethos and integrity of the game of cricket, becoming everyone's responsibility as it should be," says former Australian fast bowler Carl Rackemann.

"It should always be top priority ahead of how many runs or wickets you're getting, or catches, or what you're getting paid, or what your travel arrangements are.

"As Bradman said, you're the custodians of the game and it's up to you to uphold the integrity of the game and we've got to get that back as a priority in Australian cricket at all levels."

Never waste a crisis.

Australian cricket has experienced many before. But few that have cut so deeply to the heart of what it actually means to represent your country on a cricket field.

Perhaps finally those at the summit of the game, jolted into action by a heartfelt upswell of public disquiet and the defecting of sponsors, will be forced by it into genuine action.

Some light may be let in at the end of a dark week, in which Australian cricket's soul, as well as that of its now former captain, was laid so painfully bare.

You can watch the documentary on ABC TV at 7:30pm tonight and iview from 11:15pm.

Credits

Reporter: Steve Wilson

Steve Wilson Executive producer: Erin Vincent

Erin Vincent Supervising producer: Kate Tozer

Kate Tozer Caught Out presenter/reporter: Paul Kennedy

Paul Kennedy Producers: Ben Knight, Iain Gustafson, Alexia Atwood, Meg Sydes

Ben Knight, Iain Gustafson, Alexia Atwood, Meg Sydes Video: Huw Parkinson, Nathan Cross

Topics: cricket, sport, australia

First posted