Brettig - Whitewash to Whitewash: Australian Crickets Years of Struggle and Summer of Riches

My first cricket tour was to Malaysia in 2006 for the DLF Cup, a little-remembered triangular limited-overs series between Australia, India and the West Indies. Compared with the assignments ahead, including an ODI Champions Trophy and then a home Ashes series, this two-week sojourn in Kuala Lumpur seemed minor. But Ricky Pontings team were in full battle mode. They had recently undertaken a boot camp and were intent on charging through every opponent between that September and the fifth Ashes Test in Sydney the following January. Pontings intensity was palpable, with that of Matthew Hayden, Andrew Symonds and Glenn McGrath not far behind.

My colleague Ben Dorries got on the end of a pointed rebuke from Ponting after we both wrongly assumed that he was about to be suspended by the International Cricket Council (ICC) for a third dissent charge inside twelve months. But there were also moments when this all-conquering collective had the sorts of issues common to any team or business. It was possible to laugh at a short-lived attempt to enforce team discipline by ordering every member of the squad to do twenty push-ups whenever an error occurred in training. It was inevitable that people would gawk at the coach John Buchanan as he engaged in a long phone call to Shane Warne, who had been quoted at a book launch as saying, Im a big believer that the coach is something you travel in to get to and from the game! And it was sensible to conclude that successful teams dont always have to get along.

At the end of the tournament, I found myself drinking with Glenn Connley, then of ESPN, in the hotel all the journalists and teams were sharing. When Glenn turned in, I sat finishing my drink and watching the Australian players celebrate their win in a corner of the bar. After a few minutes I felt the sensation of my hair being tugged. Michael Hussey had sidled up to say, Come have a drink with us. Its your first tour. They were not all there McGrath, Hayden, Damien Martyn and Michael Clarke were among the absentees but I found the company enjoyable. Hussey was warm and enthusiastic, Shane Watson and Brett Lee amiably musical as they took turns strumming a guitar, and Simon Katich notably thoughtful as he pondered his ever-precarious place in the One Day International (ODI) team. Ponting was friendly enough, though he quickly became animated when I took issue with his view that Nathan Bassett, the Adelaide Crows half-back, should never have made the 2006 Australian Football Leagues All Australian selection. Later, I earnestly told him I was going to do my best to be fair and honest in writing about his team if ever fortunate enough to tour again; he very patiently accepted the kid journos words.

That tournament and its closing night were my first peek behind the facade of the Australian team, at men who were more flawed than public relations staff would have it but also more human than the headlines suggested. By the end of the summer that group had begun to break up, and the years since then have given a similar insight to many watchers of the game in Australia. Before this, stories about the Australian team largely concerned which record they would break next, but the retirements, defeats and squabbles of the past decade have given us glimpses of a more vulnerable team wrestling often with its limitations.

We have also seen Cricket Australia (CA), the nations cricket governing body, fumbling around in the dark as board and management tried to cope with the loss of a wondrous generation and the realisation that its successes had allowed the system that spawned it to be neglected. This was not true only of cricket but of all Australian sport, for the arc of targeted funding, talent identification, training and success that spanned from the early 1980s to the Sydney Olympics in 2000 did not reach as far as 2007. Crickets change of fortunes hadnt simply been a matter of Warne retiring.

Often in daily journalism it is possible to miss the wider view, as the need to form a conclusion or deliver a verdict on one days events for a deadline leads to a picture that is less than complete and even distorted. Australian cricket has had few better chroniclers than Gideon Haigh, partly because he has never restricted himself to writing only about the game. In March 2008 he was speaking alongside author and journalist David Marr at Adelaide Writers Week following the release of Haighs Asbestos House, an investigation of James Hardie Industries. Towards the end of the session, he outlined why such works had become increasingly valuable: Often these days when youre writing at book or extended essay length, what youre trying to do is disabuse people of the mistaken notions theyve picked up from daily journalism. People often come to stories with a kind of perception they already think they know what the story is, and your job is to persuade them otherwise. Writing about James Hardie, I thought I knew the story when I arrived at it, because Id gone on what newspapers had told me, but I knew enough about the way newspapers treat stories for me to realise that probably wasnt all there was to it, and I made a point of trying to forget all I knew about that story when I arrived at it.

This book attempts a similar approach to chronicling Australian cricket from 2007 to 2014. I have tried to get away from the daily accounts, spending most of my time interviewing many of the central characters from the period, from players Ricky Ponting, Michael Clarke and Shane Watson to coaching and administration staff Tim Nielsen, Mickey Arthur, Pat Howard and James Sutherland. Interviews for this work are attributed in the present says, while secondary sources and past conversations in the past said or similar. If these peoples roles in the drama were to be judged by newspaper reports alone, the verdicts might not be too inaccurate, but they would lack the details afforded by closer inspection. Cricket and sport in general are often cast in the simplistic terms of heroes and villains. The truer position is that there is a little of both in everyone. These were flawed years for the Australian game, its players and its decision-makers.

Of course, no event takes place without varying views emerging, and there are plenty of contentious episodes covered in these pages. Monkeygate, Clarkes dressing-room fracas with Katich, the Ashes losses of 2009 and 201011, Husseys last night as an Australian Test cricketer, the Mohali suspensions and the sacking of Arthur for Darren Lehmann are all subjects that have generated strong, and strongly divided, opinions. In reference to these events I will return again to Haighs musings on long-form journalism: A story like James Hardie is a very divisive story, where people are extremely entrenched in their opinions. Everyone expects you to tell their particular side of the story, so your job is to leave everyone uniformly dissatisfied and somehow in the course of writing the story to find your own way... to navigate your way through the competing versions of narrative that are being put to you.