CANBERRA, AUSTRALIA - DECEMBER 06: Glenn Maxwell of Australia warms up before game two of the One Day International series between Australia and New Zealand at Manuka Oval on December 6, 2016 in Canberra, Australia. (Photo by Mark Metcalfe/Getty Images) Photograph: Mark Metcalfe/Getty Images
Depending on how you like your sport served, cricket either suffers or enjoys a reputation for being political.
But while politics is probably no more or less part of the game than most other professional sports, cricket’s nature gives rise to pondering in a way many others cannot.
To think of cricket and politics is to imagine sharp-suited administrators trading calls about schedules from private numbers across seas, or tracksuited coaches making shady selection calls – whispered from the sides of mouths, sunglasses on, staring into the middle distance, arms folded, as they survey the nets.
It’s no different with players: if you’re not at the dining table, you’re probably on the menu. The game is full of would-be Frank Underwoods in whites.
Rarely, however, does Australian cricket use the public stage to prosecute its politics. This makes Glenn Maxwell’s case special; an adjective, incidentally, often assigned to him.
Right now, the public seem more comfortable with it than the inner sanctum. But for a player with clear capacity to affect Australia’s ailing cricketing fortunes, his recent public evisceration at the hands of the national coach and captain was curious.
In the case of Glenn Maxwell v the Australian Cricket Establishment, it would be tempting to assign each camp into corners good and evil. Of course, it’s not so binary.
By any measure, Maxwell’s public comments about his place in the Victorian batting order were ill advised. For somebody with clear ambition to play Test cricket for Australia, publicly implying that Matt Wade, his state captain and national keeper, had prioritised his own reselection over Maxwell’s was never going to help his cause.
Members of Victoria’s own establishment reacted swiftly. Key messages at the ready, elder statesmen Rob Quiney and Darren Berry painted the picture of a selfish player with a bad attitude.
Berry’s line had the all-important cut-through: “It’s all ‘me, me, me’ stuff, isn’t it?” he posited on Melbourne radio. The response from the Victorian bloc made sense, at least. Here was a guy who’d publicly questioned a double Shield-winning captain, months after declaring his preference to play for NSW.
For a state that already bathes in an ocean of paranoia about its northern neighbours, Maxwell’s words were tantamount to treason.
But while Victoria’s position was understandable, Darren Lehmann and Steve Smith’s reactions were less so. Their words carried no malice especially, but as with so many political manoeuvres, the medium was the message. Choosing a public stage to condemn Maxwell ensured that his censure would reverberate around the cricketing world for days.
Neither Lehmann nor Smith were harassed like Faf; these were deliberate, presumably planned, remarks. Why was that necessary? If nothing else, the comments reflected a double standard: public condemnation for Maxwell as punishment for reckless public comment.
But perhaps it stands to reason. There is much to suggest that Maxwell, while obviously carrying some fault, is shouldering the burden of a coach and captain keen to amplify their authority in the public sphere. Calls for Smith to stamp his personality on to this Australian side were frequent following the Hobart debacle.
The confluence of that pressure alongside a resolve to support an already-pressured Matthew Wade may help explain his words. Still, it felt disproportionate. Is Smith now meant to look strong, decisive and independent?
Lehmann, meanwhile, has since praised Maxwell’s demeanour in camp. Maybe it’s good leadership. Maybe they’ve played this well.
While most parties would now prefer this to go away, Maxwell’s enduring promise ensures it won’t. His attempts to publicly agitate for a shot at the Test side will now raise ‘Maxwell-watch’ to even greater heights.
It’s perhaps a reflection of his ultra-modern methods, but his current circumstance seem more akin to a dissatisfied English Premier League footballer in a transfer window than a state cricket hopeful.
In this scene, the player – with one eye on changing clubs – deliberately destabilises himself and his club with strategically placed comments in the media, often through an agent. In the Premier League analogy, the player then might refuse to train or threatens not to play.
The club, eager to maintain standards, refuses to pick them. The preferred club, meanwhile, ‘monitors’ the situation. Sound familiar? The result is usually straightforward: the relationship between player and club is rendered untenable, and the player gets his move.
This may appear to be Maxwell’s trajectory too, although if recent comments from ex-Test wicketkeeper and NSW captain Brad Haddin are anything to go by, perhaps the Blues aren’t so keen either. While Haddin is no longer in the playing group, he remains closely linked to the establishment; it’s not a huge leap to suggest that his views may too reflect the views of those still playing for the Blues.
As ever, where there’s delicate political manoeuvring, there’s usually self-interest. Sometimes to be selfish is to be smart, and cricket understands this well. When Shane Warne recently labelled Steve Waugh “selfish”, most of the public saw it as a sacrilegious blight on one of the game’s untouchables. Some cricketers, however, darkly wondered whether it was a compliment.
Ahead of a gruelling tour of India and the ensuing Ashes, how Glenn Maxwell treads that tricky line may well prove significant.
