Crossing the Line: How Australian Cricket Lost Its Way

by Gideon Haigh

‘I'm not proud of what's happened. Y’know, it's not within the spirit of the game.’ Steve Smith was not to know it at Cape Town on 24 March 2018, but he was addressing his last press conference as captain of the Australian cricket team. By the next day morning he would be swept from office by a tsunami of public indignation involving even the prime minister.

In a unique admission, Smith confessed to condoning a policy of sandpapering the cricket ball in a Test against South Africa. He, the instigator David Warner and their agent Cameron Bancroft returned home to disgrace and to lengthy bans. The crisis plunged Australian cricket into a bout of unprecedented soul searching, with Cricket Australia yielding to demands for reviews of the cricket team and of itself to restore confidence in their ‘culture’.

In Crossing the Line, Gideon Haigh conducts his own cultural review – ‘less official and far cheaper but genuinely independent’. Studying the cricket team across a decade of radical change, he finds an accident waiting to happen, and a system struggling to cope with self-created challenges, on the field and in the boardroom. And he wonders: is there even any longer a spirit of the game to be within? Crossing the Line is the first instalment in Slattery Media Group’s Sports Shorts collection, a new series of sports essays published as small-format books. Sports Shorts has been created as a home for ambitious, lively and engaging writing and journalism on sport—work of a scale and scope not suited to the confines of day-to-day journalism. Every instalment will illuminate or entertain, all the while fitting into your back pocket on the way to the game.

Genres: Nonfiction, Sports

133 pages, Kindle Edition

First published October 4, 2018

About the author

Gideon Clifford Jeffrey Davidson Haigh (born 29 December 1965) is an English-born Australian journalist, who writes about sport (especially cricket) and business. He was born in London, raised in Geelong, and now lives in Melbourne.

Haigh began his career as a journalist, writing on business for The Age newspaper from 1984 to 1992 and for The Australian from 1993 to 1995. He has since contributed to over 70 newspapers and magazines,[2] both on business topics as well as on sport, mostly cricket. He wrote regularly for The Guardian during the 2006-07 Ashes series and has featured also in The Times and the Financial Times.

Haigh has authored 19 books and edited seven more. Of those on a cricketing theme, his historical works includes The Cricket War and Summer Game, his biographies The Big Ship (of Warwick Armstrong) and Mystery Spinner (of Jack Iverson), the latter pronounced The Cricket Society's "Book of the Year", short-listed for the William Hill Sports Book of the Year and dubbed "a classic" by The Sunday Times;[3] anthologies of his writings Ashes 2005 and Game for Anything, as well as Many a Slip, the humorous diary of a club cricket season, and The Vincibles, his story of the South Yarra Cricket Club, of which he is life member and perennate vice-president and for whose newsletter he has written about cricket the longest. He has also published several books on business-related topics, such as The Battle for BHP, Asbestos House (which dilates the James Hardie asbestos controversy) and Bad Company, an examination of the CEO phenomenon. He mostly publishes with Aurum Press.

Haigh was appointed editor of the Wisden Cricketers' Almanack Australia for 1999–2000 and 2000–01. Since March 2006, he has been a regular panellist on the ABC television sports panel show Offsiders. He was also a regular co-host on The Conversation Hour with Jon Faine on 774 ABC Melbourne until near the end of 2006.

Haigh has been known to be critical of what he regards as the deification of Sir Donald Bradman and "the cynical exploitation of his name by the mediocre and the greedy".[4] He did so in a September 1998 article in Wisden Cricket Monthly, entitled "Sir Donald Brandname". Haigh has been critical of Bradman's biographer Roland Perry, writing in The Australian that Perry's biography was guilty of "glossing over or ignoring anything to Bradman's discredit".[4]

Haigh won the John Curtin Prize for Journalism in the Victorian Premier's Literary Awards in 2006[5] for his essay "Information Idol: How Google is making us stupid",[6] which was published in The Monthly magazine. He asserted that the quality of discourse could suffer as a source of information's worth is judged by Google according to its previous degree of exposure to the status quo. He believes the pool of information available to those using Google as their sole avenue of inquiry is inevitably limited and possibly compromised due to covert commercial influences.

He blogged on the 2009 Ashes series for The Wisden Cricketer.[7]

On 24 October 2012 he addressed the tenth Bradman Oration in Melbourne.

Reviews

[Venky · Rating 4 out of 5]

On the 24th of March 2018, at Cape Town’s Newlands Stadium, the Australian cricketers were being run ragged by the hosts. Clueless against the resoluteness of Aiden Markram and the nonchalance of A B De Villiers, shoulders began to sag and heads to bend. The series was already on a knife edge, and not just metaphorically. With a tantalizing scorecard of 1-1, tensions ran riot as passion stepped over all unwritten thresholds of tolerance. David Warner, in one of the previous Tests had unabashedly and unashamedly justified his nickname of “The Bull” by first celebrating in a puerile fashion after running out A B De Villiers in a moment of magical brilliance, before making such reveling seem the stuff of Montessori kids by getting into an ugly verbal barrage with Quinton De Kock.

But, in what seems to be a fate strictly reserved for the ides of March and not for the 24th, Cameron Bancroft at exactly 3.00 P.M resorted to an act that sent Australian cricket into a veritable tailspin. Cameron Bancroft, like a deer caught in the glare of a pair of powerful headlights, was caught by television cameras trying to rough up one side of the ball with sandpaper to make it swing. Acrimony, uproar, outrage, and investigations later, Captain Steve Smith and vice-captain David Warner were found to be involved and all three received unprecedented sanctions from Cricket Australia.

In the wake of this scandal, Gideon Haigh, arguably the greatest living cricket writer plying his wares today, in his new book “Crossing the Line”, proceeds to undertakes, what he terms his own ‘cultural review’, describing his outcome as “less official and far cheaper, but genuinely independent.” The book is the result of more than 50 interviews with people who have had a significant association with the game in myriad capacities. The interviewed include players, coaches and officials. However, no names are explicitly offered as the said interviews were conducted abiding to the conditions of confidentiality.

Mr. Haigh blows the lid open to uncover a systemic malaise plaguing Australian cricket, that has at its crux and core, the intransigence, insouciance and incoherence of an administration with blinkers firmly in place, that prevents them from looking beyond the narrow parameters of “High Performance.” The immense pressure accompanying the players and forcing them to adopt “The Australian Way” of playing cricket, was a disaster waiting to explode. As Mr. Haigh illustrates, “fifteen years earlier, Lehmann had been involved in an incident in a one-day international against Sri Lanka, where he responded to dismissal with a notorious racial expletive: Black cunts.” There is a gradation to every peak. “Crossing the Line originates in a simpler idea, that nobody goes to sleep honest and wakes up a cheat. The drift to corruption occurs little by little, influenced by example, precedent, incentive and human material, and after a time may need a third party to identify it as such.”

Mr. Haigh identifies two forces – endogenous and exogenous as being responsible for ending Australian cricket’s golden cycle of unopposed dominance. The endogenous force involved the element of attrition. The former was natural attrition. “In the 2006-7 Ashes, Waugh’s successor Ponting led a team of the talents: Warne, McGrath, Gilchrist, Langer, Martyn, Hussey, Clarke, Matthew Hayden and Andrew Symonds. In the 2009 Ashes, Ponting would lead, of these, only Hussey and Clarke. The volatility of results during that climacteric cost the number one Test ranking that Australia had enjoyed officially for more than six years and unofficially far longer.”
The exogenous factor took the form of finance. “India’s embrace of T20, and the world’s. In March 2007, Australia completed an ODI World Cup threepeat without losing a match; India was despatched early, expensively, dismally. The next time Australia stepped on the cricket field, in September, it was beaten by Zimbabwe at Newlands, in its first game of the inaugural World T20, while India stormed to the title. Traditionally averse to the shortest format of the game, the Board of Control for Cricket in India experienced a Damascene illumination.”

The method adopted to groom and brood young cricketers at the domestic level also led to a shambolic strategy. The Argus Review of 2011 in the wake of the debacle at home ushered in a slew of changes that made the management phrase “top-heavy” read virtuous. Pat Howard came in as a high performance manager – a “sole point of accountability” for the national team’s results which led to the inception of a system that revolved around the national academy. The merits of ‘investing’ in ‘youth’ was blown out of all proportion courtesy, the ‘talent manager’ in the form of the egregious Greg Chappell.

As Mr. Haigh illustrates, Chappell was a firm believer in the motto of catching them young and watching them grow. “Talent is like fruit,” he would say. “If you don’t pick it when it’s ripe, it’s likely to go off.” Cricket’s outstanding recent talents—Warne, Waugh, Ponting, McGrath, Brian Lara, Sachin Tendulkar—had all been blooded early at international level. The disappointments—Chappell spoke of “the Graeme Hick factor”—were those who had stagnated in first-class cricket, falling into bad habits. The exceptions—players such as Adam Gilchrist and Mike Hussey, who had broken through later—he deemed mistakes, players who “probably should have been picked earlier.” But this very policy of incubating the youth also in sheer contradistinction never batted an eyelid before sacrificing that very youth as was illustrated in the treatment of Cameron Bancroft. Made a scapegoat for the actions of his belligerent and bull-headed (no pun intended vice-captain), the 25-year-old was in the aftermath of Sandpaper Gate ‘thrown under the bus’.

This brainchild resulted in the Futures League which bungled the careers of many talented yet ‘older’ players. Classic examples being Mark Cosgrove and Clint Mackay. In the Argus’ review “the words “accountable” or “accountability” would appear 43 times, and the phrase “high performance” 28 times, often in close proximity (“In high-performance organisations, measurement and accountability are a way of life and all leaders in the organisation must learn to link those measurements to high-performance outcomes”).

Mr. Haigh also dwells on the infamous “Home-work gate which in 2013 scalped the then Australian Coach Mickey Arthur. The pitiful way to defend the sacking as measure to inculcate an ‘Australian way’ to play cricket signified a desperation rather than a dedication on the part of the functionaries of Cricket Australia.

Crowning all these embarrassment (prior to Sandpaper Gate) was the clash between the Australian cricketers and the administration over player pay. The autocratic, derisive and high handed manner in which Cricket Australia approached the dispute left a lot to be desired.

In “Crossing The Line”, which surprisingly is a very small book, Mr. Haigh does an admirable job of dissecting the frailties and foibles of a cricket administration operating upon the planks of rigidity and laxity. This he does with neither bias nor prejudice.

[foolscap · Rating 3 out of 5]

I love cricket, and I would spend the rest of my life boo-ing the Australian cricket team, so this seemed like a book that would feed me some perspective, in the least. However, as much as I love Gideon Haigh and find his writing otherwise to be lyrical, Crossing the Line sorely lacked any passionate argument. There are quips, flashes of brilliance, and a string of incidents that can hook you in but even so, it feels patchy and dry. It was an effort to complete reading this book, given that each page was just littered with names from CA. I honestly wished it was structured and heavily edited to make it readable, not alienate someone from not wanting to know more about cricket.

[Faraaz · Rating 4 out of 5]

No one writes like Haigh on cricket

[Peter · Rating 4 out of 5]

As a long time cricket lover and ardent supporter of the baggy green, this was a sad - but not surprising - read. Haigh makes clear that the failings in South Africa were no more than an outward expression of a culture that had soured long before. Three players were punished, and rightly, but complicit is a cricket administration that encouraged aggressive behaviour.

This really is an indictment of the ACB. In fact much of what ails Australian cricket today can be sheeted home to decisions made years ago - the preference given to young players, the watering down of domestic competitions, the opportunistic exploitation of commercial possibilities, a rampant bureaucracy, and general arrogance and dysfunction.

I think most of us who follow Australian cricket closely have seen signs of this over the years. To see it in print, and from the mouths close to or within the game, is plain disheartening nonetheless.

You hope change is on the way, and the errors identified here rectified. Who has that much faith in even a revamped ACB? In any case, it will take years to get it right off the field - on the field I expect we’ll bounce back, as always we do (if only briefly).

Haigh is probably the best cricket writer going around. He has such a clear, intelligent and distinctive style that he is unmistakable. It’s hard to disagree with his analysis or his conclusions.

Great book written at the right time.

[Ernest · Rating 4 out of 5]

On 24 March 2018, sandpaper was applied to a ball in a cricket test match between Australia and South Africa with Australia in breach of rules (laws) and, according to many, the spirit of the game. This incident transcended a mere breach of sporting rules. Players and those in leadership positions, including the captain and coach, were sanctioned outside the rules of the game, including some of them loosing their position and jobs. The incident made front page news around the world, drew in political leaders, and generated much discussion and debate from those who would not consider themselves normally interested in cricket.

In this book, Haigh conducts his own examination of what he calls his own less official and far cheaper but genuinely independent cultural review of how things reached that point within cricket in Australia. He interviewed 50 people associated with Australian cricket (including players, coaches, officials, and observers) who agreed to speak on condition of anonymity. What results is an almost forensic yet still very readable analysis of not just how this point was reached but of some of the aftermath. Dedicated followers of cricket in Australia may already know many of the details, but there is much to glean even for the casual fan (including incidents within recent lived experience, some of which played out publicly in the media) and of the philosophies of some key protagonists of Australian cricket and some of those results.

Before this book, Haigh was already known as one of the sharpest and most insightful current cricket writers. Whether or not one agrees with his conclusions, it is to the public’s benefit that this book has been written.

[Sairam Krishnan · Rating 4 out of 5]

I thought this was a different book, more about the players and the culture that led to Sandpapergate.

But Haigh's book actually delves deeper, and goes back to the rot in Cricket Australia that set in motion the decade-long decline that culminated in Cape Town. And to a cricket fan from abroad, this is annoying to read because of two reasons: One, the Australian domestic system was the toast of the world in the late 90s and early 2000s, producing an assembly line of battle-hardened players who immediately made a mark in international cricket. The Hussey brothers, Michael Bevan, Ryan Harris, Simon Katich, Cam White (leading that bloody good Victorian side), and so on. The loss of that system must rankle. And two, it was a great model, and everyone was coming around to that idea. In India certainly, the rumblings for a tighter, tougher domestic competition took all its cues from the Shield. That Cricket Australia took it apart when other countries were just about realising that they needed to learn from it is the bigger tragedy here.

[Joe · Rating 4 out of 5]

Gideon Haigh’s review of Cricket Australia (CA), “Crossing the Line”, How Australian cricket lost its way, delves well beyond the ball tampering in South Africa, and the players who were involved – Bancroft, Smith & Warner.

The on-field shenanigans were only the most visible evidence of problems with Australian cricket, especially off the field. The CA board has many questions to answer, and although some key members of the board have now left (Peever in particular), to paraphrase Paul Keating (who borrowed it from another politician) – “In the race of life, always back self-interest - at least you know it's trying.”
Did Warner / Smith / Bancroft cross the line? Were they encouraged / supported to do so? Where is the line anyway?

CA’s treatment of the players during the pay dispute was appalling.

Follow the money & you’ll find some answers!

[Peter Langston · Rating 4 out of 5]

Really an extended essay on the changes in CA structure and outcomes since the Argus Review in 2011, Haigh presents a damning indictment on the corporate structure that is Cricket Australia. Self-serving and consumed with corporate maxims like building and maintaining a brand and maximising financial returns, the author points out that it has lost the plot. His conjecture is that CA needs to take more of the share of responsibility that led to Sandpapergate and he makes a compelling argument. Somewhere along the way, the love for the game and upholding the responsibility for being custodians of the spirit of the game, has been abandoned as the Australian brand became increasingly air-brushed and marketed by an administration bloated by appointees with meaningless job titles and very little knowledge of the game.

[Heather · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5. I’ve said it before, I’ll always enjoy a book that critiques Australian cricket 😂 This was interesting from that perspective as well as a SportsBiz angle, some of the ins and outs - governance reviews, player power, commercialisation of the game, equity across men’s and women’s elite teams - were very interesting. Haigh’s writing as always helped paint the pictures, his candor and not being afraid to state his opinion was appreciated.

[Amanda · Rating 4 out of 5]

Interesting deep dive into the background of the set up of the modern game in Australia the business decisions and the effect on the players. To me it read somewhat sympathetic more so to the players. At times the sentences seemed clunky and hard to digest with some unusual vocabulary choices, maybe not so easy to get into for a general audience. The structure was also unusual but also seemed to lack a definite conclusion

[Jay Dwight · Rating 4 out of 5]

Fascinating read, detailing the inner workings of Australian Cricket, and how the running of the sport more in line with business and via use of management consultants has led to a deterioration in on field performance.

Lots of learnings, both from a cricket and a business perspective, to be gained from this one.

[Mary Smith · Rating 4 out of 5]

A thorough examination of the state of cricket in Australia, this book looks at the administration of the game since the Argus review and finds it severely lacking. It is no wonder that the game has lost its way when the people in charge have little or no idea about it.

[Yuvi Panda · Rating 4 out of 5]

Good quick read

Was published before the longstaff review completed, so is missing a lot of drama that has happened since. Damns general hyper capitalist corporate management culture that fucks everything it touches for short term gain.

[Chris · Rating 3 out of 5]

Good insight into the corporatisation of Cricket Australia and the problems this has created with Australian Cricket and its cricketers. Gideon Haig is my favourite cricket writer, but this work seemed a little rushed and suffered as a consequence.

[Mayur Patil · Rating 3 out of 5]

I had read this authors writing in past about cricket. He seems knowledgable and passionate about Cricket. In this books, he gave information on how management of CA actually works and how it influenced the 2018 incident.
Good information.

[Duncan G Aldridge · Rating 5 out of 5]

A really thought-provoking take on the state of Australian cricket after the events of the past year.

Would be interested to read more about what he feels should be done.

[Stuart Robinson · Rating 5 out of 5]

Brilliant, almost forensic insight into the culture allowed to develop in Australian cricket that essentially allowed players to develop an arrogance and win at all costs.

[Andrew Walton · Rating 5 out of 5]

Haigh's rapid investigation and report from 50 willing participants prising open the real issues of how things have gone off track.

[Rishi · Rating 4 out of 5]

I came across Gideon Haigh on Channel 7 discussion panel discussing the recently concluded India tour of Australia 2018-2019. India, for the first time ever, won the test series Down Under. He was passionately outlining the robust domestic structure player has to go through in India to make the national team. In comparison, he lamented, Australia domestic structure, once robust, has been wrecked in the quest for homogenisation. Ever since watching him, I tried getting hold of one of his books, and luckily Crossing the Line fell on my lap through sourcing. Ever since the infamous sandpaper gate, I’ve been itching to read literature on it, and what better way to start with Haigh’s take on it.

I had grown up watching the all-conquering Australian cricket team of the 2000s. They laid waste to any team coming their way. It still hurts, being an Indian, remembering the smackdown Australia laid on India in the 2003 ICC Cricket World Cup final. In the 2003 edition, Australia not once but decimated India twice, more ruthlessly in the group game. Then the inevitable exodus began, and by 2015 all the players associated with the great Australian team had dissolved in the past. The new Australia began rebuilding under the relatively new Steve Smith, now a maverick of the modern test era. Smith turned into run churning machine once the captaincy fell into his lap. The Australian team under captain Steve Smith and coach Darren Lehman tried their hard to emulate the all-conquering team of the yore. Their desperation led to baffling behaviour on and off the field and finally, under immense pressure, disintegrated after the ‘Sandpaper Gate’ fiasco.

Gideon Haigh, through Crossing the Line, explores the culture within the cricket structure of Australia. The culture provided an ideal environment culminating into 'Sandpaper Gate', which shook the collective conscience of the Australian public. In his analysis, more than the player, he blamed the administration for the fiasco. Before reaching his conclusion, Haigh gave a brief history of cricket administration in Australia. It started when a bunch of colonies on a continent came together to challenge England for the test series. Earlier, each region had its own cricket board, and they came together only when the international cricket scheduling and selection loom large.


The first shot at the national board came in 1892 with the formation of the Australasian Cricket Council and the inception of the Sheffield Shield tournament. The council collapsed under player mistrust, and in 1905 another attempt was undertaken in the Australian Board of Control for International Cricket. It regulated the traffic of tours, and another body, Interstate Conference, managed the Shield’s affair. In 1973, the Australian Cricket Board subsumed both bodies and began its journey to be the monopoly guardian of cricket in Australia. It brought in sponsorship, created the Australian Institute of Sport for incubating emerging talent and reluctantly shared its revenue with the Australian Cricketers’ Association. ACB, under CEO Malcolm Speed, corporatised into CA, Cricket Australia, and began attracting non-cricketing administrators to run it. The administrator ordered homogenisation of talent instead of variety, promoted winning at all cost mentality and assiduously dismantled the Shield’s structure which once was a proving ground for future stars. The money followed by power led to the degradation of Australia’s national cricket quality.

Crossing the Line was a very insightful read as it provided a photogrammetrical peek into Australian cricket culture. When I watched the drama unfolding in Cape Town, I wondered what forced the players into such extreme desperation. Initially, all blamed the players, but after reading this book I came to an understanding of the level of pressure they were subjected to. The cauldron was hot, the ingredients peppered in the right amount, and pressure acted as a ladle to churn the potion. CA initiated a cultural overhaul in the aftermath, but Haigh is not too optimistic. Over the last decade, the organisation has grown increasingly secretive and sensitive – paradoxically, with each year that it has grown richer and more powerful. In the name of cultural change, few will be sacrificed, and the bandwagon will move ahead until the next bump. The book was very engaging and analytical, covering the administrative aspect brilliantly. I will give it 3.5 stars out of 5. It would have scored a comfortable 3.75, but then I had to take multiple breaks to go look for the word in the dictionary.

[Alan Isaac · Rating 3 out of 5]

Typically negative writing by an author who will appeal to the glass half empty brigade

[Stephen O'Loughlin · Rating 5 out of 5]

Brilliant

Read it once then turned around and read it again. Geoff Lemon’s Steve Smith’s Men was great but this is the definitive CA history and what lead to South Africa. Brilliant.

[Jef · Rating 4 out of 5]

An interesting if not slightly disjointed look into the history and some of the reasons behind the ball tampering incident of 2017.

While I enjoyed the historical context behind the topic of the "win at all costs" mindset of Australian cricket there could be more insight as to the purpose and how to solve the situation.

Well put together and tackles some of the key issues

[James Clark · Rating 4 out of 5]

A really timely and important look at the culture of both the Australian cricket team and Cricket Australia.

A great case study of the long term consequences of neoliberalism reforms and managerialism in non-profit organisations.