Ten Things #12

Gideon Haigh on England's introspection, New York hijinks and the Andrews honour.

Artwork by Fisher Classics

1/ The T20 World Cup continues.

2/ Well, they can’t say they’re unprepared.  Here is England’s coach Matthew Mott ahead of the tournament, in the context of the team’s abysmal fifty-over World Cup campaign last year: ‘How we react if we happen to have a poor start is something we’ve identified. As a group we’ve made a commitment to be more open in and around our training sessions to help each other out more. In India, all of us were guilty of being a bit insular and trying to problem-solve ourselves. We’ve made a commitment to be more vulnerable as a group so that we are helping each other. The robust conversations we’ve had will hold us in good stead.’ 

3/ According to my colleague Simon Wilde in The Times, Mott ‘also brought in the Manchester City psychologist David Young to help with lines of communication between management and players.’ Unfortunately Mott failed to invite my grandmother, who would have been pleased to tell England how to suck eggs. Because with the best will in the world it’s hard to see how three-way communication is any easier than two-way. Time, perhaps, for a robust conversation about Mott’s future.

4/ It’s certainly been a suitable juncture to revisit White Hot, the recent book by my acute young colleagues Tim Wigmore and Matt Roller chronicling ‘the Inside Story of England Cricket’s Double World Champions’, thanks to ‘a golden generation of players, leadership and vision, a collective shift in mindset to embrace risk.'  It’s an enjoyable read by diligent reporters, but a bit like a mid-career autobiography. Tim and Matt argue that England has established a ‘DNA in white ball cricket’; they quote a bullish Jos Buttler as describing it as ‘engrained’; Liam Livingstone predicts England will grow ‘stronger and stronger’, Sam Billings that it will ‘keep on progressing’; the assumption is that everything achieved is here to stay, infinitely replicable, self-correcting, self-reproducing and self-congratulating. But as C. Northcote Parkinson reminded us: ‘Perfection of planned layout is achieved only by institutions on the point of collapse.’ And if you listen, there’s just a hint of people looking back, over their shoulders, resting on laurels.  Thus Mark Wood: ‘We were part of a team that won everything. We beat everybody. We set the standards. We deserve those medals because we’ve been the best, consistently.’ Note the past tense.  If England can advance to the final octet, it will be a feat of escapology to rival anything they’ve previously accomplished, and fully justify a White Hot update.  If not, the opening lines should be italicised: ‘In English men’s sport, winning normally means you’re about to lose.’

5/ Ticket prices for India v Pakistan soared as high as $US10,000.  $US2500 per six!  Cui bono? Certainly not cricket’s.  But Pete had a great time, is in cracking form on the pod, and that’s got to be worth something.

6/ Is it time for a rosette for stinking the joint out?  That is, recognising those batters who most compromise the progress of innings, such as Imad Wasim’s timid 15 off 23 as Pakistan slipped behind the run rate in New York.  Still the favourite is Jonny Bairstow’s sorry 7 from 13 balls in England’s limping pursuit of Australia’s 201 in Bridgetown.  I’m not sure any player with a hundred Tests behind them has exhibited the same capacity for, at times, making the game look so cussedly difficult.

7/ Former Vanity Fair editor Tina Brown on Martin Amis: ‘One of my first calls when I got to Vanity Fair was to ask him to write a piece about a new play by David Hare. His first question was: “Do I have to see it?”

8/ Brian Jonestown Massacre tambourinist Joel Gion reaches breaking point in his cracking new memoir In The Jingle Jangle Jungle: ‘It’s a thin (but extremely long) line between being a beautiful loser-outcast in rebellion against everything conventional and just an obnoxious asshole nobody wants to deal with anymore, and the trapeze wire is very high now.  I look down and squint at the tiny shapes far below.’  You’ll never look at Burger King dumpster the same way again.

9/ Is there anything less edifying than leaders pinning medals on each other?  It is the stuff of dictatorships and military juntas.  It is like sticking the ‘employee of the month’ badge on the CEO’s lapel.  What could be a greater honour than being elected by one’s countrymen to represent them?  Best, surely, just to leave it at that.  So this is just an A-grade trolling from political Labor. Leave aside that Daniel Andrews ran a regime whose premier’s department had more staff than its health department, that his state achieved the worst economic and human outcomes of COVID, left Victoria with a mental health blight that may never be remedied and a debt that will take generations to repay - I mean, I love that part of the award is for ‘contribution to infrastructure development’ when every project Andrews touched was a budgetary calamity and that the dystopian landscapes left by his ‘big build’ turn your thoughts to Ozymandias. But that’s not the really vulgar part.  It’s that, here they are, these staunch social democrats and ardent republicans forming a partisan queue to get a touch on the shoulder from the King’s sword,  and in doing so debasing every other honour distributed.  You thought Tony Abbott knighting the Duke of Edinburgh was bad?  At least those jokers believe in this junk.  I can only speculate that Andrews was always a closet royalist, and that $600 million donation to the Commonwealth Games was the giveaway.

10/ This goes to an age-old conundrum: what to do with former politicians, eh?  I know, make them chairmen of listed companies.  Wait….

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