Sunday, August 1, 2010

Back in 2001, the Australian team woke on the eve of the Ashes to find extracts from Sun Tzu’s The Art Of War slipped under their doors of their hotel rooms.

“If you know both yourself and your enemy, you can win a thousand battles without a single loss,” Steve Waugh’s side were told - advice they put into practice with considerable success. This year, the required reading appears to feature less Chinese military strategy, and a little more Jane Austen.

“The public say they will stay away from sports they don’t believe are good role models - and so do sponsors,” said a letter sent by Cricket Australia to Ricky Ponting and the team.

Players were told that “spitting, swearing or sledging” could “damage the brand”, and urged to “remain enthusiastic and avoid being too disappointed, or abrupt with the media”.

Attempting to turn Aussie heroes into Austen heroines - sweet, decorous and desirable - has met with predictable scorn. Not least from Merv Hughes, one of many past greats who, upon receipt of such correspondence, would have walked briskly from hotel bedroom into bathroom to made use of the letter as he saw fit.

“It’s easy to say in the coolness of a boardroom, but when players are out there trying to win a Test match for Australia they’re not thinking about being a role model,” said Hughes, a man for whom brand awareness means recognising which lager gets you drunk quickest.

Tellingly, the market research which prompted the CA letter was conducted in the wake of the infamous “Monkeygate” Test between Australia and India at Sydney. That’s why it also instructs players not to claim dropped catches. And yes, Mr Clarke, that would be you they’re referring to.

Ponting faced calls for his head following that Test as Australia indulged in an orgy of hand-wringing over the conduct of its national team. And perhaps latte-sipping urban Australians - the type that respond to market research surveys - are still slightly embarrassed by the snarling mongrels beneath the Baggy Green caps.

But whatever discomfort or unease they feel would soon be overwhelmed by a sense of national shame should Ponting’s side fail to defend the Ashes in England this summer.

In truth, Cricket Australia should have issued just one reminder to its players this week: “Don’t lose”. Because whatever the surveys say, there is nothing that damages the Australian ‘brand’ more than losing to England.

Misgivings about manners, appealing to sponsors, all that stuff is fine and dandy when you’re winning. But it drops like a stone down the list of priorities once you start losing.

In 2005, the last time Australia lost an Ashes series, Ponting arrived in England with a catching pact and a will to win in the right way. Michael Vaughan turned his nose up at the pact, and didn’t give a toss how his side won.

Ponting still bears the scars from that defeat - literally, in fact, as he needed stitches to repair a cut under his eye caused by a Steve Harmison bouncer.
And you suspect the fires that burn within Ponting will ensure that catching pacts and market research won’t figure greatly in his team-talks once the action starts.

Because while the Ashes may be about Pride and Prejudice, it is no place for Jane Austen.