An invidious Sydney tradition surfaced again at the third Test match between Australia and India last week, with six spectators ejected from a stand for allegedly racist chants towards a nearby Indian outfielder.
To top that, the Australian captain Tim Paine was caught on a stump mic angrily sledging an Indian player as a “dickhead” and former captain Steve Smith was accused of deliberately scuffing the crease line used as a marker by an Indian batsman.
There is a doctorate in cultural studies here for someone. Sledging has a long history in Sydney sport (eg “Saw your missus up the Cross last night”) and repartee from the grandstand is part of the show here as in many other cities around the world.
“For more than a century abusive behaviour went unchecked at Australian cricket grounds as if it was some sort of slapstick sideshow,” Robert Craddock wrote in the Daily Telegraph. “Some of it was. Cricket is nothing without crowd involvement and we all love a good one-liner. But much of it was crassness masquerading as cleverness. Cowards have been hiding in the masses. There was somehow a feeling that taunts that would be totally unacceptable in offices, homes or any public space were somehow permissible when shouted from row 23 after two or three or 10 beers.”
Not any more, Craddock added, along with most other cricket writers. When Mohammed Siraj, the star bowler on the outfield between overs, had play stopped last Sunday because of hostile chanting, something changed. “Watching a Test match come to a standstill in Australia because of crowd abuse was distressing in one way but strangely comforting in another,” Craddock said. “Cricket has simply had enough of racist crowd behaviour — and not a moment too soon.”
Cricket officials and police are still trying to pin down what was said. Siraj said he heard “brown dog” and “monkeys”; others in the crowd including an Indian-Australian said they heard nothing explicitly racist like that, but teasing plays on Siraj’s name. Instead of dismissing it as “banter” or “heckling”, such writers as Gideon Haigh and Malcolm Knox effectively said, “come on, who are you kidding?”
“For a start, the Indian objection is cumulative, to the long-term boorishness of Sydney crowds,” Haigh wrote. “They were invited to report an instance if they heard such; Siraj did. And, frankly, who would willingly soak up such prolonged stupidity? Any reader who thinks so is invited to forward their work address: I’d be pleased to follow them all day shouting a drunken joke about their name, and taking pleasure in their misfortune and discomfiture. For another thing, racial epithets are not a precondition of racism. On the contrary, racism can be most pernicious where it is politest.”
Haigh and others pointed out that Siraj was particularly vulnerable: on his first tour and first long trip out of India, son of an auto-rickshaw driver from Hyderabad. When his father died six weeks ago, he remained on the tour rather than return for the funeral.
Then we have our politicians trying to paper over things, with NSW premier Gladys Berejiklian saying racist abuse against an Indian cricket player would be “so un-Australian” if proven to have occurred. To which Indigenous cricket star Dan Christian commented: “It’s not just an Australian cricket problem, it’s an Australian society problem.” And India’s Ravichandran Ashwin, who got the sledging from Paine, said racism had been part of his Australian touring experience for 10 years.
“Cricketers say they get abused all over the world but Australia is ground zero, its crowds the most hostile and abusive,” says Sharda Ugra, a senior sports journalist with sports channel ESPN Cricinfo. It also occurred in India. “That too without alcohol as an excuse, as it is not allowed in Indian grounds,” she wrote in the Sydney Morning Herald on Wednesday. “Mumbai’s Wankhede Stadium’s fairly well-to-do North Stand has chanted racist abuse en masse at West Indian Mervyn Dillon and Australia’s Andrew Symonds (who in 2007 was also abused in Baroda).”
The “ripple effect of the Black Lives Matter was now forcing sport to face up to racism”, Ugra said. “Yet creating non-toxic environments, not just in Australian cricket but in India and elsewhere, depends on more than institutional codes or security ejecting yahoos. They can only be built and reinforced by the constant, vocal disapproval of everyone around a sport’s racists and bullies. Regardless of which seat they occupy. Even if that stuff once used to be part of the game.”
Sledging and heckling used to be just between us and the English, inaudible in the broadcast rooms. Now there are cameras and microphones everywhere, journalists from all around the cricketing world, and live play shown worldwide. Australian stars spend part of the year playing in the Indian Premier League for huge salaries. Hence Paine’s quick apology to Ashwin, and careful scrutiny of Smith’s crease scuffling, which brought back the ball-tampering episode in South Africa three years ago.
The Australian team is still on probation from that. “Some, predictably, have piled on to the Australian team, claiming three years of steady progress had all been undone by one bad day at the office,” wrote Ben Horne in the Daily Telegraph. “This was always going to happen. The first time the Australians stumbled, the baying mob would appear again.”
Deploying a strange metaphor, Horne said the Australians could not complain: “You may have only ever kissed one goat, but every time after that you allow your gaze to linger on a fetching specimen someone is going to think you’re at it again, but they’re not.”
Quite. But let’s leave with this summing up from Sharda Ugra about what far-off Indians see on their screens:
“In India’s long-distance view, there are two or three Australias. There’s MasterChef Australia, seen more regularly these days on Indian TV screens than cricket. Diverse participants, warm judges, mouth-watering feasts.
Then up pops live cricket, MasterChef Australia’s alter-ego: eye-grabbing, throat-constricting, high skill action, trite mouthing off between players and, in unsavoury leftovers from SCG 2021, half a dozen yahoos ejected for racist abuse.
A third confusing track runs alongside this: of Australian and English captains deciding not to take a knee last September followed by Cricket Australia introducing the Barefoot Circle and instituting the Mullagh Medal, in honour of Indigenous Australian cricketer Johnny Mullagh. Many times for Indians, Australia doesn’t add up.”
Hamish McDonald has been a correspondent in Jakarta, Tokyo, New Delhi and Beijing, and was Regional Editor of the Far Eastern Economic Review in Hong Kong and Foreign Editor of The Sydney Morning Herald. He has won two Walkley Awards for reporting from Asia and was made an Inaugural Fellow of the Australian Institute of International Affairs.
Comments
4 responses to “Line between sledging and racism continues to blur”
One recalls in 2007/8, upon a visit to Australia after being away for some time, there was an Australia India test series with much media focus upon Harbhajan Singh, and attracting underlying racism masquerading as humourous sledging; worst was hearing dribbly comments made by educated middle class people who thought they were tolerant….
Former English skipper Mark Ramprakash spoke round the same time of the racist sledging he was subjected to by the Australian team, and no other…..
Still it continues, reflects and is a reaction to, part of the ageing declining Anglo Irish culture, which does not forbode well for cricket in Australia, dependent upon less diverse demographics…..
Ironically, immigration from the Sub-Continent maybe the game’s saving grace.
“Line between sledging and racism continues to blur”is the title of the article but most of the article doesn’t deal with sledging but with crowd behaviour, heckling, abuse, barracking. Sledging is what fielding cricketers say and do to the batsmen to unsettle them. The comments by Tim Paine were childish and stupid but in what way were they racist? As for Steve Smith scuffing out the crease, once again childish and stupid, but is the author suggesting that a frustrated Smith wouldn’t have rubbed out the crease if the batsman had been a white man? Apparently it “brought back the ball-tampering episode in South Africa three years ago”. Is it now being suggested that the ball tampering was motivated by racism by the white Australian players towards the mainly white South African players?
As for the crowds, undoubtedly racist comments have been, still are and will continue to be made by Australian crowds. Whether or not any were actually made on this occasion is still in doubt and yet to be established. I wouldn’t be surprised if the alleged racist comments were made but shouldn’t we wait for the facts to be established before we pile on?
Finally, barracking ( as it used to called) by the crowd has a long history in Australia going back to the very first cricket matches between England and Australia. Many Touring English cricketers commented on this uniquely Australian habit, many of them loathed it and many had a very low opinion of Australians in general cease of it. We are an uncouth lot and always have been but things are slowly heading in the right direction. Apart from some stupid and childish moments, often borne of frustration,the players are setting a better example than they have for a long time and the great majority of the crowd are behaving well.
Thanks Hamish. I have always disliked the on-field “sledging” and I don’t recall it being a feature of the game when I was a young cricket writer and had the pleasure of meeting players including MCC (Michael Colin Cowdrey), Gary Sobers, Graham McKenzie, Colin Milburn, Rohan Kanhai and Barry Richards. I wonder if anybody is still alive who can tell us if Keith Miller and Bradman did this sort of thing or were they content to do their talking with bat and ball.
“Line between sledging and racism continues to blur”
It sure does, ever did, it’s a long standing ‘English’ tradition. Born of Empire (Sydney’s own Gov. Macquarie attended the violent crushing of Tipu Sultan’s resistance to English rule in India), born of the triangular Slave Trade, born of the invasion and dispossession of the peoples of Aotearoa and Australia, born of the great transportation (convicts here, coolies to Fiji, Malaya, Sri Lanka, Arakan), born of the Opium Wars (may China rise!), born of the Balfour Declaration and the subjugation of the people of Palestine, and born of all the other acts of cruelty that made the British Empire and the English Aristocracy (the pommy bastards) rich and powerful, and despised around the world.
Don’t blame a few fading halfwit drunks from the old Sydney hill. They’re an echo of the past. In Canberra, Brisbane, Perth, Hobart and Melbourne, the crowds behave just as badly. The racist rot is nation wide and it runs deep. It’s compounded by our unacknowledged complicity in the violent dispossession and genocide of Australia’s first nations people and the destruction of their precious 60,00 year old civilisation, on which the hubris, wealth and power of all us ‘ordinary Australians’ depends.
Thank Ms P Pants-Down for reigniting it, and thank dear Johnny Howard for for raising it to a cultural norm with his ‘culture wars’, “kill the pig”, Murdoch led, Tampa debacle and his white picket fence. Thank our present government for refusing to listen to the Ularu Statement from the Heart and rejecting the path of healing.
As England’s own Sir William Gerald Golding taught us (1954), all it takes is granting permission to hate.