“Shame about the rain hope it doesn’t ruin an exciting last day,” writes Tom Barrington. “As a UK based radio cricket enjoyer, I had to find an Australian feed yesterday. I tuned in during the collapse and was amazed at the funereal atmosphere, it really was striking how down the team were and the calls for an enquiry were starting. I think they had a point re Maddinson, but this is still an extremely successful side who have a great chance of winning the series still and ultimately the World Test Championship.
“Do you think this is part of the difference between the culture around cricket in England compared to Australia (ultimately borne out in results), in the lack of acceptance of failure? I’ve listened to many worse England collapses and there is much more of an acceptance of fate, combined with some gallows humour.”
In a word, yes. My theory from my experience working a lot in both countries, which others may dispute, is that broadly speaking the English are good losers and bad winners, while Australians are good winners and bad losers. Caveats! Generalisations! Do not deluge me with contrary case studies, I’m talking broad social averages here.
The theory being that because Australians expect
The theory being that because Australians expect to win, they move on from it quickly and don’t wallow in smug gloating to the same extent, but when their teams lose, they are shocked to the core that such an outrage could happen, and can’t cope with it.
All out for under a hundred is UNACCEPTABLE to an Australian mind, it is the province of weak teams from weak countries that do not have our indomitable pioneering spirit born of the hardscrabble clay, or something. There’s a lot of hypernationalist myth mixed in there, and a lack of ability to be philosophical about failure.
But those complaints also have a point, that a lot of flaws in this current team have been visible for a while, and haven’t been addressed, so when a Test falls apart because of those self-same weaknesses, people get stroppy about it.
Source: www.theguardian.com
