Editorial Tuesday January 27, 2015

Peter Jackson, editor, The Northland Age

Just not cricket

WE'VE long been told that we take sport too seriously in this country. Failure on the world stage is routinely greeted with dismay, if not scorn, and defeat of the All Blacks is enough to cast a pall of despair over the land. This, apparently, is a symptom of our national lack of self-esteem, our desperate need to be liked and admired by bigger countries. Maybe it is. But even if it's true, we are far from unique.

We only have to look a little to the west to see a better example of a people who seriously detest coming second. Australia has a win at all costs attitude that has become ugly, turning sport into a display of national superiority and arrogance, currently best shown by the national cricket team.

Australia's need to succeed was never better revealed than in its response to the Montreal Olympics in 1976. The green and gold team headed home with one silver and four bronze medals, while New Zealand collected two gold, one silver and one bronze. Hardly an embarrassment of riches, but it did spawn a series of television advertisements that played on Australia's unfamiliarity with gold. It was especially shameful that Australia's silver medal was won by the men's hockey team, beaten in the final by New Zealand.

So was born the Australian Institute of Sport. Never again has that country been so unsuccessful at an Olympic Games. The cost to the Australian taxpayer per medal is astronomical, and the team has yet to equal the third place achieved on the medal table at the Games in Melbourne in 1956, but when it comes to spending for success we're probably not far behind.

Huge sums of money, by our standards, are now pumped into our elite athletes, and success is used to calculate how much goes to any particular sport. And plenty of people would be happy to see more invested in training and competition if it promised more medals once every four years.

That's a world away from the Olympics of old. In 1972 New Zealand's men's eight won the blue riband rowing event in Munich, after a preparation that truly exemplified the Olympic spirit of amateurism. The rowers got to Munich on the back of a fundraising campaign that famously hinged on raffling pigs in barrows. No open chequebook for them. And there have been plenty more recent examples of athletes who have gone on to achieve at Olympics and world championships after serving their apprenticeships overseas on the smell of an oily rag.

It's a shame that the Olympics are no longer a showcase for amateurs. Once it might have been regarded as a worthy achievement simply to get there, and an honour to represent one's country. Now we see athletes flying in to the venue, competing and flying out again. Heaven forbid that they should miss the next event on their calendar, meets that tend to be much more lucrative than the shabby old Olympics (or Commonwealth Games).

Many of those who compete now are professionals for whom Olympic Games are just another event. Some obviously covet the medals that they see as contributing to their sporting legacy, but the pride to be gained from earning the right to represent their country, then to compete, possibly for the one and only time in their lives, whatever the result, has largely gone.

We sit at home and watch professionals doing what professionals do, a phenomenon that is only going to become more pronounced with the addition of the likes of tennis, golf and rugby sevens to the Olympic programme.

Gone, almost, are the days when a talented amateur who has overcome enormous odds just to get to the Games strides to the podium and weeps during the national anthem. Many are more likely to be calculating how big their bonus will be, and how much they might have earned had they competed elsewhere.

We lost something beyond price when money became the driving force behind sport. The bottom line these days is, well, the bottom line. It's cash that wins Olympic medals, and it's cash that sees the All Blacks playing on increasingly foreign fields, that motivates the Australians to insist that rugby league's Anzac tests are played in Australia, and now reportedly has Melbourne and Brisbane conspiring to steal the league nines from Auckland.

There are exceptions; the details are elusive, but some years ago we heard the delightful story of the African who won a long distance Olympic track title and who went to great lengths to avoid fans when he went home. Why? Because he was illiterate, and unable to sign his name for those who sought his autograph. His greatest sporting achievement would not have made him rich.

Having said all that, money is probably only part of the story behind an increasingly ugly approach Australia takes to winning, not least at cricket. Certainly being part of a winning team would be crucial to keeping one's place in the national team, and winning teams fill stadia, but the depths to which the Australians have taken the so-called 'sledging' that so mars the modern game no doubt also owes something to an element of the national psyche that it could do without.

The ICC, one of the less effective governing bodies in a world stuffed with ineffective sporting governing bodies, has undertaken to stamp out sledging, but clearly doesn't have the guts to do so. If a player of the calibre of David Warner has the ability to improve the odds of winning by unsettling the opposition he will continue to be selected, and will no doubt continue to abuse the opposition in a manner that is not only not cricket, but in any other environment would be unacceptable, possibly criminal.

There was a time when cricket was widely recognised as being founded on the best of human qualities, a game in which fair play was paramount. Ironically, the saying 'It's just not cricket' was supposedly first heard in Australia, to describe an action that would reasonably be interpreted as unjust or wrong. Today sledging is tolerated because it can contribute to achieving the desired outcome - winning.

Here in New Zealand we might see ourselves as Australia's little brother. But that's OK. We have our share of sporting (and other) success, all the sweeter because it generally has to be worked for, and is rarely a given. And if our behaviour is a little quaint at times, then so be it. We can be proud of the fact that we have not totally lost touch with the better side of human nature. And we can exult, as we sometimes do, when we see Australia's win at all costs approach fail.

The fact that some New Zealanders will support any team that is playing Australia probably owes a great deal to the depths to which our neighbours will stoop on occasion, and hopefully we will continue to adhere to a much higher standard of behaviour.

The contrast between our two countries has never been better displayed than in this summer's cricket, when departing batsmen have left the field in Australia to a spray of abuse, while departing Sri Lankan batsmen here, after a meritorious knock, were recognised with handshakes and back slaps from every New Zealand player.

We might not win as regularly as Australia does but we do OK. And as a nation we can still look at ourselves in the mirror without disliking what we have become.