Note: This was written just before Mark Taylor made his unexpected exit from Cricket Australia – but not before he influenced the appointments of both Paine and Langer.

Were Steve Smith, David Warner and Cameron Bancroft sole agents of their downfall or cultural fall-guys? They’ve been punished and will no doubt be rehabilitated. Will culture? In time, perhaps. Even under close watch it proves elusive. 

Following the Bancroft-Warner ball-tampering blow-up, Steve Smith calmly and authoritatively announced his intention to continue his leadership, feeling no need to feel any different. Soon after, he was smashed by the million-pound shithammer of anagnorisis, ambushed by crisis: he’d forgotten his holy duty to protect, nourish and perpetuate; left his first love. Those tempted to believe he was being hard on himself were soon set straight by The Colony’s extravagant reaction.

Dissolving like unseasonal snow before our eyes, Smith left a messiah-sized hole through which we anxiously glimpsed a vast, desolate, unchartered tract without markers of meaning. The Colony’s most audible voice, media, swung into action, not exclusively to repair, but build; to build bridges of sense, stockades. Some tilted caps embellished with cockades of derisive smartness, affectedly demonstrating unaffectedness. Others wielded batons of cynicism, opprobrium or denunciation. Still others voiced un-ironic pain, seeking valence with their hearers. This frenzy of sense-making was a kind of sense in itself, yet enigmatic as ten million swarming fireflies blinking in perfect unison.

There was an oceanic unity, a collective need to be included, even if it was to state that one didn’t want to be included. At times media morphed to Medea: scorned, monstrous, indignant, incensed, wielding the fearsome power of the irrational in its rational guise.

It was irrational; legitimate, a rationale, if irreal. Smith had exposed The Colony’s soft belly. The wailing of our prophets, high priests and people was met exultantly by sporting adversaries, genuine haters who gleefully sacked our Holy of Holies, pissed all over the Ark of our Covenant. Little Smudge was all-of-a-sudden looking ugly. Failings that might once have been overlooked got heinous.

Smith also robbed us of himself: the textbook Aussie hero – talented, resourceful, a world-beater and a good bloke – and just as he appeared to be delivering Australian cricket, too.

And let’s not discount ontological envy. The metaphysical edge to that head-shaking resentment. In their routine fight for immortality, many see the Australian captain as a Lucky Bastard. Here we are, yearning to be part of something bigger and more enduring than our flesh and blood, the fellowship of nourishing, jointly-generated cultures, seeking personal power and prestige within them via influence-affluence, name-fame games – and then this Smith, leading the pack in that flight from mortality, toting our projected be-longings, holding a position commonly if half-jokingly referred to as the second-highest in the land, comes along and threatens the whole damned indispensable artifice.

Many sports journalists revere their occupation, its proximity to Australian sport’s culture, therefore Australian history, and upward, and outward. They’d rather be nowhere else, nothing else. Except maybe Australian captain. Smith threw away his lead. Unforgivable.

There was chaos to manage in The Colony. There were meanings to forge. Scapegoats required. Reviews promised; two consultancies instigated. But before we proceeded, assumptions were needed. We settled on a workable two: that Australian cricket has a capturable culture, and that CA embodies it. The real world is after all bloody hectic. It’s best to have our chimeras manageable. Culture could now be blamed, addressed, analysed, titivated; terms agreed.

But unanswerable questions emerge when we speak culture into existence. When Collingwood’s Sam Murray was recently cited for performance-enhancing drugs, someone blamed the Collingwood “culture”. Debate flowed, with an undercurrent: should an individual’s actions be linked to his club? Or any other group he belongs to, including family? Is he a sole agent? Is anyone?

Smith, Warner and Bancroft raised similar questions, bringing a culture into focus. But which? We zoom out. We pan wide. We search deep. We see cultures inside cultures; something of the larger group in the smaller. Vice versa. We see ourselves.

Can we be ever-conscious of something that goes back as far as we do? Our cricketers are both responsible for their actions and as deeply influenced by the past as Japanese office workers, who have never seen a rice field, are by the world-view the rice fields gave them. Each morning they arise with a hereditary reflex and arouse a host of ancestors. And/or vice-versa, if we believe Einstein.

The mistake we must avoid is to think cultures don’t organise our minds unless we want them to.

*

Earth, long ago: Humans crouch together against a world of matter and energy that won’t explain itself; of chaos, questions. In time they give it order, answers. Meaning flares from mind to mind. They inhabit culture, it inhabits them, and they survive. The seeds of countless other cultures, including Australian cricket’s, germinate in proliferating soil.

Time passes. The Colony’s born. An isolated old land becomes a young nation. People mimic others’ deeds, imitate nature when it’s useful, as neurones mirror one-another at the front of brains. Together they dig numberless roads to a future where Steve Smith and company wait at a certain perilous intersection.

Because there’s purpose in opposition, not just agreement, they compete, needing to know themselves in relation to others. They – we – engage, via games. We take the testing, and the winning, seriously. Competing is existential traction. Victory, existential progress. Self-idealisation, existential preservation. Projecting our undesirable traits onto other nations in order to fight them, existential light. It casts the shadow of our victimhood. Dardanelles, Darcy, Phar Lap, Bodyline.

This isolated young nation ensures players of games rise from ordinary ranks. A collusion encourages them above pursuers of other interests. Pugilists are crucial to this identity struggle. Our colony grows, resolving into conflicting camps, predominantly British overlords against settlers.

Next scene: it’s the early Nineteenth Century. We’re playing a game, of English provenance, with a political purpose, expressing internecine conflicts: yobs versus nobs, “natives” versus “soldiers”. Mother Britain is enemy to the colonies, even before The Colony competes with her internationally at this game, cricket, and Ashes contests become a serious matter.

*

The Mother Culture enclosed cultures like a Babushka doll: broader society, Australian sport, Australian cricket, Australian cricket team. The contained contained the container. Sub-cultures, countercultures, all as inseparable as orange from an orange. Borders were permeable. The matrix, inescapable.

Cricket became as much a vessel for Australianness as Dante’s Inferno was for Italianness, providing vernacular, imagery, metaphor, expectations, beliefs, standards. As a mixing bowl for all things Australian, it preceded the political attempt to unify us by half a century.

Even those born elsewhere, or those for whom cricket and its affairs are picayune piffle, get something of the cultural genes that inscribe our character: a will to compete, to gamble, cheeky attraction to things illicit. Freedom. Hope. A certain view of victory. Prowess and the willingness to prove it. A victim mentality. Self-doubt. Pre-existing signposts punctuate our journey, like the myth that sport is not only physically but yes, spiritually healthy. Agreed decencies.

Rich information shapes that cricket culture.

*

Then there’s that hope in leadership. Australians turn their children to an Australian captain, talk much of sporting “role models”. A kid learns to sledge. Restrictions, derived from the larger cultural space, are agreed on the field, in clubrooms, boardrooms (calling Moeen “Osama” was many things, but CA deemed it “un-Australian” – offensive and deviant), good and bad, as observed in our champions, manifest on pitches. Little Smudge, a cricket lover, was a product before he strode into deep, unchartered waters, unaware of their powerful undertow.

Smith, like any Australian captain, stepped into an immanent significance like an off-the-rack uniform, pockets stuffed with memos from other times, other places, surrendering to transcendent forces on one hand, asserting himself on the other. Every captain finds a way to split the difference.

Not everyone idolises a captain, but almost everyone idealises the role. People revealed during the Newlands saga a connectedness. Fans have imagos of leaders like Bradman, Chappelli at the other extreme, Taylor in-between. Three captains were Australian of the Year in 15 years.

But we Aussies have our variations on being human. England raises an ironic monocle. Subcontinental rulers can be objects of suspicion or scorn from subjects of different faiths or factions. Entire dynamics differ.

Real-life superhero Imran Khan admits cheerfully, expecting no impact whatsoever on his immense public standing, that a bottle-top was indispensable to his armoury in the slaying of 362 Test batsman. And by implication, to bowlers he captained. Ponder those ramifications. Yet no-one in his country cares much. There are worse sins there to be worrying about than cheating in a game.

Our own pill-fiddling scandal engaged The Colony because nothing’s confined to itself and there was something about survival in it. Surviving Smith’s misdirected friendly fire, for starters, was cricket’s immediate concern. The sense our consultants impose will help cricket persist. It won’t be “reality” or “truth”, just negotiated meanings that might as easily be called collective fantasies, mutual myths or shared lies. Their “truthfulness” is not an issue. Functional survival is. Manhood, winning, leadership, insecurity – all might be examined inside this “Australian cricket culture”.

That culture will be a petri dish. In it, world-views will compete, yet join in a mutual struggle for unattainable collective coherence. Tensions and rival forces will be managed as everyone adds their oil to the water. The way it all bubbles together in discord is a unity of sorts. That’s culture in a nutshell. It makes sense – until a president is murdered, a terrorist attacks, a city burns, an Australian captain cheats.

*

It was Australian cricket’s sub-prime crisis, deep-rooted. When Jim Maxwell lamented its “win-at-all-costs culture” in a documentary thrown together after the incident, he was only describing the pointy end of a history. Jim said it was bound to “implode”. Others sent warnings before Newlands. Abrasiveness would be our downfall. Pun intended.

Did certain vectors, then, point to inevitable, imperative crisis?

It’s been called a “governance issue” but no governing body completely grasps what it’s governing. Were CA’s reactions to various eruptions accurate or appropriate? We have to make concessions. CA’s lens has always been necessarily multifocal and ignoring profitability and expansion into unexplored areas courts terminal irrelevance. But there were those other relevant matters, like on-field abuse. Was CA attuned to them? Failure to recognise stimuli can be a sign of, or lead to, organisational deficiency. Was it a system breakdown? Was Newlands an isolated variable? Did it arise from the matrix?

Consider, too, new forces bearing on cherished aspects of culture. The dominant need of that young, isolated nation pressed on cricket the moment it went international: the desire to assert every “Australian” virtue — winning, fairly, never cowering, never allowing the enemy psychological inroads. Freedom from domination; asserting the Aussie will and way. The limitless War On Defeat, a chimerical enemy, was declared. Do we blame Smith and his troops for following an old operational brief? Do we alter the brief, or keep it and change the rules of engagement?

Now The Colony revises its unspoken constitution. And what is it to be “Aussie”, anyway?  Or “a man”, as exemplified by hirsute heroes Spofforth, Lillee, Marsh, Chappelli, Boon, Hughes, Warner; a “sporting man”, personified by Gilchrist, Harvey, Bradman, Woodfull? Do they strike the same chord? Where does a leisurely chain-smoking prodigy like Doug Walters sit in our earnest world? Does victory have the same meaning? Does a passionate, if wayward, supporter who abuses his losing national rugby team attract a different kind of criticism nowadays? Is cheating relative? Consider Imran. Compare and contrast.

*

Conditions existed for an Australian captain not only to cheat, but get caught. Smith’s inclination to believe he was unassailable was no mere hubris. It seems sight needed restoring. Smith began his captaincy with authoritarian flourish, rightly demanding certain personnel. By the end, the same note rang hollow. The old imago was ready to topple like some tyrant’s statue in the public square.

Expectation on Smith exceeded leadership. In crisis, Australian cricket has raised up saviours – something akin to the Biblical Judges. Our Samsons, Gideons and Joshuas were named Bradman, Chappell, Simpson, Taylor, Waugh. Until recently, Smith. Like those Old Testament leaders, they wielded big sticks in answer to the call.

Fitting, somewhat, the mould of the tough-minded, independent thinker of high standards required for captaincy, Smith also shone in isolation outside cricket’s system of representation, its habits of mind and behaviours, far above less-remarkable players he captained. Greg Chappell and Waugh took charge of significant characters and achievers. Only Warner came close to Smith as a batsman.

There were hysterics too. The South African tour was swathed in them, weapons like “inappropriate” and “offensive” levelled at Smith’s team and the crowds. Add Warner’s revenge motive, following the public humiliating of his wife and the de Kock incident. Other cans were opened: accusations of hypocrisy, sexism debates, discussion of “lines” crossed, condemnation of the team’s recent demeanour. Throw in an all-round form slump. According to Maxwell, “a siege mentality” overtook them.

Anxiety makes people step out of, or overstep, roles. The contagion can spread, vertically and horizontally. The veneer of civilisation only takes a little sandpapering and it’s gone. Smith and Warner already had common anxieties. Both were quickly conferred leadership by dint of extraordinary batsmanship. As team performance declined, especially batting, their elevation to formal leadership was fast-tracked. They picked up historical luggage. Current urgencies were added to the historical current.

Warner was a ripe fall-guy. The 2017 pay dispute was hardly Packer, 1977, but there was personal enmity, and he’s “polarising”. Warner was mouthpiece of the informal culture of the gene with its historically-rooted aggression; the unbound Opposite loose inside CA’s rational, formal citadel, knocking over pedestals. Apparently, he went too far. Residual resentment meant accord between CA and the countercultural Cricketer’s Association was superficial. The coalition of Warner and Smith here warrants an entire study. A horde of issues were kept in a holding cell.

Smith, having surpassed expectation against Mother Britain, was asked to satisfy The Colony’s craving for limitless victory on the soil of a talented, determined, well-drilled team. It went to script in the first Test – as it did in India, 2001. But whereas Waugh was confident his personnel would turn things around after the second-Test loss, Smith wasn’t at all, going into the fateful third Test at one-all. By that stage, sprites had overtaken his men. Some ancient devils manifested first in Warner. The demon he’d expelled when he put his house in order a few years ago returned with seven mates, each worse than itself.

It all swamped Smith’s authority, and with eleven words he abdicated upon seeing Warner and Bancroft concoct the sandpaper scam: “What are you blokes up to? I don’t want to know!” A big part of Smith’s guilt was his innocence.

Each captain progresses differently through familiar places.

*

Maybe we’ve been misunderstanding the present using terms of the past. A decisive leader might not be the solution. While long-form cricket continues its inevitable (under current conditions) entropy, he operates within a broken system. Lehmann and Smith couldn’t recapture a more self-assured, victorious time.

Have unforeseen powers arisen in other parts of The Colony? Have new fault lines rendered a fracture in cricket’s revered traditions necessary?

“Old-style” leaders are déclassé elsewhere. The larger environment is beginning to refuse them, reject subcultures that sustained them, as the supposedly ubiquitous Authoritarian Personality conjured by Adorno (well-played, Trump) conflicts with today’s Authoritarian: the Hysterical-Coercive Personality busying itself expunging that ol’ White Patriarch.

Credit CA for widening cricket’s family. The women’s game has exposed the men’s “band of brothers” mentality that squares off productive traits like empathy or even a considered, measured approach to competition, as somehow effeminate.

New ingredients, a different flavour.

The media, important in keeping Australian cricket rattling around inside its container, also heeds new constituents in social media. No longer proxies of a public unable to fend for itself, their disjuncture, too, is evident. Fewer journos will adopt the austere, individualist, nuance-is-for-Nancies approach of our skippers. Time for the totalitarian to make a fashionable wardrobe change.

With the populace weighing into issues in more immediate ways, there will be new payments, and penalties for new misdemeanours. Captains will be more readily rejected. On occasion, when social and mainstream media become allies, they constitute a formidable storm one skipper cannot withstand. Together on Twitter they retweeted with elemental triumphalism anything that made Smith, or his defenders, look hypocritical or silly. Cheats were an abhorrent “Other” to be rejected by The Colony – or else. Charity stood no chance in the face of peer fear. The feeding was frenzied.

Increased encampments, novel weapons. It’s fair to say Smith’s team were besieged.

The series of press conferences following the scandal were a communal pageant, a procession of penance. Warner’s and Smith’s reactions were examined with strange relish in all media for their “sincerity”. Notes were compared; juvenilia scrutinised – biographies, old films, anecdotes. Smith met the agreed requirements. Collective suspicion targeted Warner. That Alazon, Warner? His missus sat next to a spin doctor! He didn’t cry well enough! He walks that gloomy dingo-stalked gorge where once wandered another who didn’t cry well enough (turns out Lindy was innocent. The Colony mumbled a grudging half-admission that someone might have made a blue with the paperwork).

*

Temporary lunacy was the bridge. It happens. Chaos helps us better see order; we touch madness to know sanity. Strongholds might never be broken otherwise.

Once sanity was restored, the collective instinct led us to Tim Paine, standing next to those old prophets Justin Langer and Mark Taylor, likeable, stable, seemingly incorruptible. So far, sinless.

Between them, a coach who lapses into strange tongues, an ex-skipper who’s a secular saint of Australian cricket and key examiner of the findings of the Longstaff and McCosker reviews, and a captain who seems to get it, “corruption” and “rot” would be excised, discarded.

All will discharge the holy duty. There will be a period of grace. Sins of defeat will be forgiven before victory is demanded again.

Enemies might be appeased, too. We hope for an agreeable season. Heartfelt gestures of goodwill like shaking hands with opponents, already instituted by Paine, somewhat address that problematic old relationship between us and the “not-us”. There will be more under Langer’s tutelage.

But only constant awareness will turn back culture’s troublesome, timeless marauders – ancient traits that will stealthily coalesce to frustrate agents of change, subtly keep things in place. That’s how it all begins again. The need for “eternal vigilance” can sometimes be as forgotten as the man who first actually used the phrase: John Philpot Curran.

Deep-rooted beliefs, for example, can be damaging if unexamined. Like that robust old expectation of leadership by skilful example. Paine has already earned respect, but as foreman, he’ll ultimately be judged by his performance on the tools. Now our best batsman is hors de combat, that expectation might skew our judgement of Paine.

Saviours like Paine are secure conduits through mayhem but the transitional culture they preside over will freeze into a workable, acceptable state of affairs only until the next shake-up, which they might or might not survive.

Re-emphasis might be required. The Colony hates bad winners, but good winners, too, have been traditionally scrutinised for flaws, even during our perpetual War on Defeat. As for losing with grace – it has a short use-by date. The Colony might do well to adopt Kipling’s wry English take on Victory and Defeat.

Old suspicions, too, need to be openly addressed. Some are already calling Glenn Maxwell’s non-selection a relapse. Experience tells them that inside a sensible machine of esteemed selectors, panel discussions and processes followed “to the letter” teem ghosts of parochialism, partiality and politics – and a certain cultural expectation of brutal, decisive action. The “workable” decision to drop Simon Katich with extreme prejudice might have been considered victimisation in another context. In cricket’s, it was beyond question.

Genuine honesty has to replace ersatz blokey tactlessness – another reason for Taylor’s and Langer’s emergence. Genuine honesty will question old group defences that keep real causes unsayable. If many cannot bear to hear the right questions, as ex-coach Mickey Arthur pointed out, they will get right answers to the wrong questions. Default to symptoms and their suppression does long-term harm. Genuine honesty will distinguish false consensus from real agreement.

There are many things to be valued still, and change needs to account for them. Ownership will be a key to commitment, and other ways of seeing loss, victory and opposition might ideally emerge from the players and ripple out to suburban and country pitches. No theory matches a good real-life example, an embodiment. Taylor and Langer have demonstrated that they know this to be true.

No matter what CA do, The Colony will be watching. Already James Sutherland has resigned, not, he says, as a result of the scandal. But it defeated him. The head of CA is isolated. Cricket is Australia’s “world game”, a means and a measure for 150 years. Sutherland, too, had his moment of anagnorisis.

All this talk of culture excludes another way of seeing: Bancroft, Warner and Smith as sole agents. Life, like dreams, has a narrative with internal logic, but doesn’t lack incoherencies. What Warner and Bancroft perpetrated, and Smith approved, might have been as inexplicable as Barry Hall’s sudden urge to tell a wildly inappropriate joke on air. It can be argued that, too, was fuelled by context, but individuals who simply make bad decisions can be fixed, if The Colony allows.

Langer once shared with me his belief that a good culture is simply one that consists of “good” individuals. Individuals, that is, behaving well. Not flawless individuals. It flies in the face of group theory and opens itself up to postmodern questions, like, “who’s to say what good behaviour is?”; “who sets the standards?” Adorno’s bogeyman is never far away.

The man who replaces Lehmann uses an alien language to describe things the corporate/success slogan-level lingua franca cannot. A concept he calls “joy” enabled him to see that the Australian cricket team lacked it, and to spot the discontents driving Warner.

Another notion, “forgiveness”, gives him the ability to disregard bitter “ban them for life” calls coming from corners of The Colony; to believe the evil trio deserve rehabilitation. At the WACA, it’s fair to say lives were restored while the primary task – playing cricket – and its goal of winning matches was re-established by Langer. Task-focus is the most potent weapon against culture’s dark beasts.

Langer already attracts disapproval. His merely awkward attempt at plugging Australian cricket back into the Mother Culture by declaring the returned Peter Siddle a “great Australian” was, to those who question the old constitution, offensive. He’ll have straits to navigate between various interest groups wanting stasis and the progressive caste whose ethos won’t include a coach with authoritarian or nationalist views, caricatured though they are. He wants the players to grapple only with what’s in themselves.

The ideal held by Langer, Taylor and Paine is a “culture” of openness and feedback, participative and involving, encouraging team members to make active contributions. But ideals are like good intentions. Only on-field success will silence most disapproval. That will never change.

Australian cricket will endure in some form. It will take the field, mentor, guardian, captain, twelve men behaving well for now – and a thirteenth who goes by many monikers, a hoary old-timer of undiminished influence eager to co-operate in shaping the present but just as keen to lurk alone in the shadows, controlling it anyway. So that he comes when he’s called, we address him by a single name: Culture.

Published in Inside Sport, October 2018