…You’re dismissed!
By our senior cricket writer
Oh, no! Not you too, Greg Baum? We thought you were much better than this!
The Sun-Herald‘s cricket writer this morning has perpetuated a myth started years ago by then The Courier-Mail editor Christopher “Let’s show quality journalism the” Dore, namely that Stuart Broad did something really, really naughty; something totally against the spirit of the game of true gentlefolk.
As you can see from our image at top, Baum refers to an incident during the 2013 northern Ashes when Broad brought shame to the game – and everlasting damnation on his head – when he refused to do the decent thing and walk after he had clearly nicked a ball to first slip.
We could give Baum the benefit of the doubt and agree that the “Australia” Broad had infuriated were the Australian players – who admittedly on the day at Trent Bridge were livid in their hypocrisy – but we’ll show him no quarter and suspect he’s referring to the Australian public in general.
Here are the facts. In the following Ashes Down Under later that year, Christopher Dore used two pages of his paper to make an absolute fool of himself – long before doing the same with ladies at functions – by introducing a childish, ill-thought-out strategy of refusing to name Broad in the paper’s articles, banning him to the titles of “phantom menace” and refusing to name the England medium pacer.
And why? Because earlier in 2013, Broad had refused to walk after nicking a ball straight to first slip, according to Dore. Yet Broad had done no such thing; he edged behind to the keeper, and the ball struck the keeper’s gloves before ricocheting to slip.
In essence, if Dore’s aim was to show his staff journalists his basic rule – never let the facts spoil a good story – then he achieved that purpose. What leadership! Of course, his childish outrage was made worse in that Broad’s incident came after the introduction of DRS and it wasn’t Broad’s fault that the Aussies had exhausted their reviews, a problem they haven’t quite fixed yet. Broad was perfectly in his rights to leave the decision on the Aussies’ appeal in the hands of the umpire, who we must assume saw the deflection off the gloves but not Broad’s bat.
Aside: In the era of DRS, the honourable walk-off has made a bit of a comeback. Maybe Broad would have walked if the Aussies had a review in hand, just like Steve Smith did the honorable thing the other night and was almost off the ground before the umpire’s finger was raised, knowing that a DRS review would have shown he clearly gloved the ball behind.
The bottomline once more: Not walking and letting the umpire decide is a perfectly honourable thing to do. Was before DRS if the truth be known. Is now. All Test sides have players who let the umpire decide their fate. Adam Gilchrist might have been a walker – although The Bug once wrote of a scenario where he might have not adopted the practice if the Ashes were on the line – and there have been plenty of players who have been castled who have waited for the umpire to decide if perhaps a sudden gust of wind might just have been responsible for all three stumps lying scattered on the ground.
Dore’s decision back in the 2013 to pick on Broad – and to get the basic facts so horribly wrong – did little more than fire Broad up to a man-of-the-match performance at the Gabba. His two-page piece of non-journalism was almost as embarrassing as the essay he wrote later in defence of the non-naming piece of mindless infantile malarkey.
Australia was not infuriated back in early 2013. Truth be know, the Gabba crowd largely wasn’t infuriated later that year. Truth be further known, the small rent-a-crowd provided with Courier promo signs at the Gabba was probably not infuriated either.
It’s sad to see some one of Baum’s experience and seniority giving oxygen to that particular slice of Newscorpse childish stupidity.
Don Gordon-Brown
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