It's just not cricket

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.