Pat Says Boo, World Reels

Cue the usual hysterics, the social media drive-bys, the mirthless cartoons

Gideon Haigh

A hoary cliche of news media concerns the captaincy of the Australian cricket team being the second most important office in the country after the prime ministership.  

On one hand, it’s what a particular prime minister would have called ‘hyperbowl’; on the other, you can argue that the comparison, at least in prestige terms, has it back to front.

The captaincy is an older office than the prime ministership, extending back 147 years versus 123.  The captaincy involves a more of less constant cycle of winning, versus once every four years.  

Many more people in England, India, Pakistan, South Africa, Sri Lanka, West Indies and Bangladesh know who leads Australia’s cricket team than who leads its government.  And, right now Pat Cummins is doing a far better job than Anthony Albanese.

Cummins has had a year of unexampled success, leading Australia to victory in the World Test Championship and World Cup, and to a retention of the Ashes; over the same period Albanese did nothing about a cost-of-living crisis while expending his political capital on what looks increasingly like a vanity project.

Cummins is even proving abler at what Albanese used to regard as his speciality - ‘fighting Tories’. 

Let’s keep this in proportion.  Cummins is hardly an instinctive culture warrior.  It is more that the neo-narcissists of the Australian right are so brittle, so apt to be triggered by anyone seen in proximity to a solar panel or a copy of Dark Emu.

Cummins’ positions seem always to be moderately couched; it is more that he gives straight answers to straight questions rather than deflecting that he is merely a sportsman and the, y’know, the boys done well.

Even Cummins’ latest intervention commenced with a patriotic preamble: ‘I absolutely love Australia.  It is the best country in the world by a mile.’ Then: ‘We should have an Australia Day, but we can probably find a more appropriate day to celebrate it.’

Cue the usual hysterics, the social media drive-bys, the mirthless cartoons. Sports people should stay in their lane, right?  Although were Cummins to have donned a slouch hat and wrapped himself in an Australian flag spun from coal, he would now be fending off invitations to deliver the keynote at this year’s CPAC.  Assuming David Warner doesn’t have that gig sewn up…..

Yet what was Cummins’ view anyway?  It was not the call for Thursday’s game against the West Indies to be redesignated the Invasion Day Test with the burning of an effigy of Captain Cook; merely a recognition of Australia Day’s increasingly negative connotations.  Celebratory calendars change.  If they didn’t we’d still be marching on Empire Day, raising a glass on St Andrew’s Day.

The Australian cricket team also developed a political character, to go with the game’s reach and resonances, even before the colonies unified - indeed, they were enlisted in the cause of Federation. 

Joe Darling’s 1899 Ashes team were farewelled at Sydney Town Hall by Edmund Barton and George Reid, long-time rivals recently reconciled in the federal cause who doubled as vice-presidents of the NSW Cricket Association.  

The Australasian’s report stirs the cockles: ‘Mr Barton called on the Eleven to remain true to the nation which they would belong to on their return….Joe Darling stepped forward, with his hand upon his heart, and declared that that should be their only endeavour.’  Imagine pre-Federation Sky After Dark: ‘Hey Joe Darling, read the room!  What about our customs revenues?  And don’t be so disrespectful of the NSW Mounted Rifles!’

The captaincy’s most successful incumbents, moreover, have all expressed the wider contexts of their eras. In his moral middle-classness and imperial fealty, Donald Bradman was the perfect conservative pin-up.  In his sideburns and safari suits, Ian Chappell was a prototypical Whitlam man.

Allan Border was the perfect ‘end of certainty’ figure, standing firm as Australia adjusted to the deregulation of the (cricket) world.  Steve Waugh tapped into baggy green folklore as successfully as John Howard built a haven for ancestor worship.  

Cummins is different again: cautious but thoughtful, moderate but confident.  Successful too - which is what most galls his detractors.  There’s no evidence of his being distracted from his core responsibilities by his non-core utterances, or that going woke is sending him broke.  On the contrary: he is at the top of his cricket form and earning capacity.

Which foreshadows its own challenges.  What we are prepared to say is one test; what we are prepared to sacrifice is another.  What we are yet to see from Cummins is a conviction that might cost him a dollar and tarnish that super-slick brand.

Cummins will this year be the second-highest overseas player in the Indian Premier League, whose poo-bahs sit at the right hand of a sectarian autocrat.  Cummins plays in global tournaments bankrolled by Aramco, the world’s biggest polluter and the world’s most assiduous greenwasher.  

Last year there was much talk of cricket being the next target of Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund, the country’s tentacular and opaque sovereign wealth fund, promotor of LIV Golf and owner of Newcastle United.  In which case, Cummins will be near the top of the shopping list.  He has an important job now; but his more important roles might be to come.

This piece also published at Guardian.com