Month: March 2018

The rime of the Australian ball tamperer

Posted on by Martin Newman

Like the ancient mariner Trevor Chappell finally emerged this week from his decades-long exile of public opprobrium to pass on his curse.

With a glittering eye the villain of the underarm bowling incident of ’81 gleefully announced he was no longer the most hated man in Australian sport.

He cast it off, more happy to be rid of the albatross around his neck than sorry for what awaited the disgraced Australian cricket captain Steve Smith.

Smith, the player feted as our greatest batsman since Don Bradman, this week held two of the worst press conferences of his life.

Naively thinking a manly admission of guilt could get him ahead of the controversy, he set off.

He’s not good at facing the press anyway, but even by his lacklustre standards the train departed the station and promptly derailed.

By week’s end Smith had reverted to a boy, bawling his eyes out and blubbering for forgiveness from a steely public that had already made up its mind.

The brightest star, and future of the country’s Test team, had lost sight of the gap between perception and reality.

For the truth is there are 101 ways to cheat at cricket and pretty much everyone has done it.

The national team’s ball tampering is in the headlines, but the message to take whatever advantage you can in the game begins at an early age.

In under 16s cricket, playing in the local final, I remember the opposition coach beating the ground violently with a mallet and screaming at his young charges when they failed to slow down the game enough, allowing another over that saw us tie with them. Before that, they had run down the clock with their time-wasting, strangling our opportunity to win.

You can call that tactics, but it’s not sporting. It wasn’t fair.

Playing grade cricket, where you often have to double up as an umpire adjudicating against your own players, I learned fast: Don’t ever give an lbw.

Having raised the finger to my own captain when he was struck plum on the pads, cowering against the stumps, I got the mother of all dressing downs in front of the team back on the sidelines.

And, when it was my turn to bat, my aggrieved teammate came out to umpire and immediately gave me out, caught, even though the ball had sailed past my bat without a connection. He’d asked one of the opposition players (who was happy to oblige) to appeal the first ball I swung at and missed.

It was an important lesson. Cricket is firstly about winning and secondly about loyalty to your team. Not honour. Not fair play.

It’s treated that way by everyone involved, from the grounds staff that prepare a pitch to favour the home side to the deliberate scuffing of the ball to achieve swing; the sledging that greets a new batsman at the crease, or the unwillingness to walk when you’re out.

It’s just not cricket!

Well, it is actually. That’s very much what cricket is.

And it is against that background that our national team has come unstuck.

There is a gaping chasm between public perceptions of the game and an often brutal reality. The same reality that saw cricket arrogantly close its ranks at the inquest into Phillip Hughes’ death. Nothing to see here.

Everything that has happened in this past week has clung to that ethos.

The decision to rough up the ball with sandpaper (why on Earth choose bright yellow?), the man-child captain invoking a mysterious ‘leadership group’ to explain away his decision.

It would be churlish to cite the numerous examples of cheating in international cricket, the match fixing, the drugs, the slinging.

Or, even just the huge level of hypocrisy exhibited in the comments of some former players who are no saints themselves.

The cheats’ wheel of misfortune has landed on most countries, and now it’s our turn.

A sadder and a wiser man, Steve Smith has learnt it the hard way.

(Originally published in The Daily Telegraph. Painting: The Cricketers by Russell Drysdale)

Pay discrimination against women is issue of our time

Posted on by Martin Newman

When people talk about the innocence of childhood they aren’t usually referring to the gender pay gap.

But I’m going to draw that bow. It’s not as long as you think.

Because up until the end of school, the end of your childhood, the concept of potentially having a job that is worth more if you’re a bloke never crosses your mind.

I recall my graduation year at high school, a bog standard co-ed public on the South Coast, and the even balance among the students across all subjects. There was no marked difference.

Across the board boys and girls were either equally competent, equally brilliant or equally not made for school. My mate Anthony was dux in our graduation year, but another friend Katie was nipping at his heels. 

We had no concept either that among the teaching staff there was any difference in competence, ability or intelligence. Because there wasn’t.

It turns out, though, that school was some kind of egalitarian utopia. Because once you start earning a wage a very different picture emerges.

Talk to experts and they’ll tell you the slow diminution of women begins when they enter the workforce or tertiary education, and continues steadily through their working lives.

Inevitably more and more are put off certain vocations by the male culture that has developed in them.

For men it is the opposite, entry to a club where everything seems slightly easier than it should.

In today’s workforce you hear more and more about redressing the balance and of programs mentoring women in the office. The completely incorrect implication of that being that women somehow haven’t kept up, or can’t play the game, or just aren’t good enough.

How did we get to this point? Or more precisely, how have we always been at this point and why has more not changed?

Men know, from as far back as we can remember, that women are intellectually on a par with us. That our ‘female peers’ are exactly that, equals.

We know it from science and we know it intuitively. 

And yet the gender pay gap persists, as does the under-representation of women in company boardrooms and in politics.

There are only minor signs of improvement.

In this country the official wage gap has wound back only 0.6% from what it was in 1994.

And the Saturday Telegraph’s own investigation into the basic expectations of some employers shows just how transparent many industries are about paying women less than men.

Women, of course, are inevitably blamed for their own predicament. They’re allegedly not vocal enough, or cunning, or they are “too nice”.

It’s a bit like boys getting away with bad behaviour because they are boys. Men do too.

Men get away with being loud, overbearing or intractable because they are men, and it’s their nature.

The responsibility of women being paid fairly, equally, lies with the leadership of any organisation.

Offer anyone an advantage in the workplace and they’d be stupid not to take it, which is why responsible management is so vital. A management sensible enough to vanquish outdated practices and brave enough to see justice performed.

Part of it is appreciating the different attributes women and men bring to the workforce and rewarding them equally.

The subtle, but unrelenting, talking-over of women in the workplace, and the acceptance of it, will ultimately be to the detriment of our whole society.

(Originally published in The Daily Telegraph. Illustration: Street art on Berlin Wall)