‘How Australian cricket lost its way’

In the wake of the ball-tampering scandal in Cape Town, Australian cricket has been forced to look inward to ask itself what it has become – and how. The national governing body, Cricket Australia, has conducted its own review – although just how open to reform it can really claim to be is questionable, given it re-elected the chairman and promoted its COO to CEO (replacing the long-serving James Sutherland) before the review’s findings were revealed.

In Crossing the Line, Gideon Haigh – journalist, scholar, historian and, to some, conscience of the game in Australia – undertakes his own ‘cultural review’, describing his findings as “less official and far cheaper, but genuinely independent.”

Haigh takes in 2013’s Homeworkgate, the sacking of Mickey Arthur and the hiring of Darren Lehmann – a “desperate move” later rewritten as a masterful intervention by a high-functioning executive – and the growing belief in an ‘Australian way’ to play cricket: with aggression. As behaviour became less savoury in an effort to serve the relentless pursuit of success, “an atmosphere of leniency prevailed” with players who in many cases were not temperamentally suited to such a hard approach encouraged to ‘headbutt the line’. While players ultimately have been punished strongly for crossing it, the same can scarcely be said for the coaches and administrators in overall charge.

There was also the matter of the players’ pay dispute, a situation in which CA were able to appear aristocratically high-handed whilst simultaneously entirely bungling the negotiation. Haigh argues the players’ image with the public was, months before the ball-tampering scandal, damaged by this stand-off – and with the full backing of CA.

Perhaps most notable in this short but punchy book, which is yet to find a UK publisher, is the way these events are treated like genuinely important history, worthy of serious study.

Indeed, it’s noticeable to the English reader in particular that modern cricket can perhaps only be dealt with in this way – as a legitimate historical topic – in Australia. As highlighted by the 2018 scandal, the game retains a significance in the public imagination there that allows a writer like Haigh to treat its ongoing story with a gravity that in England might well be met with a smirk or, more devastatingly, a shrug. And that is no compliment to England, whose own national governing body shares plenty of the wealth, hubris and control-freakery of its Antipodean cousin.

In producing such a fair and detailed, if ultimately scathing, analysis of Cricket Australia as an organisation, Haigh has provided a necessary counterbalance to the body’s own compromised review process, and, perhaps more generously, helped highlight the ongoing difficulties involved in administrating a truly professionalised game in a fast-moving world.