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Keywords: Cricket Australia

  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Stray thoughts: Striving for solemnity

    • Andrew Hamilton
    • 03 October 2022

    In the last few weeks, we have been drowned, smothered or mired in words that have striven for solemnity. Such occasions as the death of Queen Elizabeth II and the various Grand Finals are held to transcend the everyday and so to demand elegiac or epic words. It is easy to laugh at the manifest failures to reach those heights, whether by Poets Laureate who should have known better, or by excitable journalists. There is, however, something endearingly human in the attempt.

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  • AUSTRALIA

    A moment to dream about

    • Michael McVeigh
    • 07 June 2022

    Before the game, Richmond players of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander descent were encircled and then honoured by their teammates. The sight of non-indigenous Richmond players on their knees while their teammates stood proudly before them was powerful and moving. It felt like a significant moment in the club’s history. To get to that moment, authentically, was not easy.

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  • RELIGION

    Facing the final innings

    • Joel Hodge
    • 17 March 2022
    21 Comments

    While we have been (barely) coping with a pandemic and natural disasters, the death of a larger-than-life figure like Shane Warne — an ordinary-bloke-cum-sporting-legend, an ever-present companion to Australian audiences, and seemly untouchable — has really brought home the fragility of life. It has drastically reminded us of our mortality: that we don’t live forever.

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  • AUSTRALIA

    Shane Warne’s limelight

    • Binoy Kampmark
    • 07 March 2022
    8 Comments

    It was once said of T. E. Lawrence that he had a tendency to back into the limelight. With the late Shane Warne, arguably the finest slow bowler cricket has ever produced, it edged towards him. His debut appearance against India in the 1991-2 home series in Australia was not auspicious. Paunchy, exuding a vernacular Australian coarseness, and initially wayward, he received an object lesson from India’s Ravi Shastri and the youthful Sachin Tendulkar at the Sydney Cricket Ground. But there were already those incipient signs: the slovenly look, the ear piercings, the peroxide hair.

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  • AUSTRALIA

    The ones who came with chains

    • Brian McCoy
    • 14 December 2021
    15 Comments

    I don’t write to State Premiers very often. However, a month ago I did. It was to the Western Australian Premier, Mark McGowan. It was not about Test cricket, the Juukan Gorge or opening the state’s borders. It was in relation to a photo on the front page of The Australian on the weekend of the 6/7 November showing an Aboriginal man in Western Australia boarding a plane under arrest. He was barefooted and with both a wrist and ankle chain.

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  • INTERNATIONAL

    Football, money and the nature of the local

    • Andrew Hamilton
    • 29 April 2021
    4 Comments

    The history of sport, with its varied and often conflictual relationships between local communities, money and administration, provides the context for understanding the Super League move. It also raises more important questions about the nature and importance of the local. 

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    True friendship

    • Barry Gittins
    • 04 February 2021
    2 Comments

    All three of us are parents, we’ve all been adversely impacted by COVID-19, and prior to that we’ve shared the usual rough and tumble dynamics of male friendships and bridal party affiliations. We have been in and out of each other’s good books, hard conversations, interpersonal dynamics and orbits. We’ve been through a lot as mates. COVID-wise, though, that affinity has been at a remove.

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  • MEDIA

    Mainstream media is dropping the ball on women's sport

    • Marnie Vinall
    • 28 January 2021
    5 Comments

    2021 is set to be a big year for women’s sports — dependent on COVID, of course. Yet, if you looked to the Australian mainstream media’s reporting and coverage of sports, there’s a fair chance you’d get an idea that women’s sports are happening far less than they actually are.

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  • AUSTRALIA

    Don't change the date, change the attitude

    • Malarndirri McCarthy
    • 28 January 2021
    7 Comments

    January 26 is one day out of 365. But no other date conjures up so much passionate debate amidst a cacophony of divided views. Each year there is the predictable commentary about Australia Day. 

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Breaking the glass ceiling in Australian elite sport

    • Erin Riley
    • 17 November 2020
    6 Comments

    If the up-and-across path isn’t available, it makes it all the more important that there are sufficient development opportunities within sports in Australia. Unfortunately, as women’s professional sport has grown in Australia, fewer women have been given coaching roles.

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  • AUSTRALIA

    The cult of certainty caught by cricket chaos

    • Andrew Hamilton
    • 04 September 2019
    3 Comments

    In a combative world where even sport is as joyless as was trench warfare in another age, the quirky ending of the Headingly cricket Test was an unexpected delight. The events prompt wider reflection on the broader quest for certainty in human affairs, and the consequent impatience with human judgment.

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  • ENVIRONMENT

    Memories to pique climate conscience

    • Brian Matthews
    • 29 August 2019
    6 Comments

    There are thousands of Australians old enough to remember: hot summers starting before Christmas and tailing off into autumn in the weeks after their return to school; the buddings and flowerings and wiltings in suburban gardens and country main streets; the first chill in the air as they unwrapped their Easter eggs ...

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