The all-time Despicable Australia XI. Part 2
10Part two of the Despicable Australian XI. This time, and oversupply of wicket-keepers and some very strange bowlers
Greg Matthews: For a couple of years in the late 1980s Greg Matthews really was Villain No1 in New Zealand. For a start, he was a bit odd, wore way too much zinc and scored seriously ugly runs against Sir Richard Hadlee in his pomp. He was an Aussie battle who achieved above his ability, and that’s our domain.
He was also a cheat, as demonstrated in the inside cover of the DB Annual of 1986; claiming a catch off Hadlee (of course) in front of a classy bunch of Eden Park spectators. That was the series when he had a toilet seat thrown at him.
His later career of a hair-growth ambassador was hilarious.
Greg Dyer. Onto the wicket-keepers then. And this is where the Australian derision becomes just so easy. Two of them make this side, and there is not even room for Ian Healy; that’s how tough the competition is.
That catch down the leg-side off Andrew Jones in the Boxing Day test of 1987 was as comically bad piece of cheating as you are likely to see. Sure enough, Bruce French gave him out. To Cricket Australia’s credit, Dyer didn’t play a lot after that.
Brad Haddin: It is cheating a bit to include two wicket-keepers, but that seems appropriate. Speaking of cheats; here’s Bad Brad.
He hasn’t learnt humility or decency or anything like that; a couple of weeks ago he was spitting in Virat Kohli’s face; going on about a badly executed run.
And then there is his wallpaper stripping voice…
Mitchell Johnson: MJ hating is typically more of an English than a New Zealand thing, but there is this piece of genius entrenched in the psyche. Seriously; head-butting a guy wearing a helmet?
There’s that Davey Warner intellect effect that we all love so much coming into play again.
Brett Lee:
Three beamers to the same batsman across several years (Brendon McCullum) is not accidental; it’s actually pretty nasty.
No amount of subsequent Bollywood cheesy music videos should ever mask that fact.
Had by Haddin. What a bastard. And the annoying monkey, Matthews-I’ll never forget that Eden Park cheating ‘catch’ off Hadlee as I was there and pretty nearby. Paddles had just smacked a few to the boundary and an unlikely win was just starting to look a bit of a possibility until the cheating monkey struck…
I’m all for being very competitive & never taking a backward step in sport, but any fieldsman claiming to have caught the ball when they actually haven’t is real lowlife stuff.
No Steve Waugh? There was the deliberate go-slow in the 1999 WC with the aim of knocking NZ out. And the sanctioning of borderline-illegal bullying and intimidation, and popularizing it with those phrases (“mental disintegration”, “hard but fair”, “aggression but without crossing the line”). And the absolute refusal as captain to reign in his players when they got out of hand.
It hasn’t been easy picking this XI; so much competition.
Good call how SWaugh introduced the “Mental Disintegration” term. But we can’t go too hard on the go-slow tactic; Fleming used it to eliminate SA from a Tri-series final a couple of year later.
Even ‘Irongloves’ himself, Rod Marsh wasn’t averse to a bit of skullduggery. Two examples spring to mind: Betting with Lillee at the bookmakers at odds of 500-1 DURING the test that England would win after about the third day of the famous Headingley match in 1981. Then there was no small matter of kicking the ball away from us after setting off for a risky single in a one-dayer at Perth in 1982-83; there’s no doubt it was deliberate. Interestingly, both controveries attracted pretty much only retrospective attention.
Marsh wasn’t quite all shades of dastardly however- he did after all bellow ‘”no mate” to the snake dressed in canary green and yellow, Greg Chappell as his lackey bro’ Trev shaped to bowl that mully-grubber at the ‘G on 1 Feb ’81.
Imagine if that Lillee / Marsh bet happened now. They’d be banned for a long, long time.
Re the kicking the ball away; my hazy memory of that is that he was expecting to be given out; couldn’t believe he’d got away with it.
Yes, they’d certainly be for the high jump nowadays- quite amazing they did that really isn’t it? And just as an aside, re. the Australian uniform colour scheme- what I should’ve in fact said was: Canary yellow with slime green. Rather appropriate for that day, don’t you think?
To be fair betting like that was legal then, and it’s not now.
True. I was meaning Canary yellow with slime green for the day of the underarm in fact.
Time to revise this lineup?