Five days deep into the scandal the Australia team finally hit bottom. Their coach has quit, their two openers are banned and their captain and best batsman since Don Bradman is a broken man.
Thursday was a wretched day. It began with Cameron Bancroft’s press conference in Perth, his words catching in his throat as he spoke, continued with Steve Smith’s in Sydney, when he seemed almost overcome with suffering, and finished with Darren Lehmann’s sudden announcement that, despite everything he had said, he was going to resign after all. Lehmann said he changed his mind when he saw Smith cry.
There have been bigger scandals but you would not know it from the fallout. No one died, no one doped, no one fixed, hell, no one even managed to cheat. The umpires did not even feel the need to change the ball. And here is Smith, five days later, tearing himself apart in public, trying, failing, to hold back his tears.
Both he and Bancroft were asked what message they had for “the kids” out there. Both started to sob when they tried to answer. Listening to all that, you were not struck by the children’s loss of innocence so much as the adults’ loss of perspective. If the truth is a casualty of war, a sense of proportion is a casualty of sport.
It was not really clear who benefited from all this weeping and wailing. Certainly the players did not. There was no need for Smith and Bancroft to appear as they did, to front up just so they could break down. Warner brushed off the reporters at the airport by saying, “You’ll hear from me in a couple of days and at the moment my priority is to get these kids in bed and rest up so I can get my mind clear.” Which made him sound, for once, like the sensible one.
James Sutherland, Cricket Australia’s chief executive, had spoken about the need to protect the three guilty players but it is not clear what these public displays of self-flagellation were supposed to do for their mental health.
There have been a lot of tears in these last few days. Sutherland swallowed some when he gave his first press conference, in Melbourne last Sunday. The great Australian commentator Jim Maxwell started to crack up when he was talking about it all on ABC; so did Lehmann in his press conference on Thursday. Australian cricket has come a long way since Kim Hughes’s day. When Hughes cried in his last press conference as captain in 1984, Alan McGilvray described him as a “little boy who has not yet grown up” and Barry Humphries asked “if his box was on too tight”. Hughes is still remembered for it. Which did not stop him piling in on Smith this week.
Back in South Africa Faf du Plessis spoke too. It was almost incongruous to hear someone give a press conference without crying. He was good on Smith and what he was going through.
Like a lot of people Du Plessis instinctively felt the bans given to the three were too stiff but added: “I understand the context of it now. Perhaps I didn’t understand how important it is to them but you can really see how much it means to the Australian public. You can understand why they think they need to be so harsh.”
And that, at the end of it all, after all this hysteria and hypocrisy, the cant, all those platitudes and tears, will be the lasting memory of this week. Australian cricket fans, and players, just care so damn much. Which is precisely why the team will be winning again soon enough with, no doubt, Smith scoring runs for fun in the middle order when his ban is up.
It would not even be all that much of a surprise if they got their act together again before England do, since our Test team seem to be in a kind of slow decline, where the only change they make to the batting order after being bowled out for 58 is bringing back the bloke they had just dropped before that very same game.
