A hoary cliche of news media concerns the captaincy of the Australian cricket team being the second most important office in the country after the prime ministership.
On one hand, it’s what one prime minister would have called “hyperbowl”; on the other, you can argue the comparison, at least in prestige terms, is back to front.
The captaincy is an older office than the prime ministership, at 147 years versus 123. The captaincy involves a more or less constant cycle of winning, versus once every four years.
Many more people in England, India, Pakistan, South Africa, Sri Lanka, the West Indies and Bangladesh know who leads Australia’s cricket team than who leads its government. And, right now, Pat Cummins is doing a far better job than Anthony Albanese.
Cummins has had a year of unexampled success, leading Australia to victory in the World Test Championship and World Cup, and retaining the Ashes; over the same period Albanese did nothing about a cost-of-living crisis while expending his political capital on what looks increasingly like a vanity project.
Cummins is even proving better at what Albanese used to regard as his speciality – “fighting Tories”.
Let’s keep this in proportion. Cummins is hardly an instinctive culture warrior. It is more that the neo-narcissists of the Australian right are so brittle, so apt to be triggered by anyone seen in proximity to a solar panel or a copy of Dark Emu.
Cummins’ positions seem always to be moderately couched; it is more that he gives straight answers to straight questions rather than deflecting to say that he is merely a sportsman and the, “y’know, the boys done well”.
Even Cummins’ latest intervention commenced with a patriotic preamble: “I absolutely love Australia. It is the best country in the world by a mile.” Then: “We should have an Australia Day, but we can probably find a more appropriate day to celebrate it.”
Cue the usual hysterics, the social media drive-bys, the mirthless cartoons. Sports people should stay in their lane, right? Although, were Cummins to have donned a slouch hat and wrapped himself in an Australian flag spun from coal, he would now be fending off invitations to deliver the keynote address at this year’s Conservative Political Action Conference.
Yet what was Cummins’ view anyway? It was not a call for Thursday’s game against the West Indies to be re-designated the Invasion Day Test with the burning of an effigy of Captain Cook; rather, it was merely a recognition of Australia Day’s increasingly negative connotations. Celebratory calendars change. If they didn’t we’d still be marching on Empire Day and raising a glass on St Andrews Day.
The Australian cricket team developed a political character, to go with the game’s reach and resonances, even before the colonies unified – indeed, it was enlisted in the cause of federation.
Joe Darling’s 1899 Ashes team was farewelled at Sydney town hall by Edmund Barton and George Reid, longtime rivals recently reconciled in the federal cause who doubled as vice-presidents of the NSW Cricket Association.
The Australasian’s report at the time stirs the cockles: “Mr Barton called on the Eleven to remain true to the nation which they would belong to on their return … Joe Darling stepped forward, with his hand upon his heart, and declared that that should be their only endeavour.” Imagine a pre-federation Sky After Dark: “Hey, Joe Darling! Read the room! What about our customs revenues? And don’t be so disrespectful of the NSW Mounted Rifles!”
The captaincy’s most successful incumbents have all expressed the wider context of their eras. In his moral middle-classness and imperial fealty, Donald Bradman was the perfect conservative pin-up. With his sideburns and safari suits, Ian Chappell was a prototypical Whitlam supporter. Allan Border was the perfect “end of certainty” figure, standing firm as Australia adjusted to the deregulation of the (cricket) world. Steve Waugh tapped into baggy green folklore as successfully as John Howard built a haven for ancestor worship.
Cummins is different again: cautious but thoughtful, moderate but confident. Successful too – which is what most galls his detractors. There’s no evidence he is being distracted from his core responsibilities by his non-core utterances, or that going woke is sending him broke. On the contrary, he is at the top of his form and earning capacity.
Which foreshadows its own challenges. What we are prepared to say is one thing; what we are prepared to sacrifice is another. What we are yet to see from Cummins is a conviction that might cost him a dollar and tarnish his super-slick brand.
Cummins will this year be the second-highest paid overseas player in the Indian Premier League, where cricket pooh-bahs sit at the right hand of a sectarian autocrat. Cummins plays in global tournaments bankrolled by Saudi Arabian-owned Aramco, the corporate world’s biggest carbon polluter.
Last year there was much talk of cricket being the next target of Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund, the country’s tentacular and opaque sovereign wealth fund, that promotes LIV Golf and owns Newcastle United.
In which case, Cummins will be near the top of the shopping list.
He has an important job now; but more important roles might be to come.
Gideon Haigh writes at Cricketetal.substack.com.
