The trend started in 1882, when Australia triumphed at the Oval and one contemporary observed that “‘The Decadence of English Cricket’ was the theme of leader-writers in a hundred papers.”
Until this winter, the Australians never went in for such tosh. For one thing, they rarely lost at cricket. And when they did, they preferred not to spend much time worrying about it. When Mike Gatting clinched the urn 24 years ago, most of the local press relegated the news to a small inside corner, just above the dog results and way behind Pat Cash’s charge to Davis Cup glory in Sweden.
Over the past week something has changed. Australia’s spiralling crisis has filled the front pages with Ricky Ponting’s face – a crestfallen composite of George Bush and Charlie Brown.
The whole country has been infected by a sense of helplessness and desperation, a feeling that such a lame set of performances — unlike the overseas Ashes defeats in 2005 and 2009 — cannot be shrugged off as the luck of the draw. “Cricket is at a crossroads in Australia,” Kim Hughes, the former captain, said. “The wheels could absolutely come off.”
How could this happen to the baggy green commandos? Where is the gimlet-eyed grit of Steve Waugh, and the wealth of talent that sent so many of his contemporaries to ransack county cricket? Where is the confidence that once led every waiter and taxi driver to warn visiting Englishmen, “You blokes are gonna get pulverised”? Has Australia finally emulated the mother country by turning soft and decadent?
The short answer is yes. Or, to put it politely, Australia has become more like the rest of the world. The ruggedness of its hard, red soil has been tamed. The cultural cringe that held back its arts scene is no more than a memory. The high exchange rate that once allowed British tourists to buy two beers for a pound has inverted itself, so that Sydney is now as expensive to visit as Zurich.
Over the past decade, Australia has grown into a confident, self-assured country, with a booming economy that is the envy of the western world. And yet, in its very modernisation, it has lost some of the properties that made it such a hothouse for sporting champions.
“Cricket is still a big deal in Australia,” says Dr Brett Hutchins, an academic and Bradman scholar. “We played our first Test match in 1877, more than 20 years before we became a nation state, so it will always be part of our cultural glue. But, having said that, its role has changed as the whole country has become more outward-looking.
“I think there was a tipping point during the Sydney Olympics of 2000, a feeling that Australia had finally become a major player on the world stage. And not just in sport, either. Since then, our cities have become as culturally diverse as any big cities around the world. Life isn’t just about beating the Poms any more.”
Throughout the 20th century, Australia’s self-image was bound up with sporting success. The field of play gave this remote island a chance to stand as an equal alongside older nations. It was a way of sticking up a hand from the bottom corner of the map and waving hello. Or, in some cases, up yours.
Since 1974, the cricket team have greeted every Test victory with a raucous rendition of “Under The Southern Cross I Stand”. Sacred to the hardliners in the side, yet profane in its content, the song brims with the defiant spirit of the underdog. It has only four lines of lyrics, written by Rod Marsh under the inspiration of bush poet Henry Lawson, which end with the line: “Australia, you ------- beauty.” But do Marsh’s words still resonate among the scions of Generation Y? Perhaps not, now that Australia has outgrown its sense of inferiority.
The saying goes that everyone in Melbourne wants to be a film director, and everyone in Sydney thinks they are a DJ. That does not sound much like the Australia that Henry Lawson wrote about, the wide brown land where “the fare was rough and the bush was grim”. Modern Australia is comfortable and surprisingly nannyish, with even more health-and-safety regulation than we are used to in England. The pioneer spirit is hard to discern in the nine “prohibited” signs found in the average taxi.
It also seems alien to modern Australian cricketers such as Mitchell Johnson, who gives the impression that he can hardly do up his shoelaces without the coach’s help.
Not so long ago, Johnson’s forebears were so poorly paid that they used to keep a day job on the side. Geoff Lawson was an optometrist as well as a snarling fast bowler. Mark Taylor trained as a surveyor. Is it any coincidence that both men are astute and original thinkers about the game, while the modern “talent identification programmes” seem to churn out ball-playing automatons?
Globalisation has caught up with Australian sport, just as it has with Australia itself. Once upon a time, its champions used to be self-made success stories, reared on stories of Peter Lalor (a sort of Australian William Wallace) and the stockade rebellion. Now it relies on the products of academies and coaching pipelines, just like anywhere else in the world.
The generation gap in the Australian team was starkly revealed by a dressing-room bust-up last January. After a Test win over South Africa, Michael Clarke asked for the team song to be brought forward so that he could meet Lara Bingle, his model girlfriend, for dinner. This infuriated the resolutely old-school Simon Katich, who grabbed his team-mate by the throat.
Their argument went to the heart of the team’s evolution (or enfeeblement, some might say). Katich is a tough nut from Perth, perhaps the least cosmopolitan city in the country, where his father was a homicide detective. A self-effacing everyman — who happens to have a business degree – he would have fitted seamlessly into any era of Australian cricket. You can imagine him turning out for his grade team between Tests, just as the Chappell brothers did in their Adelaide suburb of Glenelg.
Clarke, who has just been named Australia’s next captain, could hardly be more different. Born into a working-class background in Sydney’s Liverpool suburb, he was fast-tracked into the Test team at the age of 23. Now, with his commercial endorsements and his soap-opera lifestyle, he has less in common with Katich than he does with an English Premier League footballer. His earnings may not be quite as excessive as Wayne Rooney’s, but if he holds on to his new job, he should soon be clearing a good Australian $4 million.
“A lot of people feel that this is the team of Cricket Australia, not the nation,” says the writer and broadcaster John Harms. “Look at Clarke: there’s so much marketing concentrated around him that you wonder if he can be dropped. The commercial side of the game is expanding like a tumour.”
Too much money, not enough respect for the old ways. That adds up to decadence, doesn’t it? Well, yes, but only to the extent than modern sporting culture is decadent all over the world. The Australians are no worse than us, and no better. They have just been dragged down to our level.
