Crap and Crapper: The Long, Slow Fade of the Cricket Star Column

In this Insta-day and Pod-age, how many cricketers, past or present, write a signed column any longer? Maybe we need more like Mitch.

Gideon Haigh

Australia’s four-nil defeat in South Africa in 1970 generated predictably caustic commentary.  Among the most scathing views were published by the mighty Keith Miller, who in London’s Daily Express kept up a relentless campaign against captain Bill Lawry. 

Eventually, one night, during Australia’s tour match against Natal, Keith Stackpole and Paul Sheahan approached Miller in a hotel foyer, thinking maybe to put in a word for Lawry, their fellow Victorian.  So, Nugget, they began, what did you make of the day’s play?  Why, responded Miller, nothing: he’d been to the races.  Stackpole and Sheahan exchanged glances: here was Miller busy calling for Lawry’s sacking without even watching.  Miller read their thoughts and laughed.  ‘You boys don’t read that crap, do you?’ he said.

We do, still, more than half a century later - as evidenced by the gasps of horror at Mitchell Johnson’s asperities regarding David Warner in last weekend’s Sunday Times.  For those not under a rock, Johnson decried the selectorial indulgence from which Warner has benefited this last year, especially given his long rap sheet; he wondered aloud also at chairman George Bailey’s seeming closeness to the team.  Heterodox views, to be sure, but far from outlandish.  The shock derived mainly from the apparent breach of cricketers’ omertà: where countrymen and especially former teammates are concerned, bland is best.  Someone not making runs?  Opine than form is temporary, class permanent.  So-and-so’s lost a yard?  Stress the value of the experience, the importance of loyalty, rinse and repeat.

The shock also derives from the ancientness of Johnson’s chosen instrument. In this Insta-day and Pod-age, how many cricketers, past or present, write a signed column any longer?  I was only vaguely aware that Johnson did until last week, which doesn’t suggest that it resonates much further east than the 129th meridian longitude. 

Responses to the column came by more conventional means: Bailey and Usman Khawaja fended off questions at press conferences; Warner’s former captain Tim Paine and current manager James Erskine defended the status quo on radio.  Johnson then doubled down in his eponymous podcast.  Remember when sport sections were veritable Parthenons of signed columns?  Not any more.  It’s hardly that genres do not perish from time to time.  Whither the tour book, the instructional manual, even the cricket blog?  But the general eclipse of the column is obscured by the continuance of a few of note.  Sunil Gavaskar continues to prick and provoke in Midday and Sportstar; Stuart Broad has remained readable, even occasionally candid, in the Daily Mail.  Beyond that, however, there are evidently easier ways to make a living and burnish a brand. Perhaps a requiem is in order.

We should distinguish here the cricketer-columnist from the cricketer-journalist.  The latter has a distinguished history.  Australia’s first Test number three, Tom Horan, became its first cricket writer of note, as ‘Felix’ in The Australasian; Mike Atherton at The Times remains England’s writing benchmark as he was its batting touchstone.  The newspaper column signed by a cricketer of the present or recent past, sometimes abetted by a ‘ghost writer’, has a different antiquity, as an artefact of England’s primordial separation of professional and amateur, the emergence of WG Grace’s Edwardian successors, and the expansion of mass literacy and the popular press. 

It was in the first decade of last century that gentleman cricketers began turning their hand to scribblings for big mastheads as a means of generating an income.  You had Archie MacLaren in the Daily Chronicle; you had Pelham Warner in the Morning Post; Ranjitsinhji, who contributed reports of the Ashes of 1897-98 to an Australian periodical called Review of Reviews, grew so popular he was invited by The Sun to edit a daily edition; his pal CB Fry even edited his own magazine.  So profuse was the flow of content that the Evening News was in 1904 moved to satire. 

Oh, what will become of our national cricket

When every player devotes

The time he would otherwise spend at the wicket

To penning elaborate notes?

To face a fast bowler is always exciting

But wouldn’t it cause you distress,

If between each two overs you had to be writing

Your views on the game for the press?

This was very much an English phenomenon.  Australians, without the same class distinction or need to turn a quid, always looked a little askance at their self-distracting English counterparts.  The standard Ashes contract  before World War I, the zenith of player power in Australian cricket, contained the following self-denying ordinance: ‘No member of the team shall correspond for any newspaper by letter or cable or otherwise during the tour. A breach of this clause renders the culprit liable to a fine of 100 pounds.’ Players, in other words, effectively took a vow of silence - hard, these days, to imagine.

War shook things up.  For one, the decline of that gilded amateur generation in England opened the writing field to professionals, with their sometimes rebarbative opinions.  One of the most famous cricket columns of all was written for the Weekly Dispatch in January 1925 by the outspoken Lancashire pro Cecil Parkin, although it is famous less for its message than for the response.  Parkin did not actually call for a professional to captain England in Australia, which he was aware ‘would not be tolerated for a moment; he merely said that Arthur Gilligan (an amateur) should be succeeded by Percy Chapman (another amateur) ‘under the supervision’ of Jack Hobbs (a professional).   It provoked a famously empurpled attack, at the county’s annual meeting, from the Yorkshire grandee Lord Hawke: ‘For a man who calls himself a cricketer to write an attack on the England captain and at the same time to say the best cricketer he ever played under was Hobbs is beneath contempt. I trust no professional will ever captain England.’  The response to the response, needless to say, was instructive also. 

As the Australian Board of Control bore down on player rewards after the war, Australian cricketers also began to pad their incomes with money from the media - to the Board’s acute discomfort.  They imposed a rough-and-ready standard known colloquially as the ‘player-writer rule’ to restrict cricketers’ literary endeavours, with the scope for an exemption where a cricketer was a professional journalist. Jack Fingleton wriggled through; Donald Bradman did not. The latter’s contract with Associated Newspapers, negotiated in order to insulate him from the inducements of the Lancashire League, almost precluded his appearance in the Bodyline series.  When the Board demanded that Bradman choose between bat and pen, RC Packer, Kerry’s grandfather, freed the cricketer from his obligations.  Bradman almost certainly returned the compliment by leaking word of Bill Woodfull’s famous dressing room confrontation with Pelham Warner (‘There are two teams out there…’) to his Sun ghost writer Claude Corbett.

It was in these days, long before players turned pundits in the broadcast media, that columnists may have had their most marked impact, while also showing their genre’s weaknesses.  Bodyline, for example, was interpreted for faraway English followers chiefly through the columns of two erstwhile greats: Englishman Hobbs in the Daily Chronicle and Evening Star, and Australian Warwick Armstrong in the Evening News.

Privately Hobbs viewed Bodyline with distaste; publicly, fresh out of the game, and with England captained by his old Surrey amateur teammate Douglas Jardine, he was loath to admit as much to his ghost writer Jack Ingham.  As the Reuters correspondent Gilbert Mant recalled in Cuckoo in the Bodyline Nest (1994), Hobbs was ‘a lovely fellow traveller, modest, unassuming and good natured’ but his reports ‘said nothing one way or the other.’  The one controversy Hobbs caused, ironically, was by criticising, albeit very mildly, the scoring rate of his former opening partner Herbert Sutcliffe.  This earned him a rebuke from that great defender of press freedom Lord Hawke, again in the forum of the Yorkshire annual meeting: ‘We deplore his cable about Sutcliffe. Such ungenerous criticism should be impossible.’

Armstrong, the arch competitor, was promoted by the News precisely for his having an opposite character to Hobbs: ‘He is not hampered by the thought that he may have to take the field himself with a player he criticises. He is not embarrassed by ties of personal friendship….Indeed it is not too much to say that on each day of the five Tests, a reader of the Evening News will understand more of the real truth of a day’s play than most of the people who have watched it under the Australian sun.’

Interestingly, the English public didn’t, quite, buy it: Armstrong might not be ‘embarrassed by the ties of personal friendship’, but he was still Australian.  And when he chided the visiting team - ‘In Australia bowling at the batsman is considered unsportsmanlike - I consider it so myself’ - he was upbraided by readers for hypocrisy.  Armstrong had himself harnessed a fierce pace attack, Gregory and McDonald, in 1921; the News immediately published half a page of letters of complaint.  In fact, Armstrong’s views evolved as the series unfolded, and he grew critical of the ‘deplorable state’ of Australian cricket, while ridiculing Bradman as showing ‘unmistakable signs of fright’ and being ‘nothing more than a cricket cocktail.’  Mitchell Johnson on David Warner seems rather tame by comparison.

Seventy years ago this month, Sydney’s Sunday Telegraph unleashed a cricketer columnist who quickly became a byword for unvarnished opinion.  By then, Sid Barnes had done it all. Having achieved immortality as an Invincible, he had stood out of cricket on grounds he could make more money elsewhere, as an investor, trader, filmmaker, author and irreverent opinionista.  

Barnes was an incorrigible showman, gremlin, and prankster.  So vulgar was he in the Board of Control’s eyes that in January 1952 they blackballed his attempted comeback; he retaliated with a defamation action that humiliated them.  Barnes’ column, which meted out short punchy items under the rubric ‘Like It Or Lump It’, was both toweringly scathing, particularly of administrators such as board secretary Bill Jeanes and NSWCA chief Syd Smith, and unapologetically forward-looking, especially regarding players.  Here’s a sample from January 1954, starting with a response to news that the Board had paid the 1953 Ashes tourists a £100 bonus.

If anyone went to the trouble to work out just what it cost the Board of Control to dish out their £100 bonus, they'd know that the "gift" represented just about two per cent of the £80,000 odd profit which the team made on the tour. Truly a magnificent gesture by the Board.

Australian Test cricketers are top-line artists in a sphere of entertainment appreciated by millions throughout the British Commonwealth.

Like stars of the boxing ring, vaudeville, even the theatre, they deserve payment commensurate with their skill.

Let us fall in line with the Taxation Department and forget ridiculous talk of amateurism so far as cricket is concerned.

The Test cricketer is a professional sportsman and as such should be paid his due.

The Board's bonus to the 1953 team, irrespective of the fact that they lost the Ashes, should not have been less than £1000 a man.

*

AT the September meeting of the Australian Board of Control secretary Bill Jeanes' retirement takes effect - about 15 years too late.

How about a testimonial to Jeanes? I'll start the donations — with a halfpenny.

*

While on the contentious subject of testimonials, joke of the week, to those in the know, is the suggestion that Syd Smith’s superannuation scheme would solve the problem of who should or should not be given a benefit match.

I crossed swords with Smith on this question several years ago and I have not forgotten his final, arbitrary statement — ‘Once a cricketer has had a trip to England he is no further use to the game and should get out of it. He becomes a hindrance and a nuisance.’

I've a pretty fair idea who should get out of cricket for its improvement!

Go Sid!  Barnes was, of course, an outlier, but it’s a corrective to our notion of the 1950s and 1960s as more genteel times in Australian sport that there was a columnist so unvarnished, who so ecumenically bagged everyone. For he was equally unsparing of cricketers, boxers, footballers and even press colleagues. 

A Melbourne cricket critic, who wouldn't know better, is living

up to form by advocating ‘slow-coach’ Mackay, of Queensland,

as an opening batsman for Australia next year.

Classy New South Wales batsman Ron Briggs could outbat

Mackay one hand tied behind his back, kneeling, and blind-folded.

The tone reflects, in part, a somewhat different relationship between sport and its critics.  Australian media then merely covered sport; they were not simultaneously investors in it; as the ballast of money was lighter, the boat was more rockable.  There may have been a personal aspect too: those personal skirmishes had left a mark, and Barnes’ apparent insouciance concealed a sensitive, insecure man.  He subsequently took ‘Like It or Lump It’ to Sydney’s Sun where it became ‘Take It Or Leave It’, and continued offering these alternatives into the early 1970s - he is reputed to have baptised Rod Marsh ‘Iron Gloves’.  But anxiety and depression preluded his death fifty years ago.

The zenith of the signed column was probably Fleet Street in the 1980s, when newspapers were still rich, cricketers still comparatively poor, and Ian Botham predator and quarry in the tabloid hunt for scandal.  But two figures here, meanwhile, were notable for their candour.  Ian Chappell started as a columnist as Barnes was finishing, and has continued on and off since - even while broadcasting he has tended to come into the press box and write among the journalists.  Chappelli remains a man of strong views, unapologetically held, punchily put, and sometimes repeatedly expressed.  ‘One of the biggest drawbacks in having a coach is that the team captain is deprived of placing his stamp on the team.  In the case of a bad appointment, a coach can cause animosity in opposing sides by either the things he does or says, or in the things he did earlier in his career’: that could be Chappelli last week, although it’s Chappelli in The Age in November 1990, when his distaste for Bob Simpson was deepest.  No need to ask Chappelli twice about Bradman either…..

In the same vein, and with similar views about coaching, came Shane Warne, signed to the Sunday Age for a reputed $50,000 when he emerged, sacked by the Sunday Age after the disclosures about John the Bookie, but rapidly rehabilitated - in The Times, the Sunday Times and the Daily Telegraph in the UK, and occasionally in the Herald Sun here.  Between times, Warne experimented far-sightedly with his own website - it was where, ten years ago, he offered the plan for Australian cricket that quickly became known as the ‘Warniefesto’. 

Warne columnised as he commentated - cheerily and freewheelingly.  His speciality was picking teams and giving jobs.  There is a long piece to be written about players Warne anointed, from Matthew Elliott and Shane Harwood to Darcy Short and Nathan Coulter-Nile.  He was also the first to moot Darren Lehmann and Justin Langer as potential Australian coaches.  He had a knack, priceless to editors, for going too far.  His first column for The Times was a dissing of Arjuna Ranatunga for which he received a two-match suspended ban from the International Cricket Council: 

Ranatunga might be a shrewd, experienced leader. But his batting is not what it was, and he is terrible in the field. Frankly, Sri Lanka - and the game overall - would be better off without him. There is plenty of animosity between Arjuna and myself. I don't like him and I'm not in a club of one.

So why did columns dwindle?  Once cricketers started picking up microphones, they were bound to put down pens, for written opinion paled in effectiveness with oral, visual and online.  That seemed to be the lesson of the website total-cricket.com founded in the late 1990s by the cricket impresario Mark Mascarenhas, heavily weighted by celebrity cricket perspectives but ultimately no match for Cricinfo’s formula of news and scores.  Less time and effort was being devoted to them too. In his excellent new memoir Pitchside (2023), Amrit Mathur tells the story of helping the retired Tiger Pataudi with his columns in Sharjah around this time.

Not a great ‘watcher’, Tiger found the cricket tedious. He didn’t like the heat either and would leave mid-afternoon after instructing me to meet him at his hotel after the day’s play to help with the article. Every evening I dutifully filled him in on what had happened, which he then converted into a sharp piece that appeared the next morning under his byline. He was a pioneer of remote work, much ahead of WFH.

Columns were about who was saying rather than what was said, but the latter was not of no account.  In Ricky Ponting and Michael Clarke, the office of Australian captain was occupied consecutively by columnists of opposite dispositions.  Ponting, who cared little what went out under his name, would welcome his ghost writer Andrew Ramsey with a friendly: ‘What have you got for me today?’ Clarke, obsessed about his carefully curated personality, would scrutinise every word his ghost writer Malcolm Conn eked from their conversations.  It was only thanks to the excellence of the scribes that the results were at all readable.  Tim Paine put his name to only a few non-commital columns.  Not that you would know this from the commentators and commenters at The Australian, who imagine him declaiming climate change dogma from rooftops, but Pat Cummins does nothing at all.

Yet the simplest explanation for the eclipse of signed columns is economic.  They cost too much and offer too little.  Cricketers’ growing sense of their market worth and mass media’s collapsing funding models put new strain on the old racket.  Now there’s easier money to be made spruiking a new product on Instagram, why bother putting your name to an opinion that will be controversial if too interesting or pointless if too bland?  For off the shelf views, meanwhile, newspapers can wring television and social media.  

In England recently, I heard a story about a newspaper’s negotiation with a star cricketer.  The deal, the newspaper explained, was only worthwhile if the cricketer could offer something new, from inside the dressing room - it didn’t need to be indiscrete, merely fresh.  Yes, the cricketer nodded, he understood, but in due course provided mere ‘the boys done well’ pablum.  Gently prodded, the cricketer became defensive, claiming that he was being ‘set up’.  The deal fell over; the column did not proceed; it’s unlikely we missed out on much.

Some loss, all the same, is involved even in an unmourned demise.  However false or dull the notes they struck, columns were a point of connection between cricketers and their publics directed to some end other than financial.  Cricketers today are simultaneously overexposed and underutilised, knowing more and saying less than ever.  Cricket needs robust and informed opinion, but can afford only advertisements.  Mitchell Johnson, then, is only one story here; another is the effect of the absence of more like him.  Maybe it was always crap.  But what's replaced it is even more so.