Essay

The ugly Australian: the evolution of a

cricket species
How did Australian cricket come to be synonymous with hostility, gamesmanship and verbal
abuse? A year on from Sandpapergate, we explore a thorny subject

Jarrod Kimber | April 25, 2019

GREENVALE, Melbourne. 1993.

Something hit me in the chest, hard. Knocking me a step back. Why was this guy purposefully
bumping into me?

It wasn't a normal under-14 game. This was a special event. The crowd was full of not just
parents but senior players from the club. The one umpiring was a thickset middle-order batsman
from the 1sts named Darren; most called him Dazza.

Mid-pitch I looked around to see if anyone had seen the bowler charge through, but no one had.
So I went on batting until I ended up at Dazza's end. He whispered: "If he does that again, hit
him with the bat."

It would never have crossed my mind to do that. I grew up in a tough league where everyone
played hard, aggressive cricket. But I was 13 and having fun. Cricket was the thing I loved the
most, and as much as I wanted to win, it was still just a game.

The next over I went down to talk to my batting partner and looked up in time to see the same
bowler charging. This hit was harder. Straightaway I swung my bat, clipping him on the knee.
He went down yelping.

His team-mates came from everywhere. None had seen the original shoulder barge on me;
everyone had seen me whack him. Some ran at me, others went to the fallen bowler, and their
captain raced over to the umpire. It was Dazza, and he smiled while pretending he hadn't seen it.
So they ran to the square-leg umpire, who was their coach, and he said he'd seen it. But he'd also
seen the bowler drop his shoulder into me and said he deserved to be hit.
Of the two people over 14 years of age on the field, one encouraged escalating, the other said the
extra violence was justified. Welcome to Australian club cricket in 1993.

Dazza and their coach had a quick word with the bowler and me. Their coach was adamant I'd
done nothing wrong. I was not as sure, but according to him, I'd been "harsh but fair." What he
didn't say was the real truth: it was ugly.

Someone's pinching you at school, not once but over and over, for hours. Some are painful but
most are annoying, and the frequency bothers you. You tell your teacher and they give the
pincher the odd strong look, but they also make it clear you should handle this. It's just pinching.
Move away, ignore it, be the bigger person, and it will stop eventually. But it doesn't, and you let
it fester. With each pinch the fury within you builds.

Play

Fans weigh in on what playing "hard but fair" means

Then there's one - not the hardest, not the most gratuitous, but the one that makes it too many,
and you explode and throw a punch.

Who gets in trouble? The pincher will be taken aside and talked to about their behaviour, but any
severe detentions or suspensions are for the puncher.

That's what Australia has been doing for generations. They needle until you crack. And when
you blow up, they claim persecution. No one plays the moral high ground better than an
Australian who seconds earlier was the instigator.

It's something Australians, especially boys, are taught from a young age. When you complain:
pfft, it's just a joke. When you retaliate: whoa, you went too far. Until the moment you react, it's
all hard but fair, something you can laugh about over a beer, and what happens on the field stays
on the field. But when you flare up, they adopt the victim card quicker than an Australian fast
bowler spits the dummy.

There have been three textbook occasions of this internationally. When Virat Kohli mentioned
Ed Cowan's sick mother. Quinton de Kock talking about David Warner's wife. And Ramnaresh
Sarwan bringing up Glenn McGrath's wife, who happened to be ill at the time.

In Australian cricket you are called (insert all the expletives you've ever heard here) quite
regularly, where everything about your appearance, alleged sexual preferences, schooling, or the
car your dad drives are weaponised. If you're not born into that, it can be hard to know how to
react.

It's not like Australian cricket ethics are easy to understand. What we are really talking about
here is their infamous line, which no two people ever seem to agree on. Yet it is the moral arbiter
all Australian cricketers are judged by. Their line, their mythical line, their ever-changing line, is
hard not to cross when you grew up in the game, but harder if you're only exposed to it once
you're playing international cricket. It's a miracle the Australian team can headbutt the line, given
it moves so frequently.

Australian cricketers are experts in cognitive dissonance - the ability to have two separate beliefs
at the same time. In the same breath as letting you know they never walk, they'll sledge you out
of the corner of their mouth about how you should have walked.

You can't win this - they were born into it. You can only be soft for failing to stand up to the
pressure, or a villain for going too far. There is no right reaction. The line is wherever they want
it to be; you are always on the wrong side. That is its sole purpose for existing.

"I know he's your captain, but you can't seriously like him as a bloke. You couldn't possibly like
him". That was Tim Paine chatting to M Vijay as they played the second Test on India's last tour
to Australia.

"Could you repeat that, please, so I can decide if it crossed the line I just drew here in the sand
two seconds ago?" © Cricket Australia

In ten years of writing on Australian cricket, I've never heard a bad word about Paine. When he
was brought back from the abyss for Tests, people were desperate to say lovely things about him.
Jimmy Anderson recently said, "Tim Paine is a genuinely nice guy", on the BBC.

Australian cricket believes in the good-bloke rule. This is about keeping your head in (ego),
being harsh but fair (knowing where the line is on your hilarious banter), and not being a
dickhead (not breaking whatever local rules there are that you can't possibly remember). You can
be anointed a good bloke - even if you are a woman - by someone who has that authority.

If there are good blokes, there are also bad blokes, and if you're a terrible bloke, you can be
called a flog. (Look, mate, I don't have time to explain every bit of Australian culture, but a flog
is someone who is really bad, like the sort of bloke who uses your ute to haul shit, fails to wash
it, and does doughies on your front lawn when they return it. Or someone who doesn't share your
outlook on life.) There's no commission or court you can appeal to to have your lousy reputation
fixed.

The whole thing is really about fitting in. You need to pass the test of an ever-changing checklist.
Often this involves personality traits that the person who decides who the good bloke is believes
in.

Can you take a joke at your expense, and when you give one back, does it upset the person who
joked at you? Do you drink, and do you get a round in at the bar? Will you not take offence -
basically, can you handle the odd off-colour joke about (insert every part of marginalised society
here)? And finally, will you complain? Because complaining, pointing out obvious logical
fallacies, double standards, racism, sexism or homophobia, that's often not allowed.
A few weeks after my childhood cricket club appointed their first non-white coach, the singer
Mandawuy Yunupingu was not allowed into a bar in Melbourne, since he was an indigenous
man. The bar owner was afraid: "If these Aborigines saw one of their own kind in here, they
would come in, booze, shoot up heroin and cause all sorts of trouble."

The blokes at my cricket club thought it would be funny to put up a sign in the club bar saying,
"No black blokes allowed." When the coach came in, he was refused service, and they pointed to
the sign. Almost everyone with white skin laughed, and the coach smiled awkwardly, but one
other guy didn't laugh or smile. He was the only other non-white player at the club - his parents
were Sri Lankan. And he was furious. He called the stunt racist, and ignored the people who told
him, "Calm down, mate, it's just a joke."

I remember the talk around the club after that. The coach who had accepted a joke about him in
good spirit was a good bloke. The man who had called out this obviously racist joke was a bad
bloke. It seemed to me the guys who made the joke weren't the best arbiters of who a good bloke
was.

But they were the best cricketers, or the loudest and most gregarious. Or as we'd call them these
days, alphas.

Let's use a concrete example of being the person who gets to decide if someone is a good bloke.
Darren Lehmann said when Stuart Broad didn't walk in the 2013 Ashes that it was "blatant
cheating" and also said, "And I hope he cries and goes home. I don't advocate walking, but when
you hit it to first slip, it's pretty hard." He doesn't advocate walking, so why was he complaining?
Because Broad's edge was so blatant, it went to slip. So even non-walkers should walk. Except
that the edge wasn't that big - it was a decent nick that hit the keeper's glove and rebounded to
slip. But despite the apparent evidence of the keeper's glove and the fact that Lehmann doesn't
advocate walking, Broad is a bad enough bloke that you hope he goes home crying.

1981 Greg Chappell, Australia's captain, asked his brother Trevor to roll the last ball of the tri-
series final on the ground so that Brian McKechnie couldn't hit it over the fence for the six runs
needed for New Zealand to win. Richie Benaud called it "one of the worst things I have ever
seen done on a cricket field".

1981 The image of Javed Miandad, bat raised, ready to smash Dennis Lillee over the head, after
the two had words in the wake of Lillee obstructing Miandad while he took a run did not,
thankfully, translate into actual physical violence.

1995 Curtly Ambrose had to be pulled away from Steve Waugh after the Australian swore at him
in the Trinidad Test.

2003 Glenn McGrath v Ramnaresh Sarwan could have turned uglier than it actually was, after
McGrath needled Sarwan with homophobic abuse and Sarwan retaliated with a comment about
McGrath's wife
2004 and 2009 Two Australian players (Justin Langer and Brad Haddin, now both on the
Australian coaching staff) have knocked the bails off "accidentally" and had their teams try to
claim wickets.

2013 David Warner got in trouble when he took a swipe at Joe Root in a pub in the UK.

2017 Steve O'Keefe was suspended and fined A$20,000 for a "drunken rant" aimed at fellow
New South Wales player Rachel Haynes.

2018 Warner again, this time in an argument that nearly led to a fistfight with Quentin de Kock
in a stairwell after de Kock said inappropriate things about Warner's wife.

Lehmann also sent a tweet in June 2018 to cricket reporter Alison Mitchell. On her way into The
Oval, Mitchell and fellow commentator Mel Jones had been offered "4" and "6" cards printed on
sandpaper. Mitchell noted this on Twitter and Lehmann quote-tweeted Mitchell saying: "Your
[sic] better than that @AlisonMitchell?" Better than what? Reporting on something that
happened to her on the way into the ground?

Lehmann once called Sri Lankan cricketers "black c***s", and in the book Race, Racism and
Sports Journalism, you can find him in a case study entitled "Good Blokes and Black C***s".
There they quote Malcom Knox from the Age in 2003:

"Yet for Lehmann, the logic has been reversed. His defenders cannot reconcile his outburst
against his Sri Lankan opponents with his reputation as a 'good bloke'. Teammates and associates
have described Lehmann's slur as an 'out of character' act, committed 'in the heat of the moment'
by someone who is 'universally regarded as a nice guy'. Instead, it is the Sri Lankans who are
rendered villains, oversensitive and unmanly to complain".

These days we'd just call it locker-room talk, I suppose.

Yet Lehmann is not only still a good bloke (see this for proof) he's also still allowed to call out
the opposition for doing things he does, or reporters for doing what they're paid to do.

When Lehmann stepped down from his coaching position, after the culture he was in charge of
tampered with the ball, it was Justin Langer who took over. Langer believed in the good-bloke
theory so much he had a book placed prominently in his office, The No Asshole Rule. Which is
the American version of the good-bloke rule (also see New Zealand's no-dickhead policy).

At the MCG back in the day, the crowd used to abuse Langer heavily in state games. One day he
turned around and threatened to beat up the guy abusing him.

In the 2002 Boxing Day Test, the Barmy Army decided to goad Brett Lee, whose bowling action
had been subject to an ICC review in 2000, with chants of "no-ball". Langer was quick to judge:
"I think they were a disgrace. These people standing behind the fence drinking beer, most of
them are about 50 kilos overweight, making ridiculous comments. Gee whiz, as far as I'm
concerned, it's easy for someone to say that from behind a fence. While they pay their money and
all that sort of stuff, gee whiz, I reckon there's some sort of integrity in life."

On the field Langer once took the bails off as he walked past the stumps and then pretended
nothing had happened as Australia appealed for a hit-wicket dismissal. Which was every bit as
much cheating as using sandpaper was. He offered this explanation to the Good Weekend
magazine: it was a habit. "Actually it was the most innocent thing," he said. "I swear to God, I
would have done it 10,000 times. It was like a superstition. I'd just touch the top of the bails and
walk off."

When Langer received the coaching job, he said, "It doesn't matter how much money, how many
games, how many runs you made. If you are not a good bloke, that is what people remember." A
few months ago when Australia were struggling against Pakistan, he good-bloked again, "So
there are opportunities for guys in the team, and there are opportunities for guys who are good
blokes and make a lot of runs."

Maybe Langer is a good bloke. Perhaps I'm just cherry-picking memories about him that annoy
me. Langer and I are very different people. So we have a fundamental clash there, and I possibly
hold little things against him that I'd forgive others for.

Of course, if I can do that, then Langer can too. And if it's almost like anyone can decide whether
someone is a good bloke, then it's not really a proper system to judge people on.

No one experience can claim to take in all of Australian club cricket. Many will have played in
Queensland's coastal Rockhampton but will never play in the mural-infested town of Sheffield,
Tasmania. There have been slight generational shifts as well. The Saturday night bar is no longer
the centrepiece of clubs.

But most - if not all - who have played club cricket and internationals say the sledging in the club
game is way worse. When overseas players talk about their time playing for a club, they do so
with wide eyes, even years later, still shocked by the treatment they received.

David Warner, one of the world's biggest sledgers, walked off the field in a grade game in
Sydney when Phil Hughes' brother, Jason, went at him very hard and personally.

In my time in Australian club cricket, from '88 to '05, I saw some truly heinous things that don't
happen at Test or first-class level. Once, when a legspinner bowled a double bouncer, the
batsman somehow missed it, and the bowler, for no real logical reason, sent the batsman off by
following him from the ground, screaming. The batsman returned and jumped on him. A brawl
ensued. Another game involved a near-certain run-out for our team, but their umpire at square
leg disagreed, and our point fielder took a stump and charged at him with it. I played in a game
with two brothers, one on each side, where they sledged each other so viciously that they
eventually swung punches. At a low-level club cricket grand final, one team decided it would be
their last season together and they went nuclear with their sledging. Every over they manhandled
the batsmen, threatened the umpires and opposition with violence, told the supporters they would
get one if they talked back. They said they'd "f*** up" their cars, which in Australia seemed to
be the point many thought was too far. This violent, sociopathic team won, and after that most of
them were banned for the following season or more. One for life. But it didn't matter, because
they won.

It may only be club cricket, but that is not how it feels. My father played for his team until he
needed two knee replacements because of his frequent 30-over days. My uncle would toss his bat
when he was out, and used his knowledge of the laws to push the limits of cricket. Once, when I
was 13 and my finger was snapped at slip, I went off the field, someone got some electrical tape
and taped my fingers together and sent me back out.

That is what you did. It was your club, your mates, it meant something, so you put in. You risk
your body, or sledge until you get a lifetime ban.

It was about winning, at any cost.

Forget academies, development squads, school cricket or underage competitions, Australia

believes club cricket makes them great. Throwing boys in among men. Amateur cricket with a
professional work ethic. The baggy green is only the final thing to dedicate yourself too.

David Warner was fielding close-in during the Cape Town Test in 2014. You didn't have to see
him there; you could hear him. He was on the howl.

In the first innings, when Faf du Plessis had assumed the ball was dead, he'd picked it up, and the
Australians abused him for it. They didn't appeal, though du Plessis had grabbed it before it was
dead, and without consent from them. At the press conference after play, du Plessis said, "They
run like a pack of dogs around you when you get close to that ball."

Hence the howling. It lasted for almost all of du Plessis' second innings. He made 47 off 109
balls in 157 minutes, and the Australians howled through most of it. TV and radio both turned up
the sound off the mics, often when Nathan Lyon or Steve Smith were bowling, and there were
men (read Warner) around the bat. But you could see it even with the fast men; fielders coming
in and acting like cartoon dogs barking at the moon.

There are various styles of Australian nicknames: descriptive, your name but shorter, random,
and ironic. Warner became known as the Bull - a comment on his physicality and personality.
But his nickname evolved; he became the Reverend. It happened after he got married, became a
father, stopped drinking, and took his fitness seriously.

Warner no longer wanted to be the attack dog. He had matured; he wasn't the same guy as when
young. The bloke who smashed Dale Steyn back into the Southern Stand and took a swing at Joe
Root in a bar was now the best runner between the wickets in the world and a family man.

The Australian team didn't always need him to be that wild dog; it had others. Brad Haddin was
around. It was Haddin who mocked New Zealand for being too nice when people suggested that
the Australian team could be like them. This was the same Haddin who failed to alert the umpire
that it was he who knocked the bails off when Neil Broom was "bowled". Not just failed to
report that he'd broken the bails, he celebrated a wicket as bowled when he had to have felt his
gloves break the stumps.

Peter Nevill replaced Haddin. Nevill is no one's idea of an angry man, but when the team failed,
Steve Smith said he wanted Nevill to be more vocal. While he didn't want Nevill to be an attack
dog - he'd be little more than a stern-looking Mexican hairless - it's clear Australia had decided
they needed one.

So when Nevill's form with the bat didn't improve, and he made some uncharacteristic mistakes
with the gloves, Matthew Wade replaced him. There was little talk of Wade being the superior
keeper, and until that point in the season, Nevill had made more Test runs than Wade had in
Shield cricket. Their first-class records were also very similar. But Wade could be vocal.

Wade is known as one of the harder guys in Australian cricket, and he's always in the ear of
batsmen - whether it's with the catchphrase of "Noice, Garry" or by sledging. Wade is often up at
the stumps, arms folded, glove just across his lips, giving the batsman his advice. And Wade will
do whatever he needs for a win, including when he did a Baryshnikov twirl on the wicket during
a game for Victoria, which earned him a suspension for pitch-doctoring.

While Wade was loud, in his recall he averaged 20, two fewer than Nevill. So he was dropped,
and rather than go back to the quiet Nevill, they went to the equally nice Paine - who can talk,
but even his sledges end up as friendly memes. It wasn't the "noise" or aggression they were
looking for when they hired Wade again.

So the Bull was reactivated, and the reverend collar returned to the costume-hire shop.

Before the 2017-18 Ashes, Warner said he planned on "being vocal". During the series, England
were annoyed twice by him. At first, it was with ball-tampering, which they assumed he was
doing using his finger bandages. They even asked journalists to keep an eye out for it. Also, his
sledging of Jonny Bairstow, which started being about Bairstow headbutting Cameron Bancroft,
then crossed into other abuse. England suggested privately that it was incredibly personal and
hurtful.

After the Ashes and before the infamous tour of South Africa, David Warner sat down for an
interview with Adam Collins and Geoff Lemon on their Final World podcast. "You are always
going to say something in the media," he said. "That's what I love doing... [being] the pantomime
villain. If you want to be that person you want to be. And that's me."

Pantomime villain. That's how he referred to the role, because it's not serious to them. It is make-
believe, nothing more. And if you are seen as the bad guy by a few other countries, or get the
odd angry op-ed about you, then so be it. It's about the team, the cap, your mates. You do what
you have to do.

When Warner was seen in his off-field confrontation with de Kock, Adam Gilchrist said on
radio, "the Reverend's gone, Bull's back".
When Bancroft gave an interview about his role in the ball-tampering scandal, much of what he
said was him trying to play his role as the victim. Aside from that he said one thing that showed
the way Australian cricket is. "I've asked myself this question a lot. If I had said 'no', what would
that have meant? If I actually said 'no', and I went to bed that night, I had the exact same
problem. I had the problem that I had using the sandpaper on the cricket ball. And the problem
was that I would have gone to bed and I would have felt like I let everybody down. I would have
felt like I would have hurt our chances to win the game of cricket."

An Australian player messaged me when the first Al Jazeera documentary on match-fixing was
released last year. "Do you know anything about this Al Jazeera thing? Can't believe any Aussie
cricketers would be involved?" A few other Australian players have since shared that sentiment.
They seem to think that as if by birthright and a devotion to the baggy green, they won't do
anything wrong.

Australian cricketers have gone to jail, are involved in dodgy housing schemes, and have hit their
wives. They do the things that cricketers in every other society do. They're flawed human beings,
but they don't seem to see that part.

And when Australians do something terrible, there's always a spin on it.

Like when Shane Warne took a banned substance - a known masking agent - right before a
Cricket World Cup. But an Australian cricketer wouldn't take drugs. Except, um, that one guy,
sorry, and this guy. But Warne was just vain and naïve, not someone who was potentially hiding
another drug. It was like when Warne and Mark Waugh took payments from a bookie for pitch
information and the Australian board hid it from the public because the team was on the way to
the West Indies for the series that would make them the world's No. 1 Test team. They didn't fix
a match, they just received money from a bookmaker. I assume both times the players were on
the right side of the line.

People do commit crimes in Australia; not just the immigrants who cop much of the blame but
born-and-bred Aussies as well. We've committed serial murder, and the place has a huge
problem with domestic violence. The Australian government currently locks up refugees -
including children - on the islands of Manus and Nauru, and there has been systemic
mistreatment of indigenous people for much of our history.

Australia is subject to the same problems as most modern western countries. It pretends it's not a
nation of immigrants, gets involved in wars based on spurious reasons, poisons the earth, and our
highest-ranking Catholic, Archbishop George Pell, has been found guilty of child sexual assault.

While we might have an elevated opinion of ourselves, we're subject to the same problems as the
rest of humanity.

That self-delusion is what leads to a year-long ban for an offence that others have not even been
suspended for. When the ball-tampering happened, Australia clutched at their communal pearls,
not so much because of the tampering but because the players were found guilty of bursting the
illusion.

Walking was never a word where I played. If there was ever a conversation about it, it was
usually about respecting the umpire's decision. "You are there to play cricket, their job is to
umpire".

But I also remember the first time it became an issue for me. I was playing senior cricket as a 15-
year-old, and I opened the batting and had eight overs to get to stumps. From the moment I took
guard, the fielding side took an immediate dislike to me. For eight overs I didn't receive a ball in
my half. Off one, I went to hook. There was a huge noise as the ball flew through to the keeper.
They appealed, the umpire said not out, they abused him for that. When that did no good, they
turned on me for not walking. A few minutes later it was stumps, and they were still abusing me
as we left the ground.

The next day's play took place the following Saturday, and when I took guard again, the sledging
recommenced. For the first half hour they were just calling me a cheat. Then they upgraded to
threatening violence. The longer I stayed, the worse it got. Then one of them worked out my
mother was there and they suggested they were going to have sex with her, with or without her
consent.

Even to my 15-year-old brain it was clear that they weren't serious about it. They were just trying
to upset me so I'd play a rash shot. But it was so intense being surrounded by grown men
screaming and threatening. I kept thinking: these are adults, with proper jobs, who pay taxes, run
the BBQ at club events, and have wives and girlfriends who love them. And they are trying to
destroy me.

The common wisdom in club cricket is that if you are playing senior level while still young, they
should treat you like an adult. It's that intense working over that sorts out the real players, they
say. If you survive, you are stronger. But if you survive you are also indoctrinated.

To this day I'm as sure as I can be (which as modern technology has told us, isn't much) that I
didn't nick it. But that play and miss changed me. I stayed in as they abused; we won the match,
and after that game I never walked. After living through that, I figured I was tough enough to
survive club cricket, and I'd play to the umpire's call, and give as good as I got. They didn't get
me to walk, but they turned me to their way.

Somewhere along the road, Australian fans changed from cricket fans, well turned out, polite
clapping, the odd cheeky word, to more abusive and violent. Sure, there were always types like
Yabba, the loudmouth Australian barracker. But you see the old photos of crowds at the MCG or
SCG - everyone wearing hats; they could have been on their way to church.

The country itself was a weird mix of England, Ireland and Scotland, with the indigenous rarely
mentioned. Publicly we often looked and acted English. Privately we're more Irish and Scottish.
Errol Flynn was a born-and-bred Australian with only three years of study in England, yet when
he talked, he spoke the Queen's. Compare how he sounded with Mel Gibson, who only moved to
Australia when he was 12 and sounded Aussie as.

Somewhere between Flynn's swashbuckling and Gibson's Mad-Maxing, the change was made.
Music and cricket showed it best. In the 1970s, Billy Thorpe & the Aztecs, the Angels, AC/DC,
and Cold Chisel exploded with their pub rock - sweaty, bare-chested and raw. Lobby Loyde
playing guitar, the cigarette hanging from his lips, Jimmy Barnes screaming not singing, and the
Young brothers' staccato guitar and piss-taking lyrics. It couldn't have come from anywhere
other than Australia, even if not all those musicians were born there.

At the same time in cricket you had Ian Chappell's fierceness, Jeff Thomson's power, Dennis
Lillee's presence, and Rod Marsh's anger. These weren't cricketers, they were Australian
cricketers. Chappelli wore his shirt unbuttoned because Richie Benaud did. But it wasn't the
same. When Benaud did it, he looked like a Gap model; Chappelli made it look like war. Richie
was Errol Flynn; Chappelli was Mel Gibson.

They looked angry, played hard, and gave no shits. The slips cordon looked like a bunch of
blokes turning up from a pub. The fast bowlers were liked hired goons. There was facial hair,
chest hair, and long hair, all of it sweaty. It was a visceral XI - you smelt it.

It's tempting to suggest that they changed the culture, but they were the public face. Lillee's long
hair and Loyde's ciggie were just the public manifestations of what was happening in backyards
and pubs across the nation. The blokes on the ground looked the same as those in the outer,
who'd turn up with a foam esky full of longnecks and drink all day.

The first sign that the crowd had massively turned was probably back when John Snow, the
English fast bowler, hit Terry Jenner on the head. Jenner was a tailender, and the umpire had
already warned Snow for intimidatory bowling. Snow stormed off to the boundary as the SCG
crowd booed him. When he arrived there, some tried to shake his hand, but one fan grabbed at
Snow and wouldn't let go, pulling him into the picket fence while other fans threw pies and beer
cans at him. That was in 1971.

The MCG was the worst. The vast crowds, hot weather and Christmas holidays seemed to bring
out the worst in the fans. My first memory from a Test is of a member of the crowd hitting a
Pakistan player as he tried to retrieve a ball. Melbourne fans threw bottles and golf balls at Mark
Ealham. A New Zealand player was also almost once hit. You could have as much fun in Bay 13
(the area of the ground made infamous by the Merv Hughes stretching) counting how many
spectators got thrown out as watching the game. You also had to beware the story that people
would piss in empty beer cups and throw them in the air during the Mexican wave. Maybe that
was not true, but on more than one occasion that story passed the smell test.

In 2002, Cricket Australia CEO James Sutherland told the Age, "It's pretty clear from the ICC's
point of view that the MCG is in the worst three grounds in the world for crowd behaviour, based
on the record in the last few years."
Cricket crowds are not like that in Australia anymore. The MCG and other stadiums have made
it virtually impossible to find full-strength beer. But Australian cricket crowds can still be rancid.

In recent years New Zealand bowler Iain O'Brien has been called a faggot by the Gabba crowd.
England's Jonathan Trott (who spent time with a psychologist to block out Australian crowds)
had to listen to the crowd - including a policeman - chant "Trott, Trott, your mum's got vagina
rot." The last Boxing Day Test, Mitchell Marsh was booed by the MCG, and fans were ejected
for chanting "Show us your visa" at Indian players and fans.

Crowd behaviour might have changed from the violent and weird '70s, '80s and '90s, but one
thing that remains is that Australian crowds are not like cricket watchers in the rest of the world.
They are the closest thing cricket has to football fans.

Which arm should we start with - underarm or broken f****n arm? There was the sledging of
Glenn Turner. And also Lillee and Javed Miandad fighting. Not to mention the invention of the
term "mental disintegration". Do I really have to state all the incidents where Australian
cricketers have behaved shockingly? The internet might run out of space if I do.

Sharda Ugra listed more than a few here; you can find another few from Osman Samiuddin here.
And if you read any piece on Sandpapergate, you'll have found a few more. Australian cricket
has always been synonymous with bad behaviour. It's a brand, or even a badge of honour.

A couple of years ago I was in a coffee shop with an Australian coach when one of the women's
team players came by to talk about her next match. They were talking about one player who had
played for them and had now moved to the opposition. The coach had worked with the cricketer
who had moved, so he gave advice about all her weaknesses. Not one of them was technical or
about how she played. They were all about her personality and perceived psychological tender
spots. It was a perfect illustration of what Ugra described as "premeditated toxic confrontation, a
drama scripted between balls".

And it's so deep within cricket's everyday fibre in Australia that it runs from the bottom to the
top. When India captain Anil Kumble spoke of how only one team was playing in the spirit of
the game in the aftermath of the Sydney Test of 2008, Sutherland responded with: "Test cricket
is what is being played here. It's not tiddlywinks."

A few years later came the Big Bash stoush between Marlon Samuels and Shane Warne, where
Warne walked down the wicket abusing Samuels and pulled at his shirt, after claiming that
Samuels had interfered with a Stars batsman trying to run by pulling his shirt. A few balls later
Warne seemed to throw the ball intentionally at Samuels from less than two metres away.
Samuels responded by flopping his bat over Warne's head - like he wanted to throw it at him and
at the last minute thought better of it.

Samuels was wrong to impede a Stars batsman, Warne was wrong to grab Samuels, Warne was
wrong to throw the ball at Samuels, and Samuels was wrong to throw the bat. It was ugly and
stupid, and both players should have been looking at long suspensions. Warne was suspended for
one game, Samuels none, and Sutherland said, "To be honest I thought it looked like two teams
playing in front of a very big crowd in a highly charged environment with a lot at stake. Players
are entertainers, they're putting on a show, but first and foremost they're also sportsmen who are
competing for big prizes, and I think whilst we can stand here and say we don't condone
anything that happened last night, this sort of thing is probably something that only inspires a
greater rivalry between the Renegades and the Stars and creates greater interest for the Big Bash
League."

You know the problem is deep when the CEO of the board essentially says, "Hey kids, grab a
bloke on the field, throw a ball at him, toss your bat dangerously. It just creates more interest. It's
not tiddlywinks, you big silly."

And this is the body whose job is to police and organise Australian cricket. Instead, they have
often sought to defend silly and offensive behaviour. This is the same organisation that helped
cover up Warne and Mark Waugh receiving money from a bookie, who joined the Big Three so
willingly, and banned three players for what was a systemic problem in Australian cricket. As
Michael Holding once said, "The players are the kids, and the board are the parents." CA might
be the adults in the room, but they also grew up in this society.

They might now want to cleanse Australian cricket culture of the things that make it hard to
market to families. And with Sandpapergate, they'll take a moment to try to be good, as they did
in the aftermath of Phil Hughes' death. But they still believe in sledging, they still want to play
hard, aggressive cricket. They still want to win.

Many Australians think this kind of behaviour helps them win.

''I think there's no doubt the team's performance has been affected. Hard, aggressive cricket is in
the Australian team's DNA, and unfortunately the players started second-guessing their natural
instincts in the heat of battle for fear of reprisal from Cricket Australia or public backlash from
the vocal minority. I know for a fact that many of the opposition teams were seeking to exploit
what they now saw as a weakness in the Australian team.''

That was Paul Marsh, son of Rod, and then CEO of the Australian Cricketers' Association,
speaking in 2010-11.

"If you keep toning us down, toning us down, you'll make us the same as everybody else."

That was Ricky Ponting, the former captain and commentator, after Australia returned briefly to
the top of the ICC rankings in 2014.

Australian cricket has always been this way, hasn't it? I mean, they're the bad guys, the
aggressors, the mouthy ones, those who push the laws of the game, because that is what we can
remember.

In fact, it was Australia - the first country to unleash a two-man pace attack capable of hurting
people - who complained about Bodyline. And they didn't just complain because they were
losing - they could have picked a team of quicks themselves. They did it because they thought it
was against the spirit of the game.

Part of the early Ashes rivalry was based on Australia feeling aggrieved at things WG Grace did.
Like when he "kidnapped" Billy Murdoch from the Australian dressing room before a match. Or
perhaps the most famous one where he ran out Sammy Jones while the allrounder was off down
the pitch, gardening.

Australians were the nice guys. Victor Trumper was a shining light of all things wonderful, Bill
Ponsford was a hugely respected figure in the game, and Benaud would go on to be the game's
voice and conscience. And sure, there was also Warwick Armstrong, who is probably ground
zero for how Australian cricket came to be known, but it's not true that Australia was always that
way.

And here is the thing: Australia were still great in this nice-guy era. Until 1970 they won 46% of
their Tests; the next two best were England on 38% and West Indies on 33%. Australia produced
the game's greatest player and dominated the Ashes. There was no talk of mental disintegration
back then, the word "sledge" barely existed, and no one tried to break anyone's f****n arm. And
yet they were still easily the best Test nation.

Since 1970, Australia have won 47% of their Tests; only South Africa are higher, at 49%.
Pakistan are way back in third place, on 35%. And while South Africa have won a slightly higher
percentage of Tests, they have not had a reign as dominant as Australia's, nor have they won a
single ICC event. Australia have four World Cups. They are unquestionably the greatest cricket
nation and have been for a very long time.

They were not always the most hated cricket nation. That has built up over time, perhaps because
of all the winning, perhaps because they bought into their own bullshit. The fundamental lie
comes in those Paul Marsh and Ricky Ponting statements that have been repeated by so many
Australian cricketers and fans over the years. They believe the sledging brought success, when it
was the success that brought the sledging. Australian cricketers have never been better because
they've sledged; they're just better, and because of that, they sledge.

And that is in part because Australia is a remarkable sporting nation. They have dominated men's
and women's tennis, had multiple No. 1s in golf, invented a new stroke just to kill at swimming,
and are consistently one of the highest-rated countries in terms of medals per capita at the
Olympics. They've won world titles in netball, hockey, both forms of rugby, and despite having
virtually no snow, have also won Winter Olympic golds. Melbourne has had two NBA No. 1
draft picks, Albury a WNBA MVP, Queensland has won 26 Olympic gold medals for
swimming, and Canberra has provided a Formula One-winning driver. Mount Isa, a place in the
middle of Queensland that the overwhelming majority of Australians will never visit, has
produced a British Masters winner in golf and a US Open winner in tennis.

Most countries with a population of around 20 million aren't well known, let alone well known
for dominating a sport. Australia has been on top of so many.
There's a book called The Lucky Country by Donald Horne, where the author writes: "Australia
is a lucky country run mainly by second rate people who share its luck." "The lucky country" is a
phrase still used, although not in the original negative sense Horne meant; more that of: aren't we
lucky to be from here?

Well, Australia's sports are lucky too. If you planned an ideal nation for sport, Australia would
be near perfect. There have been no major wars at home, most of the country is well above the
poverty line, there is space for facilities, and the weather is incredible. Then you look at how
sport grew. Starting as much to take down the English as for anything else, sport became part of
Australia's national identity. At a local level, communities formed around playing and watching
sport.

Australia is a tough country; colonising it took hard work. You had to take your chances, back
yourself, and help your mates, just to survive. Every team, from the F grade on matting through
to the baggy green, still has people who will put in for the side like they are playing for
something bigger - the flag, their community, their mates, it doesn't matter. Australian athletes
quite often play like they have a significant cause to win for. When you play them, you aren't
taking on another team of athletes, you're taking on zealots.

Years ago, during a marathon, an Australian TV commentator pointed out that the top three
runners were an Australian and two world-class Kenyans. He mentioned the two Kenyans had
far better recent and personal bests. Then added, "But what they don't have is an Australian
heart".

They might be more talented, but we'll fight harder and longer. We overlook all the other
advantages that Australians have for sport, and just focus on the way we play it, and our giant
Australian-made hearts. It doesn't matter if this is nonsense, or that Kenyans also have hearts,
and that they would have loved to have grown up in a lucky sports country. It matters that
Australian athletes believe in this notion of the cause, and that they try to live up to it.

It is all these reasons that make Australia a remarkable sporting nation that plays sport its own
way.

But working out what the Australian way is in cricket is quite tough. A few years ago Russell
Jackson took a look at Jack Pollard's book Cricket - The Australian Way. It talks a lot about how
Australians play cricket and essentially boils it down to a slogan: play aggressive, positive
cricket.

Darren Lehmann had his own lecture series, "The Australian Way", back in 2014. Sam Perry
wrote about it:

"A glimpse at a presentation delivered by national coach Darren Lehmann in 2014 to invite-only
coaches is instructive […] It outlined how Australia needed to play its cricket. It encouraged
attendees to implement Lehmann's philosophy throughout the country. Understandably, it
skewed to aggression.
A slide headlined 'Batting - Key Points' saw Lehmann note the importance of being 'aggressive
in everything you do!', that '[our] first thought is to score', and that 'team philosophy is going to
be aggression and freedom going forward'. The first point of his opening slide simply said
'WTBC' (translation: 'Watch the ball, c***'), going to show that even the most elementary aspect
of Australian batting now requires aggression."

So how did Australian cricket get from "aggressive, positive cricket" to "hard, aggressive
cricket" and "watch the ball, c***"?

Society changed. And Australia won a lot. They won everything. They beat England into
oblivion, finally took down West Indies, collected World Cups, and then fought back against
India's obvious challenge to their rightful No. 1 spot.

Did they do this with positive, aggressive cricket? Yes, but they also did it by creating the first
truly professional cricket environment. Academies, coaches, sports science, dieticians,
psychologists and many other advantages were there for the players. They found some of the
most naturally talented players of all time. But it was also about the way their less than all-time
great players, from the battlers to the incredibly gifted, were kept in the machine of Australian
cricket.

It would seem that in the modern era, for Australia to be great it takes a lot more than positive,
hard, aggressive cricket or watching the ball.

In his column for Players Voice after Sandpapergate, former Australia coach Mickey Arthur
wrote about the team:

"The behaviour has been boorish and arrogant. The way they've gone about their business hasn't
been good, and it hasn't been good for a while. I know what my Pakistani players were
confronted with in Australia two summers ago. I heard some things said to the English players
during the Ashes. It was scandalous. And I have seen many incidents like Nathan Lyon throwing
the ball at AB de Villiers in this series."
[…] "There has been no need for the Australians to play this way. They are wonderful cricketers.
They haven't needed to stoop to the depths they have to get results."

That seems like positive, aggressive feedback.

***

CRAIGIEBURN, Melbourne. 1995.

A lot of balls hit me in the chest, hard.

It was a semi-final for our under-16 team. We hadn't played well but had scraped through to the
finals. We were playing the best side, Craigieburn. They were a decent team, with one
outstanding player. They called him Killer; I think it was something to do with his surname. To
anyone who played against him, he seemed a foot taller and thicker than anyone else in our
competition. The name was apt.

We batted first and I opened, because no one else wanted too. Killer bowled downwind on a
synthetic turf wicket, where even slow-medium bowlers get some bounce. He was a fair bit
quicker than that, and every ball came up at my body. With a bunch of slips, a short leg and a leg
gully, I wouldn't last long.

So I let the ball hit me in the chest. I'd never been hit by a quick bowler before, so the first one
really stung. I was winded for a moment, as Killer laughed. But from then on in, as long as they
didn't hit a vital organ or bone, I could take them. After a few hits, I was turning my back and
ducking when he bowled short. The ball kept slamming into my back.

Every time Killer hit me, he got more upset. He started with glares, moved on to general abuse,
told me he was going to retire me and made suggestions about my sexuality and gender along the
way. His anger took over when he was tired. By the time he was near his tenth over, I could
barely feel the ball hitting my back. And he could hardly scream about how shit I was.

After his last ball he stood mid-pitch, winded, clapping at me.

The next over a terrible bowler delivered a half-tracker and I skied it straight up in the air to be
caught. Our batsmen fell apart - even without Killer - and we ended up with only 130 to defend.

Killer, like many under-16 superstars, opened the bowling and batting. A few weeks earlier we'd
played him, and he'd driven a ball over the fence, past a 30-metre park area, across a road and
into a tennis court. I knew that in an hour batting he'd score most of the 130 on his own. So I
sledged him.

He was a big bloke who was known for bowling fast and hitting hard. I called him an ox. I just
figured - rightly as it turned out - that he'd been named versions of that his whole life. Every time
I called him an ox, he swung as hard as he could. He whacked a six and I told him he was too
simple to play a real shot. He played and missed and I suggested that his ox brain couldn't handle
a complex delivery. He mishit into a gap and I asked him if he wanted us to dumb the bowling
down for him. Each ball he tried to hit further. A few disappeared; mostly they were clunked or
missed.

I commentated each one, and he swung each time like the ball was my head.

His final delivery, he swung so hard that it was incredible his shoulders didn't dislocate. The ball
took the top edge and the keeper completed a steepling catch. When it was caught, Killer
dropped his head and trudged off with his quick 30-odd. I followed him off for a few steps
before shouting at his back, "Bye-bye, Oxy, baby."

It was graceless and pointless. Also quite unhealthy, as Killer followed me with his bat raised for
a few metres until one of our players caught him and suggested he leave the field. At the time I
thought it was a masterstroke. But looking back, had we dotted him up, put pressure on him other
ways - and we had the bowlers to get him out conventionally, perhaps for less than 30 - the new
ball wouldn't have had a chunk of leather taken out from slamming onto a footpath. Either way,
we lost the game.

I'd like to tell you that my embarrassment at being this big an idiot - not to mention the potential
injury I could have received - meant I never did something that stupid again.

But the next time we needed to win a game, I was that idiotic. Over the next ten years, I did
plenty of similarly stupid things to rile the opposition. There were times I claimed a catch I
hadn't taken, tried faux mental disintegration, and looked the other way when my team were
tampering with the ball. And in that time I went from the kid who learnt it to the adult who
taught it.

I thought I was playing hard, aggressive cricket, the Australian way. Now it feels different; I was
playing the game the way I had been taught, and because I didn't stand up to that, I was just
another ugly Australian.

Jarrod Kimber is a writer for ESPNcricinfo. @ajarrodkimber

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