Yeah nah, Glenn McGrath

Cricket Australia postures on breast cancer and persecutes a sick employee

When I contemplate the summer, my thoughts turn to the cricket, in particular, the test cricket that is on offer for us to watch live, at the ground, or live, on the telly. A first test, usually at the ‘Gabba, maybe one in Perth, and a day-night test in Adelaide, then the big one at the ‘G on Boxing Day. To round it out, finally a fifth test in Sydney. That’s when my excited anticipation starts to wane, as I remember that for the 15th year in a row, I’ll be browbeaten about breast cancer.

Glenn McGrath used to play cricket for Australia. His wife the late Jane McGrath was diagnosed with breast cancer and died in 2008 at the age of 42. The McGrath Foundation was established in 2005, to ‘Provide supportive care nursing for the patients and families impacted by breast cancer.”

The spectacle of the fifth test, now widely referred to as the “Pink Test” in a reference to the colour of the merchandise sold by the foundation, resembles more and more a sort of pagan festival.

In the lead up to the test, deference is paid to the living deity, Glenn McGrath, with endless media audiences proselytising the foundation. Interviewers recite a credal statement to the effect that the foundation is wonderful. The Sydney Cricket Ground is adorned in pink.  The faithful wear pink clothes, and buy pink merchandise. The high priests wear a special pink set of ‘whites’, and their bats have pink handle grips. The stumps are pink. Various saints or supporters of those with breast cancer parade, in pink, on the ground at breaks in play.  Worshippers are treated to heart-rending montages of patients and nurses on the TV and at the ground. Someone has suggested to me that part of the explanation might be that participating satisfies a need to belong, to a group, to a movement, to society. Fair enough.

This has happened now for 15 years straight, and there’s no end in sight.

Too bad Cricket Australia doesn’t embody “supportive care” for its own players. They’re perfectly happy to vandalise every part of the SCG with an orgy of pink paint, to show how wonderfully supportive they are of those unlucky enough to suffer from breast cancer. But when it comes to showing true care, actually DOING anything that will help AN ACTUAL PERSON, an employee no less, they are found cruelly wanting.

Matt Renshaw, a contracted player, who happens to have contracted Covid, AND IS FEELING UNWELL, cut a forlorn figure while rain halted play. His team ‘mates’ presumably were comfortable, warm and dry in the dressing rooms overlooking the playing arena, able to help themselves to a hot cuppa or a biscuit while waiting for the rain to stop.

Renshaw, on the other hand, was shown standing rugged up, masked, in the rain, on the field, excluded from the rooms with his so-called team mates. Not one of them had the decency to go and offer him a cup of lemon tea, let alone stand with him in the rain to keep him company and ask if he was ok. I wonder if his ‘need to belong’ got a helping hand? Perhaps he feels like he belongs to a group of outcasts. It’s a big club.

Not that we expected his teammates to stand up for him. This is the same set of team ‘mates’ who a year ago sat on their hands when their newly-minted, and current, captain Patrick Cummins was prevented from playing because he had been in the same cafe as someone who tested positive for Covid, even though he was not feeling unwell and tested negative. Once upon a time, the rest of the team would have said “Turn it up, if he doesn’t play, then none of us play.” They are a bunch of cowards who are happy to kneel down in the manner popularised by BLM before the start of the test match against the West Indies earlier in the summer. But actually show a spark of human kindness to a real person standing right in front of them, in the rain? Sorry old chap, no can do, COVID protocols, don’t you know. Where was his captain? Maybe doing the crossword.

Who is it at Cricket Australia who dreamed up these protocols and then insisted that a sick Renshaw stand in the rain? Was it their own idea or was he or she acting at the direction of someone in government? Is he or she just a cruel bastard, or a patsy of a some bureaucratic tyrant? Perhaps the truth is more benign, and a good Samaritan did indeed put their arm around him, or mop his brow, or get him some vitamin D and C to speed his recovery, and we just didn’t witness it. But these days, ‘optics’ count, as Cummins will tell you while he takes the knee. Evidently Cricket Australia, the SCG management, and the McGrath Foundation are comfortable with beaming TV pictures around the world of a sick employee standing in the rain. Otherwise someone would have rushed down to the fence and beckoned him inside, away from the cameras. A more cynical take is that not only are they comfortable with the mistreatment, but may actually have leapt on the chance to propel the ‘social distancing’ narrative, and the masking narrative, either of their own volition, or at someone else’s behest.

I won’t be watching the rest of Pink Test, nor the next 15 annual Pink Tests, if it lasts that long. Perhaps the whole thing will ‘die suddenly’ one day. You can tell me about it, if you must.