Jester reacts to...

[timmy]

In today's post, Jester Reacts To the drama within Australian cricket this week.

For those of you who aren't aware, four players got dropped from the team ahead of the 3rd Test in India for not doing their homework. One made the excuse that his wife was pregnant.

Jester, your thoughts?

[thejester]

I can understand why Watson struggled coming up with things he adds to the team given he's an all-rounder who can't bowl, is currently averaging 36 with the bat, and is openly agitating to have one of his teammates dropped. That he has maintained his place in the team to this point says it all, really - Shield cricket is weak at the moment, in part because Cricket Australia are enormous morons, and no one was able to force him out. The suspensions were absolutely justifiable and should be seen as a punishment for stupidity, if nothing else - if you can't be bothered pitching to the coach as to why you should be in the team, you shouldn't be in the team.

[Stofsk]

Can someone explain this controversy to me as someone who doesn't understand cricket and all its various intricacies and subtle nuance

[Flagg]

I'm convinced that cricket doesn't actually exist and is in fact a conspiracy made up by comedians.

[thejester]

Can someone explain this controversy to me as someone who doesn't understand cricket and all its various intricacies and subtle nuance

Every player in the squad was asked by the coach to either write an explanation or present to him about what they do/could bring to team and how that would help them win the next match/the series/the Ashes. The deadline expired and four of them hadn't done it. They were suspended for one game, and the vice-captain cracked it and went home to see his first baby get born. The end.

[Stofsk]

I don't know who I should be rooting for in this confrontation

[timmy]

if you can't be bothered pitching to the coach as to why you should be in the team, you shouldn't be in the team.

This. Also, Triple J's take on it yesterday morning was pretty funny.

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[Stofsk]

I guess I don't know enough about the context to really come down on one side or the other. Because on the face of it, it does sound silly to give players homework about something like this. But on the other hand, Jester has a point that if you can't tell your coach why you're valuable and should be retained, well you're basically shooting yourself in the foot if you don't.

[thejester]

Saying 'Test cricketer gets suspended for not doing homework' makes it sound laughable but the the team leadership has leaked to journos that it's as much about the team's general malaise as it is this particular incident. More broadly I think it reflects two things: what I said above, that cricket right now (like rugby, I guess) just does not have the talent available to it that it did a generation ago, and that cricket (again like rugby) is at least a decade behind other major sports in how it runs teams off the field. Which in turn goes back to what we were talking about in the hockey thread: the clash of cultures between the jockocracy and the professionals in modern sport. Cricket, moreso than any other major sport in Australia, is dominated by white anglo males who stick by certain received wisdoms and scoff at any alternatives - professionalism off the field is less important than 'going to war for the baggy green'. I don't think it's any surprise that Mickey Arthur, with a background in transforming the South African side into a machine, got the job as coach, and I don't think it's any surprise he's encountering resistance in trying to change things.

And on that note, consider these two columns from Gideon Haigh: here and here. Worth reading cause it's Gideon Haigh, but also cause they continue to ring depressingly true two years on and a comprehensive review later.

[timmy]

THIS WEEK JESTER REACTS TO

Last week in Australian Federal politics. Because I haven't seen any other discussion on it.

[F.J. Prefect, Esq]

Jesus

H

Christ

[Flagg]

Jesus

H

Christ

Yes?

[Stofsk]

The two best things to come out of last week's debacle was 'Chicken Kev' and 'Kevin Fried Chicken'

That and all the fucking whips getting fired.

[Gands]

Sam summed it up best as "Labor can't even have a debacle correctly."

[timmy]

Anders stole a similar quote:

It just goes to show they shouldn't have dumped Thompson. At least he could organise a root in a whore house.

But yes, props.

[Stofsk]

The take-home thing about last week is Labor's so dysfunctional that I can't see them recovering in time for the election in 6 months. The fucking party whips went against the leader. Which is just... that more than anything says a lot about Federal Labor.

I mean I've said on record that the decision to knife Rudd when he was a sitting PM was a ruinous decision, idiotic and politically inept, and perhaps the most unforgivable bit about it was that the public were left out of the loop and weren't even an afterthought. But it's done and he isn't coming back, and a large part of that is because he doesn't have it where it counts when things get bad. An article I read about this fiasco pointed out how none of this would even be an issue if Rudd had had the balls to call for a double dissolution back in '09/2010 over the ETS issue. If he had done that, I strongly believe he'd be Prime Minister to this day and facing a coalition that was in disarray. But he didn't, and instead he's been quietly torpedoing his own party out of spite and fueling the speculation on and off for the last few years, and I think it finally culminated last week when he insincerely claimed he had no desire to challenge the leadership. Yeah, right. You just didn't have the numbers buddy. But you know what, even if you don't have the numbers if you feel so strongly about it maybe you should have challenged anyway, and point out how the polling data is way worse for Gillard than it was for him back in 2010. And maybe even if you failed you wouldn't have left your surpporters out to hang and dry. But no, instead go in front of the media 10 mins before the caucus and claim with a straight face that you have no intention of nominating yourself or that you promised after the last time that you wouldn't, when everyone knows you had been counting heads all afternoon.

[timmy]

Well put. I don't know if Jester's going to have much to add to that.

[Phantasee]

We may face something similar in our provincial legislature. Caucus hasn't revolted, and I think agitators have been given a stern talking to. We still have a leadership review in the fall per our party constitution, which requires a majority of delegates, but really anything less than 77% (last leader's numbers) is going to be fatal.

[thejester]

Shuffling deck chairs on the Titanic comes to mind. Rudd is clearly poisonous to a large part of the party, and that's not factional - as an actual manager he was clearly terrible. He polls slightly better - so what? Slavish adherence to polling is a short-term strategy, as the ALP learned in 2010. They're going to lose in September, the question is simply by how much and the extent to which the party can be shaped into a viable alternative to the Coalition going forward.

Taking a step back from punditry, I reckon the Gillard government will be a fascinating case study in 10-15 years. The political media, and particularly the print media, is increasingly written by 'insiders' for 'insiders', with a significant chunk of that in turn being dominated by an editorial team with a clear interest in returning the Coalition to power. While it's naive to suggest that the leadership issue is solely a concoction of the press, they pretty clearly form a massive part of the feedback loop. Hence the 'pressure' that forces Simon Crean to call for a spill...which no-one contested. Is it any surprise that this happens when the political class is increasingly dominated by professionals rather than those who have gravitated to the outside? Think about the people running the student union at uni...they are now who are in charge of political parties. They're pretty clearly not interested in policy so much as the game, and the media feeds off that. It's pretty friggin depressing all up, cause for all the shambolic politic of the current government, I suspect their legacy will be considerably more concrete and long lasting than that of the upcoming Abbott government.

[Questor]

Hey Stofsk, I followed most of that, but what's a double dissolution? I thought dissolution was when you called for new elections.

[weemadando]

Double dissolution is dissolving both houses of Parliament, House of Representatives and the Senate. It's pretty much the biggest move on the block, but can be utterly destructive to the party who calls it if the public isn't convinced it was worthwhile.

[Questor]

Double dissolution is dissolving both houses of Parliament, House of Representatives and the Senate. It's pretty much the biggest move on the block, but can be utterly destructive to the party who calls it if the public isn't convinced it was worthwhile.

Oh...

I guess I should have done better research. I just kind of assumed that those both happened at the same time normally. Is it more normal for them to be separate?

I'm not finding any information on wiki at the moment, and am too caught up in the book I'm reading to expend any real effort trying to find a reliable guide loose on the internet, so I'm just going to ask.

[weemadando]

House of Reps is a 3 year cycle but can be dissolved early. Senate is two separate fixed six year cycles (so every 3 years) but Senate elections can be up to a year before the current Senate expires so they try and work the two houses in together.

[timmy]

Your commentary on the media cycle is compelling Jester, and takes me back to discussions on media ethics when I was still a student. The fallout from the proposed media laws had a hand in kicking off this b-grade comedy hour, with the very sector in question pushing hard. This influence of events runs deep against the fundamentals of journalism and illustrates the point, but the broader public would have no way of telling - they're getting their information from this source.

In summary, the government/media relationship in Australia is every bit as toxic as in America, and there aren't enough Margot Kingstons to even begin to bring it to account.

[Oxymoron]

So, are you saying that the Fourth Power is taking over ?