10 Things 3

GH on Bancroft, Wade, The Middle East, 4 Corners, The Yarras

Gideon Haigh

1/ Thinking unimaginatively in like-for-like terms, I favoured Cameron Bancroft to succeeded David Warner as Usman Khawaja’s opening partner.  The selectors, as we know, favoured Steve Smith - their rationale was, in part, to provide him with a new challenge, shaking him from an old rut.  After New Zealand, that old rut probably looks pretty good.  But it is worth us acknowledging what Australia gained in return, which is a space for both Cameron Green, who stamped his authority on number four, and Mitchell Marsh, who bossed the Black Caps during Australia’s chase at Christchurch.  And the alleged sacrifice of Smith to the order’s greater sake must entail the question: is Smith getting lbw more often because he’s opening, or because he’s pushing thirty-five?  Every great player, whether it’s Vivian Richards or Ricky Ponting, experiences an attenuation of form in their mid-thirties.  If they did not, they could conceivably play forever.  Even had it worked, Smith at the top was only ever a short-term solution, with Khawaja also backing towards the exit - and his summer’s average of 34 has tended to pass beneath notice.  Journalists are happy anyway: failing or succeeding, Smith always provides something to write about.

2/ So farewell, then, Matthew Wade, aged thirty-six, after one of the more curious Australian first-class careers: he played twenty-two Tests as a keeper, averaging 28.6, fourteen Tests as a specialist batter averaging 31.6.  He also filled in as an ersatz opener, at round the same mark.  Wade had some fine moments, including hundreds that bookended the 2019 Ashes, and is building a useful curriculum vitae as a white ball utility.  But at the risk of being unkind, I’m not sure he should have played as much Test cricket as he did, or would have in a stronger period for Australian Test batting - that he played as a specialist number six who did not bowl and was only an average fielder was an indictment of the lack of alternatives thrown up by the country’s first-class system.  

3/ Rishabh Pant, meanwhile, is still only twenty-six, even if his career has lasted long enough to involve an eighteen month hiatus following his motor accident.  He might now feature in Delhi Capitals’ opening match on the Indian Premier League on 23 March.  There will be bigger adjustments. Pant was known for the almost masochistic zeal of his training, especially if he was coming off a failure, and the millennial nature of his attention, fleeting and fugitive.  With the best will in the world, his life will be lived at a more even pace.  He has made a remarkable recovery. Can he sustain it?  At any rate, it is exciting to have him back.

4/ I stopped in a few weeks ago for a chat with John Howard.  It was around the time of Nemesis, and he was in fine fettle.  His office features an antechamber devoted to cricket memorabilia, from which he obviously cannot bear to be parted, which reminded me of the grumpy arguments during his prime ministership about whether he genuinely liked cricket or whether it was all a sham: I once commissioned the late, great Matt Price to write a piece about this for Wisden Australia.  Whether he’s an expert or not, I think cricket has played an outsized role in his life, and I had not realised how great until I recently read his autobiography Lazarus Rising (2011).  It was on coming home from playing a game of cricket aged sixteen that Howard learned his father had died; it was after a game of cricket aged thirty that Howard, having also helped as a scrutineer in a by-election for Randwick, met teacher and fellow Liberal Party member Janette Parker and was ‘immediately smitten’; one of the reasons for his September 1985 showdown with opposition leader Andrew Peacock was an appearance as guest host of the Midday Show when he nominated Bill O’Reilly as an interviewee - maybe Peacock was a Bradman loyalist?  Howard can’t have taken that Wisden piece amiss for he describes how, in the last week of his last campaign, he visited Matt, then in the final stages of cancer and days from death: ‘We chatted for 40 minutes or so about politics and sport. He displayed humbling courage and cheerfulness.  Matt’s life was ebbing away; I only faced an election.’ 

5/ The book also contains quite a lot of cricket interest, including that, during the Joh for PM imbroglio, Howard discussed with Greg Chappell the possibility of the latter becoming premier of Queensland.  Had Chappell not declined, Sourav Ganguly’s career might have ended differently.

6/ Ricky from Trailer Park Boys: ‘Make like a tree and fuck off.’

7/ Perhaps you watched 4 Corners on Monday night. Apart from the babyish simplifications and tendentious analysis, as though the rest of the Middle East did not exist, it was hard to bear the sheer conspicuousness of John Lyons, whose smug face was as much the subject as Israel and Palestine.  The self-dramatising presenter who positions themselves as the story is the bane of journalism, although maybe it always has been.  Here’s Scoop’s Wenlock Jakes in action: ’Why, once Jakes went out to cover a revolution in one of the Balkan capitals. He overslept in his carriage, woke up at the wrong station, didn’t know any different, got out, went straight to a hotel, and cabled off a thousand-word story about barricades in the streets, flaming churches, machine guns answering the rattle of his typewriter as he wrote, a dead child, like a broken doll, spreadeagled in the deserted roadway below his window — you know. Well they were pretty surprised at his office, getting a story like that from the wrong country, but they trusted Jakes and splashed it in six national newspapers. That day every special in Europe got orders to rush to the new revolution. They arrived in shoals. Everything seemed quiet enough, but it was as much as their jobs were worth to say so, with Jakes filing a thousand words of blood and thunder a day. So they chimed in too. Government stocks dropped, financial panic, state of emergency declared, army mobilized, famine, mutiny – and in less than a week there was an honest to God revolution under way, just as Jakes had said. There’s the power of the press for you.’  And still is, not least at the ABC.

8/ Mind you, conflict in the Middle East may predate even that.  This from the foundational text of Arab nationalism, The Awakening of the Arab Nation (1905) by Najib Azouri, when the reigning empire in the region had for four centuries been Ottoman: ‘Two important phenomena…are evident at this moment in Asian Turkey: these are the awakening of the Arab nation and the veiled effort of Jews to reconstitute on a very large scale the ancient monarchy of Israel. These two movements are destined to fight continually until one vanquishes the other. The fate of the entire world will depend on the final outcome of this battle between these two people representing two contrary principles.’  As true as the day it was written, save that Azouri was a Maronite Christian adrift in Paris and the Turks his chief antagonists.

9/ As you can tell, I’m thinking about this quite a lot.  Also worth your while are Amos Oz’s lectures on the conflict collected in How to Cure a Fanatic (2012), explaining how a ‘real estate dispute’ has been fanned into a holy war.  I am struck by these lines about seeing Israel and Palestine as victims of the same oppressor: ‘Europe, which colonised the Arab world, exploited it, humiliated it, trampled upon its culture, controlled it and used it as an imperialistic playground, is the same Europe which discriminated against the Jews, persecuted them, harassed them and finally mass-murdered them in an unprecedented genocide.  Now you would have thought that two victims immediately would develop between themselves a sense of solidarity.  But in real life, some of the worst conflicts are precisely the conflicts between two victims of the same oppressor.  Two children of the same cruel parent do not necessarily love each other. Very often they see in each other the exact image of the same cruel parent.’

10/ On a happier note, beautiful weather for finals this weekend: A grade at home to YP, D grade at Emerald Hill.  Go Yarras.