There is no U in Team

You know, a lot of people come up to me and ask, "Hey Ben, this Team Australia stuff - what's it all about?"

And to be honest, I find these people intrusive and presumptuous. But still, I attempt to answer their questions as best I can, because if there's one thing you know about Team Australia, it's that we try to help our teammates no matter how inadequate we find them as people.

Team Australia is, essentially, a state of mind, a philosophy that says, look, we're all on the same side here, let's work together to achieve our goals.

After all, we all love to feel like we're part of a team. Look at this happy fellas:

Yes, Team Australia is a lot like the 1982 Parramatta Eels. The government is Peter Sterling and Brett Kenny in the halves, controlling play, organising the team and orchestrating the big moves that produce results. The taxpayers of Australia are the forwards in the engine room, Ray Price and Geoff Bugden and of course good old Johnny Muggleton, doing the hard yards that are necessary if we're ever going to let our outside backs do their job: the outside backs in this case being mainly Cate Blanchett and Silverchair. 

The point is that just like a great football team, Team Australia has all its disparate parts performing their designated function in pursuit of the same aim - a strong, prosperous nation. And that's the genius of Team Australia - it uses the powerful imagery of sport, something all Australians understand, to illustrate a point. No wonder Tony Abbott was a Rhodes scholar - that man sure knows a thing or two about using sports words to say things about things that aren't sport!

It's an effective technique. That's why the accessibility of sport permeates our public affairs nowadays. For example, the government is now moving to implement a "red card" system for hate preachers. Why red card? Why not just a "stop hate preachers" policy? Because red cards are sporting, and Aussies love sports! Admittedly red cards are more of a soccer thing, but let's be honest: it's the ones who like soccer we need to be keeping an eye on.

And this is why I hope people don't feel scared or alienated by Team Australia. After all, would you feel scared or alienated by this?

Of course not! Those guys are having a great time! Because being in a team is just fantastic. And we're all in the best team of all - Team Australia. 

Naturally Team Australia requires vigilance. After all, if you're playing cricket you can't just sit idly by and let the batsman hit you for six. Team Australia is all about taking precautions. As a country of course we need to send fielders to the boundary to keep the run rate down. As a country we do have to, at times, bowl a dry line outside off stump. Sometimes we might even need to pitch it outside leg into the footmarks. That's just the nature of Team Australia - a responsible government must be prepared at times of crisis to come around the wicket. Ben Chifley knew this.

Because the fact is, being Team Australia is just as much about responsibilities as it is about rights. Sure, when you're on a great team like Team Australia you get to take the speccie in the goal square, but you also need to make the smother on centre wing, you need to punch from behind and get men around the stoppages. Some people think it's not important that, as citizens, we rush the odd behind, but those people probably don't understand the fundamentals of foreign policy.

You can't stop terrorism with this:

Sometimes you need this:

And that's what I tell those irritating people from the beginning of this article. I tell them, Team Australia is about security, about safety, about prosperity, about democracy, about freedom, about hard work, about togetherness, about patriotism and about justice.

But most of all, Team Australia is about creating a better future. I know that's hard to see sometimes, but maybe it'll be easier to understand if I put it like this:

When you're down six goals in the final quarter, sometimes it's necessary to roll the dice. You don't get over the advantage line by going sideways before you go forward, you need to make sure your scrum is solid before you start worrying about the corner posts. It's easy to get caught offside when you don't keep your eye on the ball, but the one thing we all know is true is, nobody ever scored a goal sitting on the bench. And it's by sitting on the bench that we miss our opportunity to jump the net. Hurdles are natural in life, but you can take the rebound more easily when you hit the training track hard and keep your shape. It's great to play your shots, but a sound forward defensive is the foundation of a flowing cover drive - getting the ball in the right areas is how you tempt the opposition into mistakes. And it's those mistakes that will keep this country out of the bunker, and in the onion bag, for many years to come.

That's what Team Australia means to me. So please: don't be terrorists OK? Because national security is a trophy we can all win.

A Helpful Guide To identifying Important Opinions From Sporting Champions

Is is easy to see how people could get confused by today's article in the Herald Sun by Margaret Court, in which the tennis legend points out that if we keep letting people put their bits wherever they want to, our children will go blind and nobody will win at tennis anymore. Not that they would be confused by the content, per se: it's all good, commonsense advice for the modern generation and an important message for those hedonists among us who would rather have donkey-orgies than get beaten by a nun.

But it does raise a problematic issue: obviously we know that famous sportspeople are a lot more "on the ball" than the regular chap or lass, and their opinions hold far greater value than yours or mine. But how do we identify which sporting champion to listen to, and if two different sporting champions express conflicting opinions, how do we know who's right? I mean, if Greg Norman writes a column tomorrow telling us all to make bottom-whoopee every night, what are we to think?

It is to resolve this problem that I have embarked on a study of sporting prowess and how it relates to social and political opinion. This is the Pobjie Scale of Sportsperson Rightness.

On this scale, sporting achievements carry a certain value, which contributes to how correct the sportsperson in question will be on any given subject. Margaret Court will always be VERY correct, because she won 24 grand slam tournaments. On the other hand, Pat Rafter and Lleyton Hewitt have only won 2 each, so they are 1/12 as authoritative about things as Court. Even if they make a joint statement it only carries a sixth as much weight as Court. So if you ever see an article written by Rafter and Hewitt advocating gay marriage, you can be sure that gay marriage is six times wronger than non-gay marriage, in tennis terms. Steffi Graf won 21 grand slams, so she's almost as correct as Court, but in a face-off, Court still wins. So should Steffi offer an opinion on how to resolve the Eurozone crisis, it will be a good one, but if Margaret Court disagrees, you have to go with the Aussie. Rod Laver of course won only 11 majors, but did complete the Grand Slam twice, which has a multiplier effect. Then again, so did Court, which cancels that out, but the multiplier does mean Laver outpoints, say, Pete Sampras, should they disagree on issues of social and/or monetary policy.

OK, so far, so simple, you say, but what about non-tennis players? How can we compare them? Here it gets a bit more complicated. Allan Border hit 11,174 test runs, which means his opinion is very valuable, but is it more valuable than 24 tennis majors? And what about Heather McKay/Jack Brabham?

Well now we must implement a points system, whereby each sportsperson's achievements receive a weighted score according to difficulty, prominence of their chosen sport, and ability to get their opinions into the paper. Utilising this "Pobjie Scale", we can see that Border's test runs add up to 46 points, or "dinkums", whereas Court's grand slam victories add up to 51. So Court beats Border. What Allan Border's views on gay marriage are I don't know, but if they clash with Court's, he will, sadly, be incorrect.

Shane Warne, though, is a very different matter. His 708 test wickets and 3000+ test runs add up to a monumental 59 dinkums, meaning he is a true opinion leader, or "SuperMargaret". Therefore, if it turns out that Warne is in favour of marriage between consenting sexual unconventionalists, Margaret Court will be rendered incorrect, and must either adjust her views or come out of retirement and win Wimbledon again if she wants to be taken seriously.

Mark Webber, on the other hand, has only 7 dinkums, and can therefore be ignored about everything.

So, next time you see a sporting legend opining on vital matters pertaining to our society, our government, our economy, or our eternal souls, simply refer to the below chart to judge whether you should listen to them or not. In order of opinionistic correctitude, Australian sportspeople run thus:

Shane Warne - 59
Margaret Court - 51
Cadel Evans - 48
Allan Border - 46
Steve Waugh - 46
David Campese - 45
John Eales - 43
Layne Beachley - 40
Dennis Lillee - 35
Ian Thorpe - 33
Dawn Fraser - 31
Greg Norman - 28
Ron Barassi - 25
Makybe Diva - 22
Jeff Fenech - 19
Sam Stosur - 15
Sally Pearson - 12
Mark Webber - 7
Mark "Jacko" Jackson - 2


Armed with the Pobjie Scale, all Australians should know what to think about everything in no time!

My Captain

One of the first cricket books I ever owned was by Peter Roebuck. It's called Great Innings - I still have it now, more than 20 years after I was given it. It's simply a series of 50 short essays on some of the greatest innings played over the history of cricket, from the 19th century through to the late 1980s. It wasn't the first great innings anthology written - the sort of mind that tends to commit itself to cricket is always the same kind of mind that will incline towards list-making. And Roebuck would not have been alone in including in his own list Bradman's flawless 254 at Lord's in 1930, or Stan McCabe's 187 in the face of Bodyline. Most people would probably include Botham's Headingley hurricane of 1981 and it's not a great stretch to put in Viv Richards's 56-ball hundred, or Victor Trumper's 104 before lunch on a wet track.

But I don't know anyone except Roebuck who would select from Javed Miandad none of his myriad test match masterpieces, but a virtuoso 200 for Glamorgan. Who but Roebuck would nominate a whirlwind 88 by Kiwi legend Bert Sutcliffe, hit against a fearsome South African pace attack, with a bandaged head, and a broken heart the day after a train crash claimed the lives of 151 of his countrymen, including his teammate's fiancee? Who but Roebuck would bypass Garfield Sobers's dazzling 132 in the Tied Test in Brisbane in favour his captain Frank Worrell's unspectacular 65 in the same innings, seeing the greatest heroism in the inspiration a skipper gave to a young, insecure team?

That was Roebuck's peculair genius: he was not ignorant of the cold hard realities of the game; he didn't disregard facts and figures - often he would remind his readers that in the end that most important thing for a player was to make runs or take wickets - all else was incidental. But while keeping these realities in mind, Roebuck would still see the romance of cricket, its adventure and emotion, as much as its results and statistics.

He was a storyteller, and his greatest proclivity as a sports writer was to discern the narratives in cricket. Every innings, every day, every wicket, every moment was a story to Roebuck. Great feats of bowling or batsmanship were cinematic in their scope: he would relate them in epic terms, setting the scene with passages that could seem gloriously out of place on the sports pages, with their poetic imagery and whimsical metaphors. He would construct his story as if creating fiction rather than relating mundane real events - the obstacles to overcome, the inner turmoil of the individual, the magnificence of mighty champions coming together, and the triumph of a man over his opponents, his environment, and himself, were related as if Roebuck were handing down a legend, a tale of giants in a more momentous universe. Cricket was in his bones, and it ran in his veins, and his life was devoted to helping others to see it as he did. A team game in which personal ambition is supposed to be sacrificed to the collective good, yet which is comprised entirely of confrontations between individuals, he understood its beauty and its strangeness and its otherworldly quaintness, and he told its story in the way he saw it.

Players' careers were novels, tales of struggle and redemption and success and failure that stretched back long before the public became aware of them, and continued long after they faded from view. Roebuck was a very good player himself, a successful long-standing first-class player and county captain who played with Botham, Richards, Garner, Waugh and Crowe, and understood as well as anyone the battle a man can find himself waging against his own limitations; the frustrations to be found in the inability to realise your highest aspirations. When writing of a player, even to judge him as inadequate or to call for his dismissal, his pieces never contained malice, never lacked compassion. He never allowed his objective judgment of cricketing skill to blind him to the humans he was writing about.

And he delighted in those humans' successes. When weaving a story from the threads of a cricketer, he favoured the rags to riches variety. He loved nothing more than to tell the story of a subcontinental street kid, a country urchin raised on dirt pitches, or an island villager who grew up using a palm frond for a bat, rising to the highest echelons of international sport. He rejoiced in men like Ranji, or D'Oliviera, who defied their own bigoted societies to succeed. He took an especial pleasure in unconventional operators who found success despite their disregard for orthodoxy or tradition - the bizarre stance of Shivnarine Chanderpaul, the crabbed, awkward technique of Simon Katich, the cheerful agriculturalism of Colin Milburn, were all admired by Roebuck, lover of the rebel and the innovator.

His sense of justice, his loathing of bigotry and nationalism, were palpable. He hated barracking, railed against those who would place their desire for their own team to win above justice or the good of the game. His opinions were always fiercely independent and scrupulously sincere. I didn't agree with him all the time - I thought he got it wrong on Darrell Hair, and that he completely lost his head when he savaged Ricky Ponting in the aftermath of the 2008 SCG test against India. But whether agreeing with him or not, there could never be any doubt that what he wrote was motivated by nothing more than pure, genuine conviction. If he could be intemperate, if his emotions could overrule his judgment so that he seemed less than dispassionate in assessing the facts, it only ever came from his love of the game, and his hatred of anything that could sully it. He saw such beauty in the game, and what it could do to elevate people, and bring them together, that it distressed him beyond measure to see ugliness intrude, to see his beloved cricket be less than it could be. That was why he wrote with such anger whenever corruption or greed threatened the game, when he saw it twisted to base political ends, used to assist political thugs in Zimbabwe or organised crime in India. He was no starry-eyed idealist thinking cricket could be divorced from the world around it, but that was just the point - he believed in cricket improving the world around it, and was inflamed by it doing the opposite, or allowing the worst of the world to infect the game.

But perhaps most important of all was how he wrote all this. That beautiful, lyrical, elaborate, passionate, impish, sharp, idiosyncratic style that somehow seemed of another time, evoking Cardus and Wodehouse as it painted intricately detailed landscapes and portraits of a day's play, while simultaneously devising new angles, new windows to see the game through that could distort it in new and lovely ways while also clarifying events in a way that other writers never even conceived of. There was simply nothing else on sports pages to compare with Roebuck's words. The art he brought to what can so often be a flat, blunt craft was something to behold. He could make you fall in love with cricket simply by describing the snap of a bowler's wrist, or the flourish of a batsman as he let the ball pass harmless to the keeper. He made me fall in love with cricket.

I was reading Roebuck before I read a word by Douglas Adams. Before I'd even heard of Terry Pratchett. Before I'd watched a second of Monty Python. Before I'd encountered Wodehouse, before I'd thought of becoming a writer myself. Of all the influences on me as a writer, Peter Roebuck is probably the longest-standing outside my own parents. I never net him, and now, to my lasting regret, I never will. I didn't know him - though, from what I understand few really ever did. But if it's true that a writer can show themselves through their writing, that you can get to know someone by the words they put down, I knew him. I knew him by his words, for most of my life, and the devastation I feel at his death is a testament to his ability to touch lives of people he was never even aware of. It's a mad, delusional conceit for me to wish I'd really known him, to think maybe I could have done something for him, as an act of reciprocity. But if I wish I could have been a friend to him, it's because he so often made me feel he was a friend to me. Maybe that was the greatest part of his genius after all.

I don't know all the details of his life, or of his death. I don't want to speculate, I don't want to intensify my own sadness, or anyone else's, by sifting through that which I really know nothing about, or by pontificating on sadness, or loneliness, or the flaws of a man only just gone.

But what I can say is that in recent years, Peter Roebuck seemed to be one of the last bastions of cricket the way it was supposed to be. As the game became more driven by money, by greed, by coldly professional calculations and cynical self-interest, to the point where the lines between corruption and administration were becoming blurred...Roebuck stood as a voice for cricket as pure, as joyous, as the most beautiful of games. As Michael Parkinson said, sport only matters if it doesn't matter - only if sport can remain a game, played for love and by principles of fairness and honesty lacking in the important, life-and-death world outside, can it be a beacon to that outside world, a force for good. Once cricket becomes just like everything else in life, it might as well not exist.

Peter Roebuck felt that. And now that he's gone, I wonder if anyone else really feels it the same way. With Roebuck gone, cricket feels a little more prosaic, a litle more dull, a little more sordid. I don't know if this game that I love still has the magic, the beauty that can make me believe there's something better in the world. Maybe there's nothing better in the world. Maybe everything really is, at heart, dirty and ugly and selfish. Maybe cricket is destined to go the way of everything else, and even the most brilliant of artists among us can't hold back the tide of voracious, remorseless reality. I hope it's not so, but maybe it is. And this summer, this Roebuckless season that is now upon us, can't help but feel grim and hopeless and dark. This game I love...can it be beautiful anymore? His words, today more precious than ever before, will hopefully help it remain so.

Peter Roebuck I will miss you. If I wrote a thousand times as many words as I have here today, I'm not sure I could ever really say how much.

Regrets

What is my number one regret? The lies I've told, the friends I've hurt, the manslaughter of the childhood friend I covered up?

NO

My number one regret is that I have been neglecting my faithful blog readers. Both of you. Ha ha ha self-deprecation!

Anyway, I was away for a little bit decompressing from a rather frantic personal and professional period, visiting family and lying down etc. I'm back now, blogging for your delectation.

What's been happening since the last update?

Well, there have been more writings, obviously. Check them out:

At newmatilda.com:

Thoughts on rugby league and great 20th-century statesmen

Thoughts on the Victorian government's affaire grande with the religious right

My thoughts on silly immigrants and why the athletic ones are better

At Crikey:

My first stab at investigate journalism; I managed to smuggle out the minutes from Hey Hey It's Saturday's production meeting prior to their second reunion special.

Please note: not only did John Blackman comment on that last one, he almost knows my name! I am pretty special I think you will agree.

So in other news...a new project! Gather Around Me, with Australia's hippest young pop culture vivisectionists Ben Pobjie and Cam Smith bringing you their thoughts through the magic of Montenegran internet.

GAM will feature random musings by Cam and myself throughout your long, otherwise-stultifying days, but the main meat of the site is in our regular podcasts. There are two up so far, check 'em out. You can also subscribe through iTunes.

Also, following my gig way back at the Emerging Writers' Festival, I have a piece in the EWF Reader, a collection of writers writing about writing. To quote the EWF:

"The Reader is a new collection that combines highlights of the 2009 festival with general writing information and new creative works across various writing forms.


The Reader is about the craft, the approaches, the techniques and processes; the discipline(s), the forms, the experiments; the inner life, the social life, the lifestyle; the ups and downs, the tricks and the tribulations, the fun and the failure…

The Reader is Artworks, Illustrations, Flash Fiction, Fragments, Interviews, Short Stories, Sketches, Songs, Sonnets, Haiku, Poetry, Plays, Photos, Comics, Couplets, Verse, Recipes, Rants, and Memoirs.



The Reader is Steven Amsterdam on writers’ workshops, Clem Bastow on freelancing, Jen Breach on writing comics, Mel Campbell on pitching to editors, Kathy Charles on shameless self-promotion, Stephanie Convery on writing Black Saturday, Olivia Davis on fear and writing practices, Lisa Dempster on how much writers earn, Koraly Dimitriadis talks to Christos Tsoilkas, Caroline Hamilton compares writers’ festivals and music festivals, Stu Hatton on his mentorship with Dorothy Porter, Jane Hawtin discusses publishing academic research for a general audience, Andrew Hutchinson recalls the Emerging Writers’ Festival, Tiggy Johnson on parenthood and writing, Krissy Kneen on not writing about sex, Benjamin Law on failure, Angela Meyer reviews books for writers, Jennifer Mills on the politics of publishing and engaging with readers, Anthony Noack on good grammar, John Pace on re-drafting your screenplay, Ryan Paine on the role of the critic, Ben Pobjie on writing comedy, Robert Reid on the role of the contemporary playwright, Aden Rolfe on the emergentsia, Jenny Sinclair on the landscape of her book research, Chris Summers talks to Lally Katz about theatre writing, Mia Timpano on how to cultivate the ultimate author profile photo, Estelle Tang on Christopher Currie and blogging fiction, Simmone Michelle-Wells pens a letter to her younger self, Cameron White reviews alternatives to Microsoft Word.

And new creative works by Maxine Clark, Chris Currie, Chris Downes, Claire Henderson, Kirk Marshall, Scott-Patrick Mitchell, Alice Mrongovius, Meg Mundell, Warwick Sprawson and Cameron T"

Nota Bene: "Ben Pobjie on writing comedy". Yes! After reading the Reader, you will know how to be funny, like me! I'm not even joking, y'all! In bookstores now!

More soon, you sexy readers.

Sleeve-length: A Pressing Issue

The Queensland Rugby League, responding swiftly and decisively to reports that Queensland State of Origin players had been mixing Stilnox and Red Bull to create a home-made party drug while in training camp for the third game of this year's series, initiated a thorough and hard-hitting investigation, in which the players were asked whether they had been mixing Stilnox and Red Bull to create a home-made party drug while in training camp for the third game of this year's series, and the players said "no".

The Australian reports, though, that the far-reaching probe did not end there. Not content with this vigorous interrogation, QRL managing director Ross Livermore then called a meeting with coach Mal Meninga and team manager Steve Walters, in which captain Darren Lockyer was brought in...

...and asked for his opinion on the team's uniforms.

Never underestimate the Queensland Rugby League's passion for truth and accountability. Let even the barest whiff of poor off-field behaviour be sensed, and they will waste no time, spare no expense, and leave no stone unturned in their efforts to take a tough, unflinching look at what the players think of their jumpers.

Kudos, Ross Livermore. Kudos.

Dark Times

Why do people like sport? By people, I mean me. Some people hate sport. How lucky they are. Those people didn't want to kill themselves last night when the Storm lost the grand final by a record margin to the hairy miscreants of Manly, who provided the perfect send-off for club legend Steve "Beaver" Menzies, so-called because of his resemblance to a giant vagina.

Now that the football season has ended in crushing depression for my teams in three different codes, I shall turn my attention to cricket, which will undoubtedly see me even more suicidal.

Sport is STUPID.

Please leave your comments on the subject of why I should stop watching sport and take up scrapbooking below.