Cricket and Free Speech

Warner, Johnson, Khawaja, and the changing times...

Gideon Haigh

The WACA Test of a decade ago is one of my favourite cricket memories.  It was played in fierce heat and piercing light.  The press watched it from an open marquee square of the wicket at ground level, so that the thump of deliveries from Mitchell Johnson into the gloves and the peal of the boundaries from David Warner’s bat were clearly audible.  And in the same enclosure I watched an instructive exchange that went to the heart of how sporting news is made.

Illustration by Fisher Classics www.fisherclassics.com

On the third day, Warner made a fine hundred.  It was, and remains, standard practice for the written media to nominate from whom they wish to hear at the close-of-play presser, even if we do not always get it.  Our resident shop steward Malcolm Conn relayed the preference for Warner.  There was also some degree of mischief to this.  Warner was at the time incurably quotable: he had just offered up his infamous ‘scared eyes’ line about Jonathan Trott, and there was a sense not even he knew what he would say next.  On the scene for Cricket Australia, chief flak Jono Rose knew it.  He listened, nodded, and knocked us back.  We could have someone else, not Warner.

There ensued a willing exchange of views between Mal and Jono from which, I thought, both parties emerged with credit: Mal was impressively forceful in asserting our prerogative; Jono was impressively calm in evaluating the risk to CA and, indeed, to Warner.  It was strong but not heated. We settled for second best.

Ten years on, and Perth has staged another Test, across town, in which cricket’s occasionally strangulated relationship with freedom of speech has again been front and centre, with Warner and Johnson this time antagonists, along with Usman Khawaja.  This time, however, cricket shat the bed.

The roles and circumstances, of course, were different.  After Johnson on Test eve published a sharply-worded column critical of his old confrere Warner and his entitlement to a farewell match at the Sydney Cricket Ground, he was relieved by CA of responsibilities to speak at two functions.  After Khawaja subtly tested the waters by wearing boots to training featuring the slogans ‘all lives are equal’ and ‘freedom is a human right’ in relation to the crisis in Gaza, CA stepped in to tell him he would in doing so transgress the ICC’s statutes.

Interestingly, the consensus was far more indulgent of Khawaja than of Johnson: in a typically fair-minded column, Greg Baum said that Khawaja is ‘hardly a provocateur or rabblerouser’, that his message is ‘political, but it’s scarcely radical’; Johnson, it was generally felt, had gone too far, had made his criticism of Warner, and of chairman of selectors George Bailey, ‘personal’, even if it’s not quite clear how criticism relating to a person cannot at some level be personal.

Strange world this, where cricketers are felt within their rights to weigh in on one of the world’s most devilishly complex geopolitical issues but to need protection from the opinions of former teammates, where fairly unambiguous ICC regulations are nothing compared to the ‘unwritten rule’ that the baggy green brotherhood merely pat one another on the back.

A ‘CA spokesman’ then offered this patronising take on it all: ‘Mitchell is one of Australia’s most celebrated bowlers, but we felt on this occasion it was in everyone’s best interests that he was not the guest speaker at the CA functions.’  In other words, CA was acting with Johnson’s welfare at heart.  Oh, blech.  This had the same regrettable tenor as Bailey’s response to Johnson’s critiquing his visible closeness to the players he’s charged with choosing: ‘I hope he [Johnson] is OK. I’ve got no idea [if he is].’  As though only a cot case could possibly have any issue with Australian cricket’s players and management.

Ten years ago, although it was against the media’s best interests, I thought Jono was on balance right to keep Warner away from our pryings, because they were invitations to further indiscretion that a brash young cricketer, high on adrenaline and testosterone after a century, might not be able to resist.  

But does the commercial juggernaut of thirty-seven-year-old Warner really need protection from the mere views of forty-two-year-old Johnson?  And does Johnson, a grown man who last played for Australia eight years ago, really need protection from himself?

It happens that I don’t share Johnson’s opinion of Warner’s right to a place, have never stopped feeling in the last few years, even as his form has been under pressure, that he is a best-credentialed candidate to be Khawaja’s partner; I’m also bored with takes on Sandpapergate that exclude the (very high) price Warner paid for it.  Further, I incline to Bailey’s view that proximity to the players is in general helpful in his role, even if it is pregnant with its own risks.

Yet didn’t both Warner (‘Everyone’s entitled to their own opinions’) and Pat Cummins (‘But everyone’s entitled to their opinions’) assure us they were not fussed by Johnson’s remarks? And didn’t former colleagues Ed Cowan (Warner has been a ‘walking wicket’) and Geoff Lawson (‘The Australian cricket team is not his property or play thing and his form…[has] been declining at Test level for some years') also make unflattering observations of Warner’s form leading into the Test?  Can someone explain to me precisely what is to be feared from fair comment?  As Orwell reminded us: ‘If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear.’  

If ex-cricketers cannot on occasion be critical of former colleagues, then what is the point of them?  Isn’t it their occasional criticisms that actually lend credibility to their praise?  You knew Shane Warne’s advocacy mattered because he could also be sharp in his disfavour: no baggy green brotherhood and/or ex-player omertà for him.  Sometimes Warne could be churlish and mulish, especially where Steve Waugh was concerned.  But you also always knew where he stood, while Waugh strangely grew in stature for his forbearance.  Both Warner and Khawaja have foreshadowed careers at the microphone: let’s hope they speak without fear or favour.

Times, too, have changed somewhat in the last ten years.  In 2013-14, summer was red hot, and the Ashes had a lock on our attention.  To what has been an excellent year for this Australian team, 2023-24 looms as a severe anti-climax.  Face it: Johnson, and also Khawaja, have offered talking points in a summer otherwise short of them.  ‘It costs nowt,’ as Brian Clough said of opinion.  ‘And it makes the world go round.’  Right now we could do with some.