It's just not cricket

Like a lot of young Queensland cricket fanatics back in the late 1970s and early 1980s I saved up my pocket money and headed off to the cricket at the “Gabba” in South Brisbane during Christmas recess.

But rather than wear the national colours I chose instead to display my personal bias by cheering on the impressive West Indies’ side as they took the field resplendent in creamy whites.

There was something magical about the world champions from the Caribbean that made them so appealing back then. On reflection I guess it was because I hadn’t seen a team entirely of black players, albeit an international team play such an exciting brand of cricket and dominate all competitors so convincingly.

I know that sounds unpatriotic but I’m confident I wasn’t the only Aussie at the game who had a soft spot for the rival nation.

The night before each day’s play I’d lie awake imagining I was Vivian Richards, the dashing Antiguan right hand no.3 batsman who strode to the crease with an air of confidence, bordering on smugness, with a swagger the likes of which I haven’t seen exhibited by any cricketer before or since.

His presence alone guaranteed a full house and the roar around the smallish Gabba oval reached fever pitch whenever he clobbered the bright red ball to the boundary for an effortless six or four. I joined in the chorus of rapturous hand clapping for the charismatic Richards as I stood with my father Jim, brothers and cousins under the large shady bottle tree at the school end of the old ground, well before the fully enclosed grandstand was even thought of.

The superbly fit Richards, who scored 8,540 runs over 121 tests for an average of 50.33, forever chomping away on gum knew the aura he wielded on the attentive sunbaked spectators and played up to their expectations. He either scored a dashing century in record time or returned to the dressing room with his bat tucked firmly under his right arm with less than double figures registered for his efforts.

Oh how I loved to picture myself as the great “master blaster” batsman.

To complete my flight of fantasy as the consummate cricketer covering all bases, on solitary evenings star gazing in the small hours of the morning, I also entertained extravagant thoughts that I was the majestic Michael Holding gracefully running to the crease to deliver the firm cricket ball at scintillating pace to a nervous batsmen a mere 20 metres away.

Holding, the tall 1.9m Jamaican right arm fast bowler with the apt nickname “whispering death” who took 249 wickets in 60 tests for an average of 23.68, like Richards also had a large adoring fan base. His staggering athleticism has its origin back to his school days in Kingston where he made his mark as a 400m runner.

Holding took turns tormenting the Australian batsmen with fellow speedsters’ big bird Joel Garner and Andy Roberts.

The fact that they won most games was also cause for celebration at the end of each one-day or five-day series.

My most enduring memory of my cricket crazed days was when I worked as a diplomat in Colombo in the early 1980s and looked after the visiting Australian cricket team who played their inaugural test in historic Kandi.

The formal reception for both teams at the High Commissioner’s residence allowed for a great photo opportunity with the great Australian fast bowler Dennis Lillee and the best cricketer of all times West Indian all-rounder Sir Garfield Sobers, who at the time was the coach of the Sri Lankan team.

Disappointingly today I don’t have the same interest in cricket or compulsion to take my son Stephen to the cricket like my father did because of the unsavoury behaviour of certain elements of the Australian cricketing public who persist in racially abusing international cricketers.

Although I suspect there was name calling back in those days when the famous all conquering West Indies team dominated international cricket I don’t recall hearing such rubbish at the ground or being made aware of it through the media.

Perhaps redneck elements in the crowd were mindful of the presence of an assembly of us burly Indigenous spectators within their vicinity and erred on the side of caution.

It’s rather ironic that the recent saturation media coverage of the Australian cricket tour of India has been focused entirely around racial vilification of Australia’s only black cricketer, Andrew Symonds (of British and West Indian origin) by other non-white spectators - the Indians.

Symonds was persistently racially vilified with chants of “monkey” by sections of the Indian crowd whenever he fielded near the boundary. I was most disturbed to see images beamed back to Australia on national television of what appeared to be monkey gesturing by the Indian crowd.

I turned 21 in Mumbai (formerly Bombay) in the summer of 1980 and know first hand how fanatical the Indian population is when a test series is on. Back in those days the open batsman for India was Sunil Gavaskar, nicknamed Sunny, who was widely regarded as one of the greatest opening batsmen in the Indian Test history. Gavaskar held the record of 34 Test centuries for almost two decades before it was broken by Sachin Tendulkar in December 2005.

Whenever Sunny went in to bat literally every Indian male had his ear glued to a small radio to listen to a ball by ball description of his performance by excitable commentators.

So yes, it disturbed me to think that another dark skin person would stoop so low as to engage in racial vilification of a visiting black cricketer. But then again if one looks at the history of the caste system in India it may not be so surprising considering the influential richer and fairer skin Indian high caste were known to turn their noses up at the blacker lower caste adivasi (Indigenous) Indians.

But Australian cricketers and public are not entirely guilt free when it comes to bringing the game into disrepute from their conduct on and off the cricket field.

Let’s take a short journey back in time by visiting my 2006 publication: Australia’s Blackest Sporting Moments - The top 100, and appraise some of the prominent public sledging that our profiled cricketers and not so famous spectators have engaged in.

Believe me this is not the kind of book that ambitious sportspeople would be pressuring their agents to have their name entered into. I was most subjective in identifying 100 of the worst offenders of racial vilification in sport.

Shiney, a cricketer who played for Hobart Town and the first Aboriginal sportsman mentioned in the media in 1835 (as cited in Tatzs’ Black Gold, 2000), was beheaded and his “specimen” sent by a resident doctor to an Irish museum for preservation after his cricketing days were over.

Thankfully agitation by Tasmanian Aborigines resulted in Shiney’s remains being returned and ceremonially cremated in 1992.

Across the Bass Strait Johnny Mullagh, the first Aborigine to play cricket for Victoria in the 1870s, as cited in Anthony Mundine’s book The Man, was told by an innkeeper while on tour that a room next to the stable was good enough for a “nigger”.

Mullagh, a gentle man, opted to sleep in the open yard as his quiet protest while his Victorian white team mates slept soundly in the Inn’s comfortable beds.

In more contempory times the mere mention of the name Jimmy Maher brings back memories of a man who had a bad case of foot in mouth. The Queensland Cricket Captain’s comments on Channel Nine’s The Footy Show that he was “full as a coon’s Valiant” during post-match celebrations of the State’s first ever Sheffield Shield victory in March 1995 had to be heard to be believed.

And yes I was watching, as I did every week, The Footy Show when an inebriated Queensland captain made his most imfamous racial slur.

Who could forget the anguish Shane Warne caused his captain Ricky Ponting when he called South African paceman Makhaya Ntini “John Blackman” in December 2005. Ntini, reported in The Advertiser rebuked Warne by saying “Hey, enough of the black”.

Australian opener, Darren Lehmann, in January 2003 was reported in The Australian for yelling “black c*&#s" in the tunnel leading to the Gabba dressing rooms after he was dismissed in the game against Sri Lanka. Australian coach John Buchanan was reported in the paper as saying that he does not condone any form of racial abuse.

Later in 2003, The Age reporter Trevor Marshallsea revealed in his December article racial abuse of spectators against the visiting Indian team: “As Cricket Australia said it was moving to adopt powers to eject spectators for racial abuse, Indian spectators and journalists yesterday reported being called names such as ‘coolie’ and ‘curry muncher’ at the Adelaide Oval and in Brisbane.”

The reporter quoted one Indian immigrant, who sits on the board of a major corporation in Melbourne, as saying he had feared for his safety for the first time in 15 years of living in Australia as he left the Adelaide Oval on that Friday night.

So as we approach the highly anticipated summer cricket season with the visiting Indian and Sri Lankan cricketers on tour I wander what kind of reception they will receive following the “monkey chanting” Andrew Symonds episode in the subcontinent recently.

I suspect the real heroes in the long whites on the centre pitch this summer will simply get on with the game and let the ground security turf out the unintelligible rednecks in the outer making mischief, and national selectors will put a broom through those cricketers complicit in racial vilification of their competitors.