If captaining the Australian cricket team is considered second in importance only to the role of prime minister, then Ricky Ponting must be feeling the frustration and disbelief of a nation breathing down his neck.
The prospect that England, the imperial mother country, could snatch the Ashes from Australia’s grasp for the first time in almost two decades has many bleary-eyed cricket fanatics calling for Ponting and his ageing warriors to be brought home in chains.
Unless Ponting’s men beat at the Oval in the fifth Test, which starts on Thursday, he will be the first Australian skipper to lose the Ashes since Allan Border’s team 20 years ago.
Since the first Test at Lord’s, the Baggy Green empire has been out-thought and outplayed. Adding to the national anxiety is the fact that the Wallabies have also clocked up four straight test defeats in rugby — their worst run since 1972.
Sport is the opiate of the Australian masses, and the underperformance of their cricket team has dented the country’s nationalistic fervour. To be uninterested in cricket, football, tennis, horse racing, golf, basketball or swimming is to be an outcast in the land of the unending quest for sporting glory.
Anxious to tap into the fervour unleashed by Australian victories, politicians are happy camp-followers at big sporting occasions, schmoozing with players to demonstrate their common touch.
Former Liberal prime minister Malcolm Fraser, determined to defuse Australian politics in the 1970s, once said that it was his ambition to put sport on the front pages of the newspapers. Nowadays, it seems it’s never off.
The hysteria that swept Australia after the 1983 America’s Cup victory by Alan Bond and his crew was the most spectacular demonstration of Australia’s national obsession, even prompting then prime minister Bob Hawke to call any boss who sacked a worker for not showing up on that historic day a ”bum”.
John Howard, the current Prime Minister, has nurtured the belief that sport is an important part of Australia’s cultural fabric, a distraction in troubled times.
”It plays a very big part in the consciousness and the daily lives of Australians with its competitive spirit and its association with the open air and the climate we have in this country,” he said recently.
Even the vocabulary of sport is colonising politics, where increasingly the talk is of team players, level playing fields, playing hardball and letting things go through to the wicket-keeper.
Sport has also been an important avenue through which young Australians learn the rules of social behaviour, relationships and self-discipline — and sometimes a lack of it.
The list of loveable sporting larrikins is long. Australians pride themselves on their blend of rebelliousness and irreverence. But as athletes such as Olympic swimmer Dawn Fraser, who pinched the Japanese flag at the Tokyo Olympics in 1964, have found, it doesn’t always go down well with officialdom.
Ian Chappell was the father of Australia’s cricketing revival, but he had to defy sport’s most conservative administrators to do it. His team was brimming with extroverts such as Dennis Lillee, Rod Marsh and Jeff Thomson, who poked their tongues at convention.
Australian star Shane Warne can pose headaches for cricket’s conservative administrators, but he is also the greatest spin-bowler to date, which is why large sections of the Australian sporting public turn a blind eye to his lengthening list of indiscretions.
But Australia’s idol worship is often to blame for mishaps. Pressure becomes to conform, to please the sponsors and to act as a role model brings its own perils for some stars. The sex scandals plaguing rugby league and Australian Rules football last year proved what many had long suspected — that celebrity and scandal often go hand in hand.
The humiliation and professional demise of the young Australian politician John Brogden this week was a sad reminder that the high-pressure worlds of sport and politics are intrinsically linked. And that sometimes both are taken far too seriously.
Brogden, the leader of the opposition Liberal party in New South Wales, tried to commit suicide just a day after he resigned over allegations of racism and sexual harassment.
Having the details of one’s private life dragged through the daily press is usually the preserve of sport stars who have fallen from grace.
Certainly the comparison has not gone unnoticed. The letters page of the Sydney Morning Herald last Wednesday said it all: ”John Brogden sounds like a cross between Andrew Symonds, Darren Lehmann and Shane Warne. Does anyone know if he can bat or bowl?”
Diggers vs Poms
1915 Australian and New Zealand troops land in Gallipoli alongside British, French and Indian forces. After massive losses, the Allies are forced to withdraw. Australians blame the incompetence of British generals for the slaughter.
1932-33 Cricket fans still talk about the Bodyline series and the rift it caused between the two countries, after Douglas Jardine’s England side won the Ashes by coldly adopting a tactic of bowling directly at the bodies of Australian batsmen.
1950s A new generation of Britons is lured down under by shorter working hours, sunnier climes and a better standard of living. The migrants, whose passage is heavily subsidised, become known as ”£10 poms”.
1992 Australian Prime Minister Paul Keating is dubbed ”The Lizard of Oz” by the British tabloids for touching the queen’s back at a reception in Canberra.
2003 A relative minnow of football, the Australian national team, humble England in front of their own fans. The ”Socceroos” finish up the 3-1 winners, but partisan England fans claim it doesn’t count as the game was a friendly. — Guardian Unlimited Â