Complacency and the Death of Phil Hughes

The complacent response of the media to the death of Australian batsman Phil Hughes, not least from the BBC’s Jonathan Agnew, is perhaps to be expected. “It’s all part of the game,” seems to be the most common reaction.

The felling of Hughes in Sydney by a fast, rising ball highlights the appalling design deficiencies of protective helmets.

I was there in 2002 at the WACA in Perth when England’s Alex Tudor was poleaxed by a 90mph delivery from Brett Lee. It was sickening. Poor Tudor was never the same again.

That one went through the front of the visor, whereas the Hughes blow struck him on the completely unprotected back of the head. Both injuries happen not frequently, but on a pretty regular basis.

It seems that helmet manufacturers are more concerned with turning out a product that looks cool than with real effectiveness. Perhaps the death of Hughes will prompt the cricketing authorities and those manufacturers into producing something that’s actually fit for purpose.

The legendary Prince Ranjitsinhji in the first-ever film of cricket

 

My father used to talk in hushed tones of the graceful elegance of the great batsman Prince Ranjitsinhji. There was no Indian cricket team in Ranji’s day, so he played for England. In truth my father never saw him play, except maybe briefly on a news report at the cinema in the 1920s.

But Ranji had been filmed earlier, much earlier ‒ in the nets in Sydney during an Ashes test match in December 1897, a match in which he scored a brilliant 175 runs in the first innings, the highest score yet made by an England batsman in a test match.

There is some dispute about who made that brief pioneering film. I had always assumed that it was the Australian photographer, H Walter Barnett, briefly returned to Sydney after setting up his studio in London. But, as Sally Jackson in Canberra shows in a current essay*, Barnett did not in reality make that trip home, so the film must have been shot by someone else associated with his business, Falk Studios, there ‒ perhaps Frenchman Georges Boivin, Sally suggests.

I was lucky enough to see the film at a presentation at the British Film Institute some years ago, and to a cricket-lover it is fascinating. Without the protection of either pads or gloves, Ranji plays with the softest of soft hands, turning the ball deftly to fine leg. Of course, he was the perfector of that stroke, the leg glance, now a standard part of every good batsman’s technique. 

Surely it’s time for this historic footage to emerge from the darkness of the BFI’s archives into the public domain?

*http://www.nfsa.gov.au/blog/2014/07/03/do-frenchmen-play-cricket/ 

 

Leading the difficult bastards

The eviction of Kevin Pietersen from England’s cricket team is a failure of leadership. No more, no less.

In any organisation, getting the best out of the average performers is useful, but hardly a major challenge. It’s getting consistent, peak performance out of the brilliant ones that is the real test.

So often that test is compounded by the fact that the really outstanding ones come with considerable baggage. They can be moody, imperious, changeable, demanding, self-centred (and self-important), aggressive…

That’s why leaders are paid lots and take on the responsibility. Turfing out the difficult bastards is only appropriate if they lack talent.

Sport as metaphor for life

In a provocative piece in Melbourne’s The Age, the columnist Tim Soutphommasane asserts that Australia’s current malaise on the cricket field “may also say something about the state of the nation… cricket as a metaphor for life.”

Has he not noticed that, while Europe and North America have struggled to get any semblance of forward motion, the economy in Australia has remained in robust health?

I'm always leary about sport/society metaphors. When I lived in Sydney in the early 1980s, Australia went crazy about their "historic" winning of the ultimate prize in sailing, the America's Cup. However, the strong feeling of euphoria accompanied a deep national slide into recession...

And the man behind the achievement, entrepreneur Alan Bond, was eventually sent to prison for fraud.

Now how do you decode all that, metaphorically?

Hold the back page

In June 1957, in my last term at Stoneygate School in Leicester, aged just thirteen, I made my highest score in a cricket match: 110 not out.

What’s more, this was against my previous school in Coventry, whose best bowler (and bat) was Bryan Richardson, one of the finest schoolboy cricketers of his generation. I reached the century lofting him over his head for six.

This was the day that I discovered how news stories work. The Daily Express had sent along a reporter and a photographer to cover the match. The following day, the back page of the paper was covered in action photos of the game. But I was nowhere to be seen. The pictures and the story were all about Bryan.

How could this be?

Of course the Express had covered the game, not because of my prowess, but because young Bryan’s two older brothers, Peter and Dick Richardson, had just been selected to play for England against the West Indies, a first for siblings.

Ah. So that’s how it works.

With Larry Lamb at the Gabba

The opening of The Iron Lady in London reminds me of the two days that I spent with Sir Larry Lamb at the England-Australia test match at the Gabba in Brisbane in 1982.

These were days of cricket-watching, drinking and talking. He did a great deal more than me of both the last two.

And we ate soft-shell crab, a Queensland delicacy.

By this stage Larry was editor-in-chief of The Australian. Previously, in London, he had been the pioneering editor of Britain's biggest-selling newspaper, The Sun. Two stories he told stick in the mind.

First, of the daily meetings prior to the 1979 election that he had with Margaret Thatcher and Tim Bell to plot the following day’s front-page headline in The Sun. It’s generally agreed that swinging that mass-market tabloid behind Thatcher won her the election.

Then, of his rejected proposal to build an executive loo at The Australian. “Tell him to piss out of the window like the rest of us,” was apparently Rupert Murdoch’s decision. Larry was not best pleased.

Nothing to do with me, mate

My friend Peter Quantrill was a bit shocked by the inept response of the chairman of Australia’s cricket selectors, Andrew Hilditch, following his team’s drubbing at the hands of England in the Ashes series in Sydney.

“I think we’ve done a very good job as a selection panel,” said Hilditch, unable to shoulder any responsibility for the rout.

“I figure someone in his position would have undertaken a modicum of media training,” Peter wrote to me.

And yesterday we had MI5’s chief of staff, giving evidence at the inquest into the 7/7 bombings in London, saying that it would be “nonsensical and offensive” to suggest that the security service bore any responsibility for the 52 deaths. (Silly me. I’d thought it was their job to detect and forestall such things.)

It all puts me in mind of the recent BP fiasco in the Gulf of Mexico.

In fact, although I occasionally coach people in media relations, I'm rather ambivalent about the value of media training. For example, if BP CEO Tony Hayward (above) had been better coached, he might not have veered wildly between the inappropriate and the obstructive, and could well still be top dog there.

In the end, I’d rather leaders were just themselves in response to media interrogation. Better for everyone in the long run.

And always better to assume responsibility.