Several years ago (possibly the 1997 Ashes) Ian Healy wrote an article in which he admitted faking a conversation with Shane Warne before the last ball of a day's play - you know the thing: hand over mouth, exaggerated "psst, psst, psst, giggle" - to "make the media think we had a special plan." Patrick Smith, then at the Age, took the bait and got stuck right into Healy for biting the hand that feeds him.
Disinterring Heals' idea, the current squad is again playing tricks on the cricket media. This time Greg Baum takes up the cudgels:
Australians' media 'fun' a tawdry exercise
THAT was a bit of a wrong-'un that the Australian cricket team sent down to the media in India this week. You can read about it in coach Tim Nielsen's blog on the Cricket Australia website. "The boys tried to have a bit of fun with the media day," he writes. "As I'm sure you can imagine with so many interviews you tend to get asked the same question over and over and we had a bit of a competition running to see who could work the most sporting cliches into one answer."
Here's the thing: how can you tell? It's not as if the cricketers don't talk in clichés, anyway. What's one, two or three more?
But why do cricketers speak in clichés in the first place? Why, because if they venture anywhere near the same timezone as a forthright opinion the media jump on them faster than you can say "Stakeholders Sutherland and the positive outcomes".
The rumpuses caused by unguarded opinions are the reason the grovel-terms "taken out of context" and "misquoted" exist.
Here's a solution: journalist asks question; cricketer gives thoughtful, sensible reply. Is that too much to ask?
LA CACHE QUI RIT
Baumy closes:
Without a respectful relationship between cricketers and cricket media, there is only the most censored, superficial and banal communication between Australia's cricketers and the fans they say they care about. But do they? "It's all for the fans": there's hollow cliche No. 1 for the next time they "do media".
Speaking of censorship: no doubt acting on the sage advice of Kiki & Sassy, Nielsen's comment has mysteriously disappeared from his CricAussie blog.
I can confidently say we've had our fair share of media.
[Doughnuts]
We had our last training session today before we head off to Baroda where we play the first one-day game, about a 50-minute flight from Mumbai.
Baum thinks CA is trying too hard to have "a bit of a laugh" and be all "blog-savvy, Gen-Y".
Fail.
Thanks to cache, Nielsen's offending paragraph, lovingly adorned with a salute to the Australia cricket family, can be preserved here for posterior:
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