Australian cricketers have a history of taking on their board over money but this time it seems they are making a stand for those further down the ladderSo let’s unpack the sun cream, cancel the Melbourne Christmas party and stop studying our Aussie phrase books because the Ashes may never happen this winter. David Warner, no-nonsense opening batsman, has morphed into a no-nonsense Scargillian spokesman in the dispute between Cricket Australia and the Australian Cricketers’ Association (the players union).“If it gets to the extreme they might not have a team for the Ashes,” said Warner, who speaks as forthrightly as he bats. “We won’t buckle at all; we are standing together and very strong.” Related: Australian Cricketers' Association responds to...
If Steve Smith has a wider claim on some kind of ultimacy right now it is perhaps a minor role as the greatest Test batsman to be nobody’s favourite Test batsmanShakin’ Stevens was the biggest-selling British singles artist of the 1980s. It is probably worth remembering this fact the next time a man with a greying beard tells you the 80s were the last real golden age of popular music, a starburst of youthful creativity, artistic collectivism and sad, pale people standing behind synthesisers pretending they’re not surrounded by balloons on Top of the Pops.Forget all that. The rankings don’t lie. In reality the 80s were characterised by an apparently insatiable thirst for a handsome middle-aged Welshman miming to country music and...
The Australia captain and his coach Darren Lehmann have talked of resilience and adaptation after recent disasters, and those qualities were at the fore to end a 13-year wait for a Test win in India4,502. It’s a number Steve Smith wants everyone to know: the days since Australia last won a Test in India. Way back then, it was the only time the national side had triumphed in a series in this country since The Beatles stopped writing songs. Then, it was a team resembling the Harlem Globetrotters for the champions they boasted. It truly was their final frontier.When directly asked last month if his charges could do the same, the Australian captain avoided the question. It was taken as...
Cummins, after endless strains and twangs, is back bowling fast for Australia, who have a ghost attack – a set of genuinely scorching pace bowlers in their prime – quietly assemblingThere are few things in sport as exciting as pure speed. Remember the stodgy start to the Rio Olympics? The empty seats, the greasy drizzle, the sense of an entire Games drifting into the arena of the unwell? Usain Bolt fixed that, instantly and without argument, by turning up, goofing about waving at people, and then running as fast as humans ever have for a combined total of one minute and 40 seconds, erasing everything else outside that brilliant, luminous moment.In his American football novel End Zone, Don DeLillo spends...
Australia’s recent antics in South Africa and the accusations made at the Phillip Hughes inquest show the idiocy of resorting to hackneyed insultsLeast among the many insights provided by Jonathan Trott’s autobiography, Unguarded, comes this contender for the canon of classic sledges. The scene was Lord’s, late September 2010. Popular Pakistani stand-up Ijaz Butt, two years into his comic turn as the chairman of the Pakistan Cricket Board, had just accused England of “taking enormous amounts of money” to throw the third ODI. England’s players, unamused, spent the night debating whether or not to withdraw from the series. And came within a single vote of doing it, too. At nets the next morning Trott met Wahab Riaz. “You going to...