Cricket is like religion.
By that, I simply mean that for its advocates, there’s a lot of time standing around, waiting, with the promise of something happening sometime in the future, while the non-believers can’t understand the appeal… Or indeed, why bowlers appeal when the ball is clearly missing leg stump!
However, there’s a certain shock to many when someone who professes to be virtuous is suddenly caught with their pants down… Surely they shouldn’t have been the ones to have been doing the ball tampering. (In the interest of clarity, I’d like to add that I am refering to the Australian cricket team here, before any religious organisation sues me!)
Of course, I could go on about how there have been many cricketers caught doing exactly what the Australian cricketers did. The only difference was that Steve Smith actually admitted it was a plan concocted by the leadership group. This would be akin to a church saying, “Of course we tried to hush it up!” It’s not so much that someone was cheating -it’s that the captain admitted that he knew about it. This would be akin to Malcolm Turnbull admitting that he knew about Barnaby Joyce’s relationship with Vikki Campion; it’s far better to lie because if you tell the truth, people are shocked. So the shocking thing is that Smith admitted it was a plan, and not a spur-of-the-moment brain fade like Shane Warne had when he took the masking agent because his mum gave it to him and not because he was taking steriods to help with his injured shoulder. No, it was a nasty calculated thing and not just stupidity like Turnbull and Warne.
But I’m a bit worried that if I start talking about the whole cricket thing, we’ll miss the wider issue here:
How can we expect those poor, persecuted South African farmers to think of us as “civilised country” anymore?
I mean, how can we give precedence to South African farmers and move them up in the queue, now that Steve Smith has been so evil as to cheat in a cricket game. Surely they won’t want to come to our country such as ours and we’ll have to give their places to the people who’ve been waiting patiently in the queue that those coming by boat are trying to jump. As John Howard said, “We will decide who’s in the queue and the manner in which they come.” It’s got nothing to do with the colour of their skin. As the special treatment for certain people showed, it’s all to do with the colour of their money.
I mean, what Steve Smith did was the most outrageous thing we’ve heard about for years. After all, it was a cricket game. And it was a test match. It’s not one of these johnny come lately 20/20 affairs. This is a serious breach of all the ethics that all the cricket playing countries – the civlised ones – hold dear.
Yes, yes, I know that some of you non-believers don’t understand the importance of what’s happened and in your blasphemous way, you’d rather concentrate on the sale of the Tesla battery in South Australia or the destruction of the Great Barrier Reef or the 29th losing Newspoll in row (must be rigged – how could Malcolm not be adored as the second son of Mary?)!
But, ffs, this is about cricket. And it’s certainly worth all the media attention at the moment.
Even if the AFL did start this week, we should ignore that to talk about this…
Some things are more important than sport.
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