Leading Edge: Bloody likeable Australians

Sunday Times - February 10, 2014

TELFORD VICE, Johannesburg

Bloody Australians. They make themselves so difficult to dislike. And that makes them hard to beat. If they were more like, say, the miserable Poms the rest of us would win more games against them.

Instead, Aussies are as unlike KP and his fellow sorry arses as it is possible to be. They have plenty of swagger but not much snottiness, more ego than arrogance, and no problem with your team being better than theirs - as long as yours gets out there and proves it.

They talk themselves up so high their noses should bleed continuously. But they expect you to, too. And they play a game worth watching and mulling over for days after stumps have been drawn.

They don’t do boring and they wouldn’t know a loss of confidence if it smacked them in the face with Narayanaswami Srinivasan’s toupee. What’s not to like?

This enemy is for fraternising with, as a generation of SA cricket writers discovered in 2000 when some of their Aussie counterparts pitched up to cover the hearings that formed part of the investigation into Hansie Cronje’s extracurricular activities.

“No,” one of them, in particular, would boom every time one of us tried to pay a restaurant bill. Then he would throw his company credit card onto the table like the ace of spades itself, and pronounce with stentorian authority: “This one pays in Murdochs.” As in Rupert Murdoch, the owner of his newspaper group.

If we protested too much, he would haul himself up to his full six-foot-plenty, set his shoulders, and twitch a moustache that made Mitchell Johnson’s look like a princess’ eyebrow by comparison.

Fine, then. And thank you, Mr Murdoch.

Australians seem to understand cricket as a game before and after they understand it as anything else. They play that game as if they were fighting a war. But no-one dies and the truce is announced with the bump of beer bottles on the opposition’s dressingroom door.

They are also endearingly naive. Few, for instance, can get their heads around SA’s transformation issues: “Just pick ya best XI, mate, whatever colour they are, and get the hell on with it.”

Also fine. But how do we know who our best XI are, given our history and its legacy, not to mention SA’s urban geography - it’s a long, complicated taxi ride from Soweto to net practice at the Wanderers, for instance - and the fact that there are provincial selectors out there who think cricket has no need to transform any more than soccer? Our best cricket XI could be kicking a ball around a dusty football pitch in Garankuwa as we speak.

And now the Australians are back, crammed from foot to forehead with swagger and ego. Already they have punched a hole into the South Africans’ heads - what else is the claim from the SA camp that they are taking no notice of all the talk than confirmation that they, in fact, are? - and already the game has begun before it actually begins in Centurion on Wednesday.

There is no-one South Africans like to see their team beating more than the Aussies, perhaps because they haven’t experienced that happening at home since 1970.

Perhaps, too, because of the Aussie envy that many South Africans have secreted into their souls. If we can beat them, maybe we won’t want to like them quite so much.