LEADING EDGE: Dear Aussies, shut up and play

It’s enough to make even South Africans shout for England. Would that both teams could lose the Ashes.

TELFORD VICE in Cape Town

Sunday Times

AUSTRALIANS are exponentially better at playing cricket than most other people on the face of the earth. So why don’t they shut the hell up and play?

David Warner calling the Ashes “war” and saying he wanted to see “hatred” on the field are the kind of rancid utterances we have come to expect from someone who might struggle to land a job flipping burgers were it not for his ability to hit cricket balls hard.

We roll our eyes at his latest passive-aggressive stupidity and get on with watching him bat. Perhaps we shouldn’t: such ugly thoughtlessness adds nothing to cricket’s rich store of wit and wisdom, and should be the subject of rigorous examination in all sections of the media — especially by controversy-averse television commentators — and in public discourse.

Warner’s apparent lust for war and hatred should be of far greater import to that section of cricket’s audience that regards itself as human and part of the wider world than what he has to say about his latest innings.

That it isn’t is a searing indictment of the priorities of cricket’s media and its audience.

Maybe a victim of Syria’s war on its own people or of Saudi Arabia’s brutal war in Yemen should share the podium with Warner at his next press conference so he knows what the effect of hatred looks like up close and personal.

At least while Warner’s out in the middle he can’t embarrass himself and the game. Or we can’t hear him doing so. Small mercies, and all that.

But what’s with Nathan Lyon, a retreaded groundsman, for goodness sake, voicing a vicious wish to “end careers”?

It’s enough to make even South Africans shout for England. Would that both teams could lose the Ashes.

Alastair Cook wouldn’t be too many Saffers’ idea of a cricketer worth celebrating — too orthodox, too posh, just too bloody English.

But there should be applause from all quarters for his response on being informed of Lyon’s cheap and nasty crap: “Nathan was the first person I saw at the ground this morning. He asked me how my kids were. We had a nice 10-minute chat. It makes me chuckle.”

Which Lyon are we to believe? The polite enquirer or the doos who sounds like the National Enquirer?

To make up your mind about that, you need a handle on Australia’s virulent tabloid culture.

Some of most bracingly perspicacious thinking and writing on cricket, and everything else, emanates from Australia. So does some of the most putrid drivel on cricket and everything else.

A case of the latter was Channel Nine’s gung-ho coverage, last November, of Faf du Plessis and the most infamous mint in history.

Yes, the story was legitimate. Yes, Du Plessis did the wrong thing and deserved to be punished.

But why did Channel Nine have one camera trained on Du Plessis and another focused on how Du Plessis handled the camera in his personal space as this circus lurched through Adelaide airport?

Because Channel Nine needed drama to move the story forward, and the thuggish behaviour of the South Africa squad’s security detail — a reporter was body-slammed and his microphone kicked across the floor — gave the network exactly that.

Perhaps this happens when a society that likes to think of itself as robust and forthright is hemmed into an ever-smaller space for real life by too much regulation for its own good.

Aussies like to see themselves as tough-talking, hard-drinking, full-on individuals who are always up for an argument that’s all the better if it gets physical.

Closer to the truth is that they wouldn’t dare not wear a seatbelt, nevermind drive a car after drinking a beer, and the way they allow themselves to be spoken to by security guards with no authority beggars a Third Worlder’s belief. Say that in Mzansi, fella, and those epaulettes will be shoved where the sun don’t shine.

The law must, of course, be obeyed. But the way Australians do so doesn’t square with the image they project.

Some Australians, that is. Many are superbly civilised. Others are Warner and Lyon.