Say it ain’t so, Mo

The kid who went into legend with his plaintive request of “Shoeless Joe” Jackson after the fix of the 1919 World Series was revealed said it all – if he actually said it. But I now know he felt.

To think that the splendid, stirring sight of Mohammad Aamer’s and Mohammad Asif’s devastating control of swing and late movement – if you were watching Aamer demolish the English top and middle order on Friday night you saw some of the best Test bowling you will ever see – could be mixed up with dodgy dealings is almost too much for me to bear.

The cricket romantic in me was lifted to the heights watching the beautiful parabolas that Aamer bowled, and his joyous wings-stretched celebrations after another victim. But allegedly bowling deliberate no-balls to allow some scuzzballs to make a few rupees: it’s heart-breaking.

As for the clear implication that Tests have been thrown, it just doesn’t bear thinking about. Who will play Pakistan again? No win against it, no five-for, no century, could ever feel quite right. The unholy alliance between sport and betting has always existed, and always will; but when a sport loses control over how it is done, a world of trouble awaits. The element of human fallibility in sport – the flipside of the giftedness of the chosen few we so love – is part of the reason why we love it so much.

How did he miss that penalty? An open goal, with 10 seconds to go and trailing by five points, how could he hit the post? The tryline beckoning, and it just fell out of his hands? We’re halfway up from our seats, and the acclamation turns to anguish – how could he have fluffed that?

At the moment we weep for cricket, as we glimpse the gaping extent of the micro-happenings in the game on which Indian bookmakers will field odds, and the massive market they serve; but it’s going to be a rotten world when every inexplicable failure of the execution of the skills in any sport brings suspicion. Don’t think that the other sports we cherish in this country couldn’t be so tainted.

But in the sickening spectacle that is unfolding around the Pakistan cricket team, there’s one thing we should not forget: if everything associated with them becomes dodgy, how do we explain their barnstorming Test wins over England 10 days ago and over Australia five weeks ago? You can deliberately lose a game, but I don’t see how can you deliberately win one: maybe that’s what cricket has to do with the Pakistanis – let them bet all they like, but only on themselves to win.

Dark and Stormy Knights Ends

So they did it: they sacked the coach. So Essendon decided not to give Matthew Knights the opportunity to prove that he could have turned out as another Mark Thompson or Alastair Clarkson – or at least, as a person regarded as a good coach. You don’t have to win a premiership to earn that regard. But now the whole unsavoury business has concluded, with an $800,000 payout and many years of understandable bitterness the reward for Matthew Knights for coaching Essendon.

The Essendon board can argue that it had to do what it has done, or risk losing revenue by not placating angry sponsors, coterie groups and supporters, and to be fair, it does have all of those stakeholders to consider, and not just its most prominent employee. But what has happened is not a good look. Essendon now has to rebuild the entire place.

Above all, the playing list should not get off easily: Essendon cannot emulate the Labor Party, and try to bundle up all of the things that are wrong with it in the public’s mind into a voodoo doll (called Matthew Knights instead of Kevin Rudd) and toss it under the bus. Quite simply, we do not really know how good a coach Matthew Knights could have been. He had a game plan that we never really got to see – because the skill levels were only rarely up to executing it.

Knights copped a lot of criticism for a high-pace, run-and-carry-based plan of attack, which was seen as being too vulnerable to the counter-attack, and flawed because of a loose defence, with too many players down back emulating Dustin Fletcher and playing off their men, without Fletcher’s 300-games-plus of reading-the-play experience to back them up. But Knights’ gameplan was never based on turnovers that occurred as early in the transition phase as they constantly were, or simply as frequent and recurring as they were. More often than not he did not have his preferred structure available, on which presumably the whole plan had been predicated and practised-with.

Only those in the inner sanctum could truly know if he had “lost” the players, who played without confidence for the last couple of months of his tenure. As in all instances of the coach walking the plank, there will be a lot of players feeling uncomfortable looking in the mirror.

Kevin Sheedy does not come out of this well, either, sniping at Knights from afar and relying on supporters’ short memories of the team playing like 2010 for much of the legend’s last few years, too – and the recruiting and list management decisions made during that sorry period. Toward the end James Hird didn’t help, either, with an ill-timed burst of romantic musing over destiny.

The board, conscious of having jumped too soon in extending Knights’ contract two years ago, now jumped too soon in the opposite direction, to appease coterie groups who seem to have focused too heavily on the coach and not the cattle. There was an unpleasant fixation toward the end on Knights’ Richmond background, and on the lack of team success he had enjoyed there, as if 279 games at the elite level did not give the guy a deep understanding of football.

All I know as an outside observer is that while Essendon’s best in 2008-2010 was good enough to beat anyone, it was only rarely on display, and the usual sight was of a physically soft team making constant basic mistakes, its application falling away with every opposition goal and the unceasing scoreboard punishment that resulted sapping the team of all self-belief.

If so it is a poor effort to stay in their shells, thinking, “it’s not my fault, really it isn’t, this guy can’t get the best out of me.” Next year, no matter who is sitting in the box, how about trying to get the best out of yourself?

Rugby’s reputation bleeds in ‘Bloodgate’

I don’t know if you’ve been following this story from the UK, but it’s an intriguing exposé of the pressure that big-time sport can exert, both on those who are part of the action and those who are support players.

The facts are as follows: on April 12 2009, in a Heineken Cup (European Cup) rugby union quarter-final, Tom Williams, a player from UK club Harlequins took a fake-blood capsule on to the ground, and late in the game, bit the capsule and came off with a purported mouth injury. His place was taken by a specialist kicker, fly-half Nick Evans, who had himself been substituted earlier, and could only come back on as a temporary replacement in the case of a blood-rule substitution. Evans took a late field-goal attempt, which missed.

The use of a fake blood capsule was initiated by Dean Richards, then the Harlequins director of rugby, and it was given to Williams by the then physiotherapist, Steph Brennan. Williams was taken down into the Harlequins rooms for treatment: Leinster’s club doctor, who witnessed the player come off spitting “blood”, smelled a rat, and attempted to follow the player into the Harlequins rooms, but was not allowed to do so. (On Sky Sports’ cameras, Williams was seen winking at his team-mates as he was replaced, but this was not broadcast.) Leinster complained to the touch-judge and the referee.

Meanwhile, down in the rooms, the Harlequins club doctor, Wendy Chapman, cut the player’s mouth, to give the injury a faked, post-dated “cause.” Leinster won the game 6-5 and went on to win the Heineken Cup.

In the weeks after the game last year the European Rugby Cup (ERC) launched an official investigation, interviewing match officials and players from both teams, and reviewing footage. In July 2009, Williams was suspended for 12 months, while Richards, Brennan and Chapman were cleared of any wrongdoing.

In August 2009, the Daily Telegraph revealed the fact that Williams was cut by the club doctor after he had come off – at his own instigation and insistence. After that news Richards and Brennan – despite not knowing about the post-dated cutting and not being present when it was done – were given bans of three and two years respectively. The final act in the sordid story is now being played out in a hearing of the UK General Medical Council into Dr. Chapman’s conduct (she has been suspended without pay since the incident.)

Dr Chapman faces being struck off the medical register for what she did: she had no knowledge of the fact that the tactical substitution of Evans could have helped Harlequins win the game. The doctor has testified that she succumbed to “enormous pressure”, and that she cannot explain why she did so. (She has admitted that she failed to tell the ERC disciplinary hearing in 2009 that she had caused Williams’ lip injury.)

It is a classic case of someone getting caught up in the moment of big-time sport and making a bad decision, but potentially facing the loss of her livelihood for doing so.

It’s a fascinating case, made more interesting by the fact that Richards is back working in rugby as a consultant and Williams had his 12-month ban reduced to four months on appeal: the doctor could end up paying the highest price of them all.

No-one has yet adequately explained what Harlequins was thinking in cheating in this way: conveniently, the club now says the matter is all behind it, and it has “moved on.” Of course it has – but Dr. Chapman is having a touch more trouble doing so.

Altitude absolves attitude

Once again the Wallabies have lived up to their hoodoo of not winning at altitude in South Africa, squandering a sparkling start, plenty of ball and strong field position to go down to the Springboks in Pretoria at the weekend.

Much was made prior to the game of the dearth of Australian success on the high veld in South Africa, in that it had not won there since 1963 (which, of course, is better than it looks, given that South Africa was out of world rugby for 21 of those years.) But the Wallabies and their brains trust would not want to fall back on the altitude as an excuse, because this was a game that was there for the taking.

Losing the second half 20–3 does point to an altitude fade-out, but I for one am glad to hear Rocky Elsom cursing the set-piece play, in particular the line-out, as the reason for the disappointing loss – which could have ended the hoodoo talk. The fact of the matter is that in the Super 12/14 era, the players encounter the effects of altitude year after year, and should know the drill by now.

No-one finds it remarkable that, earlier this year, the Reds won in Bloemfontein and Jo’burg, and the Force won in Jo’burg. The Waratahs won in Jo’burg and Bloemfontein in 2009, and the Brumbies won in Bloemfontein – for the simple reason that the Australian teams have usually been better than the Lions and the Cheetahs.

So the Australian players have all played in winning teams at altitude in South Africa – just not against South Africa. Maybe that requires a slight adjustment in the spelling, from ‘altitude’ to ‘attitude.’ That’s what the New Zealanders seem to do.