Thought this was an interesting perspective... ;-)
Down under, the playing fields of public schools have no meaning
Simon Barnes
July 25, 2005 THE ASHES. The only sporting trophy in the world that is supposed to be funny. The trophy was invented as a facetious joke, a protozoic form of English sports gallows humour, without which English sport could not survive. But here's the point: Australia never got the joke. They never thought it was even remotely amusing. Thus it was that they shaped the sporting consciousness of the world.
The Australians never really cottoned on to the idea that sport was a way in which gentlemen amused themselves. They had this crazy idea that it was serious. And they made a series of logical steps from this standpoint and thereby created the world of sport as we know it.
Because it follows that if sport is serious, then international sport is very serious. It follows that if your team is called Australia, you are not a group of gentlemen getting together for the sake of exercise and amusement. You are not so much representing your country as creating it.
That was certainly the case when Australia first began to play England for the Ashes.
England had Shakespeare and Agincourt and the Black Death and Darwin and an empire.
Australia had something better. Australia had youth. How better to express this truth than in sport? How better to define a nation than by playing sport with a seriousness of purpose that was nothing less than revolutionary?
The less history a nation has, the more it needs sport to define its national consciousness.
"Other nations have their history. We have our football," the former manager of the Uruguayan football team, Ondina Viera, once said.
A Brazilian newspaper expressed the same sentiment more exuberantly: "Our football is like our inflation - 100 per cent."
During the rugby union World Cup in 2003, The Australian printed a picture of Jonny Wilkinson on the front page of the sports section with the headline: "Is that all you've got?"
London's Daily Mirror responded with the same caption and a picture of Kylie Minogue's bum. But it isn't all Australia has got. It's got Kylie's bum and sport.
Well, there's a great deal more to Australia than sport, but all the same, sport has been a significant force in defining the Australian national consciousness.
Former England cricket captain Ted Dexter said: "They gaily revive every prejudice they know, whether to do with accent, class consciousness or even the convict complex, and sally forth into battle with a dedication which would not disgrace the most committed of the world's political agitators."
The English traditionally found this hard to come to terms with.
"In all this Australian team, there are barely one or two who would be accepted as public school men," CB Fry said in 1928.
The Australian cricket team - and by extension, Australia itself - worked on the principle of antithesis. They worked extremely hard at not being acceptable as public school men.
They put themselves out to be hard, rough and ready, easy-mannered, with no tolerance of snobbery.
From the start, Australia was ferociously egalitarian in everything except sport.
Dennis Lillee, we must never forget, greeted the Queen with "G'day, how ya goin'?"
In sport alone, Australia always has been unabashedly elitist and that was because sport mattered.
It set the pattern for international sport across the world. Before long, England took sport so seriously that it invented bodyline.
This was essentially a matter of contradictions. England, who invented sport as an aspect of gentlemanliness, took sport to a new and frightening level of seriousness.
Australia, who invented the notion of sport as a form of seriousness, took refuge in outraged gentlemanliness.
It was a defining moment in the emergence of Australia as a nation and sport has continued to play a huge part in the creation of national consciousness. And here comes another contradiction: there has been a seismic shift in arrogance.
In a way, Australia had invented sport as a serious business to combat English arrogance. Or perhaps the mot juste is smugness.
Australia used sport as a means of expressing one central truth. We are not English; we are not even trying to be English. In fact, we go to a great deal of trouble to demonstrate that we are the exact opposite.
And so the years have brought us a parade of flamboyantly un-English cricketers. Lillee remains perhaps the archetype, but a glance at the present team shows a raft of people at pains to emphasise their un-Englishness.
And the opposition? For years, England cricketers have tried to be as Australian as possible.
Australian cricket has been seen as the template for England's future and every player has striven to be as Australian as humanly possible; Australian, that is, in the sense of playing - living - with total commitment to the notion of victory.
English sport is the domain of wannabe Australians, all seeking fulfillment in serious sport. And as this astonishing reversal takes place, so another is happening alongside. It is no longer the Poms who are arrogant. Or do I mean smug?
The Times
