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BBC's Jonathon Agnew wrong and hypocritical to invoke the memory of Phil Hughes

By Adam Henry - posted Tuesday, 20 January 2015


When things do not go our way, it is easy to assume the so called moral authority of being a 'victim' in sport, then it is easy to explain away professional failures, just like Agnew with Boycott. It is more difficult to embrace the resilience of individual choice and rational expectations. We cannot expect to not deal with people who do not behave as we wish, and we cannot always have the outcome we desire. Unrealistic ideas of entitlement, particularly from others, can set you up for perpetual disappointments. We do after all have to survive in a world where hypocrisy and injustice infects everything.

You stand up to bullies, you accept the good fight, but you also need to accept that, as Clint Eastwood's character in 'Unforgiven' snarls before shooting Gene Hackman's Sherriff character, "Deserve ain't got nothing to do with it". That is, there should be no entitled expectation of final victory or justice.

Like life sport is not fair, it can be ruthless, bad things can happen to good people, those who deserve to get there might not get rewarded, bad decisions happen when they should not, arguments occur, tempers lost, lines can be crossed. Simultaneously, it can be compassionate, empathetic, good things can occur, you can be rewarded, good decisions happen, boundaries are respected. Like human beings it is contradictory, precisely because we are human beings. Sport like civic life is among the most highly regulated and administered activities on the planet, yet it unrealistic to expect that everyone will behave to some ideal standard, yet alone Agnew's edict.

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When my 5 year old son asked me about Phil Hughes it was heart wrenching to explain what had happened. But I also explained to my son about the idea of risk and that neither Hughes' nor the unfortunate bowler had done anything wrong, he was wearing a helmet, he was wearing the protection, and it was a terrible accident. So we must respect the cricket ball, as we must respect risk. There are few guarantees that are absolute, so we must attempt to be resilient.

As a child, and in the days well before helmets and children being placed in mothballs, I asked my wonderful primary school cricket coach Wayne Buckley what to do when afraid the bowler will hit you with the ball, 'Son', he emphasized, 'that is why you have a cricket bat'. What someone else chooses to do to us, or say to us, whether they are honorable in some antiquated notion like Agnew, well that is for them to deal with. They live with their own choices and outcomes. The outcome might not be the one we hope for, but if we do not give up we are winning a different type of victory - one that does not require validation.

That the Australians in particular, and Indians, were even able to play this recent Test series in the circumstances was a sign of resilience. There was nothing said on the field that was very controversial, some silly chest beating and verbal theatrics. Most players on either team said next to nothing to each other as far as I saw, a few players, as is always the case, happy to engage in verbal battle.

This had nothing to do with the death of Phil Hughes.

Unlike Agnew, the Australians and Indians were there to play top level international cricket. It was a magnificent series but there could only be one winner this time. The Indians will already be plotting how they can put this same Australian side to the cricketing sword (again) next time it tours India. That is why they are among the very best players anywhere in the world, this is also why they are very likely to be favorites at home next time they play Australia.

We might say that winning and successful output is not everything, I agree, but at a professional level it is often the very measure of your individual worth to an organization. Sad but true. The gulf between what we teach our little children to value, and what types of behavior can be rewarded as adults, is often a chasm. We might consider the Lance Armstrong saga here, but does anyone doubt that some in our society manipulate the system and have many more opportunities to sidestep personal responsibility than others? No. Would anyone think that Rupert Murdoch is just an ordinary US citizen no more or less significant than some Mr.Smith from Idaho? No.

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Therefore, we have an obligation to try as hard as possible to not give up, most importantly, on ourselves, in the face of adversity, acknowledge our own occasional hypocrisy, and try to be resilient. Dealing with the harsh disappointment of reality in something often as trivial as sport is maybe more significant than we appreciate. Ask the magnificent Clive Lloyd how he and the West Indians eventually dealt with their absolutely devastating 5-1 drubbing at the hands of the Australians in 1975-1976? Then go and ask the Australian sides that faced them from the late 1970s to the early 1990s about the experience! The Windies knew they represented something more than a mere cricket team for its Caribbean fans.

We must try to learn more from adversity and failure than anything else in my opinion. We will after all experience more of this than the opposite. If we permanently deflate into nothingness when we fail, or when we endure injustice, encounter people who lie and deceive, fail to overcome a challenge, how can we ever seek real happiness? We can learn to see defeat as a temporary setback, and like Lloyd's Windies hand them their 'arses' fair and square (in a metaphorically sense of course!) when the next opportunity arrives.

Boycott was a fulltime 'professional' willing to live and die by what he could achieve on a cricket field. Agnew no doubt could have pursued a number of employment options, cricket might have been hard work, but is was his pleasure. His failure as an international cricketer has not diminished his well remunerated commentating opportunities. Yet he was still aggrieved enough to recall an event before the advent of fire where he thought that he had Boycott 'out'. In Agnew's world Boycott is still a cheat, and still a bastard for not behaving the way Agnew thought he should have.

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About the Author

Adam Hughes Henry is the author of three books, Independent Nation - Australia, the British Empire and the Origins of Australian-Indonesian Relations (2010), The Gatekeepers of Australian Foreign Policy 1950–1966 (2015) and Reflections on War, Diplomacy, Human Rights and Liberalism: Blind Spots (2020). He was a Visiting Fellow in Human Rights, University of London (2016) and a Whitlam Research Fellow, Western Sydney University (2019). He is currently an Associate Editor for The International Journal of Human Rights (Taylor and Francis).

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