KEY POINTS:
This week Australia discovered a new and painful piece of sporting equipment: the moral compass. Along with it came the startling allegation that the compass needle is pointing to an uncomfortable polarity.
Probably for the first time, Australian cricket and its pantheon of sporting demi-gods have been walloped by public outrage over the uncompromising death-or-glory approach to winning that for more than a century has defined the sport in the national psyche.
Victory at all costs is now being challenged after the national team chalked up its 16th successive test victory by defeating India in Sydney. Instead of what would normally have been unrestrained jubilation, the moral compass swivelled south.
Captain Ricky Ponting was roasted over his integrity and his team's arrogance. His parents had to change their telephone number to escape a barrage of abusive phone calls. Sporting icons turned on the team. Newspaper readers, online reaction and radio talkback shows tracked an astonishing national revulsion.
Sydney's conservative - even jingoistic - tabloid Daily Telegraph carried a poll reporting that about 80 per cent of Australians believed their team had abandoned the spirit of cricket, and that Ponting was not a proper ambassador for the sport. Columnists called for his head.
True, by week's end nationalism was beginning to assert itself in a backwash of anger against the Indians, their financial and political clout in world cricket, and the fury directed at Ponting's team. But nothing could disguise the fact that many Australians are no longer prepared to blindly support victory no matter how it is achieved.
Australia's 122-run defeat of India, with its disputed umpiring, claims of bad Australian sportsmanship and suspension of Indian spinner Harbhajan Singh for calling West Indian-descended Aussie all-rounder Andrew Symonds a monkey, placed new boundaries on acceptable behaviour.
Not all has been directed against the Australian team. Singh's comment reinforced growing disgust at racism in sport. Letters to newspaper editors and radio talkback callers were furious at earlier Indian insults to their players, and supported Ponting for standing up against racist remarks.
"Ricky Ponting should be championed as a national hero for exposing racism in cricket," award-winning cricket reporter Malcolm Conn wrote in The Australian. "For taking his bold stand to protect Australia's only black player, Andrew Symonds, from continuing racial taunts by Indian spinner Harbhajan Singh, Ponting deserves to be feted, not condemned."
Neither did mass demonstrations and the burning of effigies in Indian streets help the visitors' claims to moral superiority, even if they did send tremors down diplomatic spines.
With Canberra working to bolster ties with the emerging regional superpower, new Prime Minister and former diplomat Kevin Rudd called for the row to be settled. His Foreign Minister, Stephen Smith, also urged cricket officials to allow cool heads to prevail.
While hardly in the league of the Central American crisis of 1969 when El Salvador and Honduras fought a brief but bloody war over the outcome of a soccer match, the Indian riots and Rudd's intervention emphasised the role of cricket in Australia.
Across the board, Australians are sports fanatics. Historians have noted the importance of sport to the national identity and self-confidence, and the significance of 19th-century cricket victories in a period when they were the only measure of international success and stature.
A paper by marketing expert Simone Pettigrew for Perth's Edith Cowan University noted: "Australians pride themselves on their interest in sport, and this interest has been linked to the formation and maintenance of self-identity. The connection between self and sport is particularly salient among Australian males, whose ethics, masculinity and sexuality may be called into question should they fail to demonstrate the appropriate level of
In this respect cricket stands above all other sports. Other major codes, such as Australian rules, league and rugby, attract huge followings but are more regional than national. Soccer is thriving but has yet to produce world-beating teams.
Swimmers and other individual athletes are feted, but not with the fervour accorded team sports.
Cricket is the true measure of Australia's sporting nationalism, and its global dominance underpins its massive popular appeal, the almost religious adoration of its heroes, and the vast, multimillion-dollar marketing machine powering the code.
The bitter 1933 bodyline Ashes series against England remains embedded in the national psyche. Its hero, Don Bradman, remains revered. There is a museum in his honour at Bowral, just outside Sydney, and where else but Australia could a cricket-mad Prime Minister push special legislation through Parliament to accord his name the same commercial protection as the Anzac acronym, as did the ousted John Howard?
This is why the outpouring of anger against Ponting's enormously successful team is so remarkable. Australians are normally ecstatic over such success, almost regardless of how it might have been achieved. And there is a significant body of support for the national team.
Australians are uncomfortable with the clout the Indians hold in world cricket, despite their on-field inferiority.
Reflecting on influence acquired by the provision of 70 per cent of the sport's global revenues, some Australian commentators claimed India could dictate its terms, and accused the International Cricket Council of buckling under its demands.
When Jamaican umpire Steve Bucknor was replaced by New Zealander Billy Bowden, after India threatened to pack their bags and go home, The Australian raged: "The Indian board's stance amounts to attempted blackmail and it cannot be tolerated." Similar fury was reflected by cricket fans, pointing to racism among Indian spectators and raising earlier allegations of bribery and corruption. In a typical reaction, one Herald Sun reader wrote: "Decades of cheating Indian umpires. Racist crowds that [India's cricket] board said did not happen. Blackmail of cricket. [India] cannot win with real talent."
Cricket Australia chief executive James Sutherland made no apologies. "It's the way Australian cricket teams have played the game since 1877 under all sorts of different captains.
"That is the way Australians have expected their teams to play and they've been admired for that."
But there was real grassroots anger at Ponting and Australia's win-at-all-costs approach to the game.
One ABC listener noted the difficulty Australians had in accepting their cricketers could be outplayed, and added: "In regard to Ricky Ponting, his behaviour does tend toward the boorish in the heat of battle."
And there was no disguising the fury felt by many of Australia's leading sporting identities and commentators. John Bertrand, the yachtsman who won the 1983 America's Cup for Australia and who now heads Sport Australia's Hall of Fame, coined the term "moral compass". "Sport is only sport," he said. "It's not war."
Peter Roebuck, one of Australia's most distinguished cricket writers, led the charge in the Sydney Morning Herald, calling for Ponting to be sacked.
"If Cricket Australia cares a fig for the tattered reputation of our national team in our national sport, it will not for a moment longer tolerate the sort of arrogant and abrasive conduct seen from the captain and his senior players in the past few days," he wrote.
In the Melbourne Age, Michael Epis added: "I don't like cheats, and I don't like this Australian cricket team." But Daily Telegraph columnist Piers Akerman spread the blame more widely: "Before we start adjusting moral compasses, recall that we, collectively, elevated sporting figures into modern gods, and we are equally responsible for their half-witted actions."
