This sort of article usually takes days to write.

People ask me whether I attend cricket matches? I say no. They ask me whether I follow it on TV. I say no because TV tires my eyes. They then ask me how I call myself a cricket follower. I say – by reading about cricket.

Apart from Knox and Haigh there are a host of other cricket writers I read in the local newspapers. Baum is one of them.

Stranger things at Edgbaston, where sneaky Steve Smith’s the arch-villain

By Malcolm Knox

August 2, 2019

When Steve Smith reached his milestone 50th and 100th runs at Edgbaston on Thursday, and when he was out after one of the great innings in Ashes history, a funny thing happened. Sections of the crowd in the Eric Hollies Stand, England cricket’s version of the MCG’s Bay 13, booed their little red-and-white hearts out.

That wasn’t the funny thing. The funny thing was that after they had booed him for six or seven seconds, thousands of those very same people joined the prolonged applause to recognise an achievement in the face of several kinds of adversity, one of which they themselves had generated.

Steve Smith was widely cheered for his incredible knock – eventually.

Fair play – you cheat! – fair play.

People are strange, when you’re a stranger. Jim Morrison nailed it. Nobody could have felt more foreign and maligned in Birmingham than Steve Smith, but then people can be foreign to themselves. Smith might himself have reflected on the apparent contradiction among the fans, if he had not been preoccupied with touching thigh pad, box, helmet, pad flap and other pad flap in the correct order. People are strange.

Among English crowds, there is a clear hierarchy in perceptions of Australian villainy and it is different from our own. When Cameron Bancroft, David Warner

and Smith appear, there is a crescendo in the volume of the booing. Bancroft, the one who actually used sandpaper on the ball in Cape Town, barely registers. That would be the same in Australia. He was the easily-led junior.But where the Australian consensus holds Warner as Doctor Evil in the fiendish plot and Smith
merely the hapless captain too weak to stop him, in England it is Smith who has the role of the arch-villain – if the strength of booing is anything to go by.

There are diverse theories for why they really pick on Smith. One is that if there’s one thing everyone hates more than a cheat, it’s a hypocrite. Warner’s persona plays up to the English caricature of the Australian sportsman: blunt, thoughtless, aggressive, crude. What you see is what you get and what they see in Warner is what they want to get from a certain type of Australian.

Smith, by contrast, is perceived as a sneak, someone who as captain professed to the highest ideals of the sacred game of cricket with one side of his face and, with the other, facilitated a conspiracy.

Warner is closer to forgiveness because he wasn’t pretending to be anything other than he was.

Another theory is that these fans view themselves as participants in the action and attack Smith because they see him as more of a threat. Warner, who has succeeded in most other places, has never made a Test century in England. Smith has been making hundreds here since 2013. The booing is in proportion to the danger each batsman poses to the English cause. Therefore the booing can be received as a back-handed compliment.

Yet another explanation is that people prey on vulnerability. Some of the crowd’s scripted songs and chants about Smith refer to his tears at his press conference in Sydney after returning from South Africa last year. (When he brought up his century at Edgbaston, the trumpeter was playing Don’t Cry for Me, Argentina.) This is the bleakest interpretation of why the booing is loudest for him. Warner’s hide is too thick to penetrate, whereas Smith has feelings, and these feelings must be exploited.

At a time when the treatment of Adam Goodes by AFL crowds is again in the spotlight, it is a complex matter to try to understand the behaviour of large gatherings. There are obvious differences between the cases. Goodes never did anything wrong – even for those who didn’t like him and rationalised their actions under some non-racist banner, he did nothing like what the cricketers did, which was blatant cheating. But there is a question common to every instance of concerted booing of skilled public performers, which is why sport invites people, gathered under a collective emblem, to act in ways that they themselves will never comprehend. Why is it that, in a ritualised occasion, they lose their capacity for independent action?

If this were a highbrow, non-booing, independently-thinking publication, now would be the time for an Emile Durkheim quote. Durkheim, as well as being patron saint of undergraduates who need to memorise quotes for exam essays, was a French sociologist who contributed greatly to our understanding of the behaviour of crowds at a time when crowd behaviour was turning to acts of unthinkable atrocity.

Durkheim said that the ability to reflect, to think for ourselves, ‘disappears to the extent that thought and action take the form of automatic habits’. The more we are encased in set rituals, the more unthinking we are.

There is no more fixed ritual than going to a sporting fixture. We pretend we are watching because we don’t know how it will turn out, but the unpredictability is contained within a rigid frame – at the cricket it’s three sessions, 90 overs, lunch at 1pm and so on – which is entirely controlled and exactly as it is meant to be.

So sport offers us a seed of the unknown inside a warm large pod of the known. We go because we know what to expect and react in unreflective, automatic ways. We boo because the person next to us is booing and that is what we came for. Then we applaud because the person next to us is applauding and that is what we came for. We boo and applaud the same performer from one moment to the next. We don’t
think. (Durkheim also said that the ability to reflect ‘awakes only when accepted habits become disorganised’. Such a disorganising event was the death of Phillip Hughes, for example, which broke automatic habits and sparked an all too brief moment of reflection).

All this esoteric stuff is just a way of saying that when they are in crowds, people can become strangers to themselves. They are not haters just because they boo Steve Smith. They were not racists just because they booed Adam Goodes. The more united they are in their crowd, the less the individuals know themselves. Sometimes they act with hate one minute and appreciation the next, and they have absolutely no idea why.

People are strange indeed. Eric Hollies, the Warwickshire spinner after whom the stand at Edgbaston is named, is best known for ruining Don Bradman’s 100-run Test batting average, bowling him for a second-ball duck in his farewell innings in 1948.

There’s an interesting story about that event, which was also notable for England captain Norman Yardley asking his players to give Bradman three cheers before his first ball. Yardley is remembered for that act of sportsmanship.

But according to his teammates, Yardley walked up to Hollies and said that three cheers ‘is all we’ll give him – then bowl him out’. Two balls later, Hollies did just that. The English crowd gave Bradman a prolonged standing ovation.

As he walked off, Hollies said, ‘Best f—ing ball I’ve bowled all season, and they’re clapping him!’