On a night that was meant to be the coronation of an international cricketing hegemon, the Australian cricket team defied all odds in Ahmedabad this week, winning the 2023 World Cup against India’s Galácticos in blue.
Forty years on from its nearest comparison, the America’s Cup victory of 1983, Pat Cummins led the nation to what was thought impossible — not just the feat of winning a World Cup away from home when the last three have been won by the host nation, but doing so while being a “woke”, “far-left”, “climate catastrophist clown”.
The scale of Cummins’ cricketing accomplishment is not to be sneezed at, nor is the gravity of the decision he made to bowl first after winning the toss. Only once before, in 1996, had a victorious captain won the toss and bowled in a World Cup final. It caps off a year for Cummins that will define his career, winning a World Cup and retaining the Ashes away from home.
He did so in a turbulent and at times often hostile domestic media environment — decried for having a relatively mainstream opinion on anthropogenic climate change (despite being in step, to varying degrees, with both major political parties), Cummins was labelled “king of the wokes” late last year, and the barrage of criticism that came his way, particularly from News Corp outlets, didn’t stop.
It has been a consistent feature of Cummins’ captaincy — right-wing political campaign group Advance Australia warned him in February last year to “stay out of politics”, and in October told him to “shut up about woke politics (and) focus on winning”. Evidently, one can walk and chew gum. Or in this case, chew gum and win a World Cup.
Around the same time, noted cricket expert Rita Panahi tore into Cummins for his “incoherent far-left activism” that “may have cost Cricket Australia a $40 million sponsorship” with energy company Alinta Energy. Notwithstanding that Alinta, Cricket Australia and Cummins have all denied the story, on-field success typically begets sponsorship opportunities.
It continued this year. In February, Daily Telegraph columnist Maurice Newman opined that “a level of ‘wokeness’ seems to have infiltrated Australian cricket and the Test team’s performances are suffering as a consequence”.
Panahi wrote a column in the Herald Sun in April, a fortnight after Cummins’ mother, Maria, lost her long-running battle with breast cancer, branding him “comically clueless” and declaring that he was now “learning an important lesson about actions and consequences”.
News Corp’s criticisms of wokeness were not limited to Cummins. News.com.au got the knives out for Adam Zampa during the tournament for not singing the national anthem. “Storm erupts as Aussie doesn’t sing anthem”, cried the country’s biggest digital masthead (which for reasons unknown lacked a byline), before following up in the next game with the headline “‘Burn him at the stake’: anthem storm erupts”.
Will Swanton opined for The Australian that Zampa should be dropped for his temerity, along with coach Andrew McDonald. Swanton wrote a 2020 op-ed declaring he himself doesn’t sing the anthem and would conclude the 2023 tournament by labelling Cummins as “Captain Fantastic” in light of the victory. One wonders whether Australia would still have won the tournament without Zampa’s 23 wickets at 22 or McDonald’s coaching.
Prime Minister Anthony Albanese told Sky News this week: “Pat Cummins, what a leader, someone who was criticised for being woke and there were articles in various publications calling upon him to be cast aside [as] you couldn’t be a bowler and captain the side.”
As a fellow Australian journalist said to Crikey: “The best part of us winning the World Cup isn’t even beating India on their home deck. It’s seeing all those News Corp hacks and ‘go woke go broke’ merchants eat the humblest of pies.”
Notably, News Corp’s actual cricket journalists seem to fall relatively far from the proverbial tree, with its stable of cricket writers considered among the best in the industry. Indeed, Code Sports editor Alex Brown took to social media to express the sentiment: “Go woke. Go win the whole bloody lot.”
