Amanda Smith: This week, more around our summer game, cricket.

THEME

Travel anywhere around Australia at the moment and sooner or later you'll see a bunch of people on an oval, batting and bowling that little red ball to each other. Today, we're discussing the role of the State competition, the Sheffield Shield, in Australian cricket. And also, going back before the Sheffield Shield, to the period when inter-colonial cricket was established, to the brilliant and tragic figure of Thomas Wills, 'the Grace of Colonial Cricket', as well as founder of Australian football.

Martin Flanagan: He was like a house designed by five different architects, because he grows up among Aboriginal Australia, he has a dominating father, he goes to the Rugby School, which is entering its greatest period of renown. He then has the massacre of his father and the rest of his party at Cullin-la-ringo in Queensland. And then finally he has that long twilight, which comes to sportsmen at the end of their active career. So he has these five enormously different, intensely dramatic experiences.

Amanda Smith: That's Martin Flanagan, whose new novel about Tom Wills tries to understand Wills' contribution to Australian sport in relation to those events in his life. More on that later in The Sports Factor.

First though, to contemporary cricket. While West Indian cricket has just been thrown into turmoil over a pay dispute, Australian cricket is settling down after its long, sometimes acrimonious dispute that included threats of strike action. In September this year, the Australian Cricketers' Association and the Australian Cricket Board struck a collective bargaining agreement for the pay and conditions of Australia's first class cricketers. One of the big changes in the new agreement is the amount of money Sheffield Shield players can earn from the game.

Former Australian Test and Shield player, Tim May, is the president of the Australian Cricketers' Association, which argued strenuously for the pay increase, on the basis of the importance of the State competition to Australian cricket.

Tim May: Yes Amanda, the problem that we had before was that there was a lot of time and commitment expected of individuals in the State system. And not all States, in fact the minority of States only, had contracts for players. So everything was basically 'commit all your time and we'll just pay you on a match to match basis'; there was no security for the players. So the big thing for us was getting this agreement whereby there are standard contracts that go to everyone who's in the various State squads. And they can range, there's just a minimum of $5,000 for the guy who just comes out and trains all the time etc., up to a maximum of $40,000. But that's in addition to their match payments. So the guys do have some sort of level of security and that's obviously very pleasing to us. We recognise Shield cricket is the crucial stage of cricket within this country; I think it's a sort of a catchment area of cricketers and it's also the nursery to the next level. So I suppose it's probably the most important research and development stage of cricket.

Amanda Smith: Yes. Tell me a bit more about why you argued so strongly for that increase for Shield players and that role of Sheffield Shield cricket in this country.

Tim May: I suppose it's certainly very much an argument of a cricketer who's played in the Shield system, and also played Test cricket. And I think you'll find that during the dispute with the Australian Cricket Board, it was the Test players that were leading this and saying 'We need more money going back to those guys'. And the reason that that is the case, is the guys appreciate how good a competition it really is, and these guys are competing with the Test players when the Test players go back to Shield. And they know that the reason they're playing Test cricket and they're such a good player, is because they've played against these guys down at this level, and it is such a great level of domestic cricket. And it's been recognised as the best domestic cricket competition in the world. And you have the elite blokes putting up their hand and saying 'Well what about these guys? Because they are contributing to the wealth of Australian cricket, and please let us not ignore that'.

Amanda Smith: What advantages does our domestic competition, our State competition, Sheffield Shield, have over, say, over English county cricket and that system?

Tim May: I think there's certainly a lot of comparison between the two. And I think the main thing is that in the Sheffield Shield competition you don't play every day of the week. I think the more you play the less hunger you have for the game, but you must always strike a balance. You can't say 'Well OK, let's just have two Shield games a year' that's ridiculous, because then people aren't attracted to the game and therefore you'll lose a lot of the athletes. So playing each State twice and having ten games for the year over a four month period or so provides I think just the perfect balance of competitiveness. You don't go through this daily grind of 'Oh if I miss out today well then I've got another hit tomorrow' which I think basically is the mentality sometimes of the English cricketer. And if you're playing, as they do over there, they play six out of seven days a week for five months of the year. I don't think people realise that, and so their fast bowlers are only operating at 75% and spin bowlers probably only operating at 75%, knowing that they can't tweak the living daylights out of every ball that they bowl. So naturally, the competition is only operating at 75%. So I think that's the vital difference: we don't play as much cricket as them, we're not worn down by the process and we're at our best and always at our competitive best for every particular game and every day.

Amanda Smith: Now, as you mentioned earlier, the new schedule of player payments includes a base rate, a kind of retainer, plus match payments. Which is like I suppose incentive, or performance pay. Now in other workplaces, incentive or performance pay is usually there to motivate workers who don't like their jobs. I wouldn't have thought that that was the case with cricketers; I don't think cricketers would have to be motivated to want to get into their State side or the national team. Are you happy with that structure therefore?

Tim May: I think ideally I'd like to see the abolition of match payments on a match to match basis. Or significantly reduced from the percentage of the remuneration that a bloke takes home at the moment. Certainly there's a great commitment from the player that's expected from the Australian Cricket Board, and I think that that commitment should be extended by let's say a greater deal of security. I think these guys are looking for security, I think these guys who basically commit to this profession should be given a security. Now whether it should be 100%? I know the AFL football players' association and the AFL have come to an agreement that down the track (and I think it's even next year, or the year after) that players won't be paid on a match payment basis, they will have a contract: 'Here it is, you're on $30,000, you're on $150,000, you're on $300,000. There you go.' And I think there are benefits for both parties. There's the surety of the athlete and he's able to perform at his optimum because he doesn't have this 'God! I've got to perform today or else I'm not going to get any money'. And the fear of the administrator, of course, is that 'Well, I don't have to perform because I've got this amount of money guaranteed for a certain amount of time'. Okay, my answer to that is then they don't understand a sportsman's psyche. When a guy goes out there and he's playing for Australia, he's playing for his personal pride. Every time he goes out there. And I think that's the important thing to note there. So I'd like to see that day come around certainly where their security as a percentage of their total remuneration is increased significantly from where it is now. Obviously the extreme is 100% contract and I know footy's going that way, but I think we'll get along there, but I don't think we'll reach 100%.

Amanda Smith: Tim May, president of the Australian Cricketers' Association, and a former Sheffield Shield and Test player for Australia.

Now each year in Australia, a Churchill Fellowship is awarded to someone to undertake study overseas on a topic related to cricket. The winner of this year's award is an umpire. Darrell Holt has been umpiring first class and district cricket in Victoria for 22 years, and he's using his fellowship to go to the UK in the hope of bringing back ideas about how to improve cricket umpiring here.

Darrell Holt: The Churchill Fellowship, when it was first mentioned to me, I thought we could perhaps develop some sort of a project where we could see what they are doing in other countries. And I guess I picked on the United Kingdom because we know that there are some things they do in the United Kingdom, particularly in the area of examination and evaluation of umpires, which is probably ahead of what we're currently doing here in Australia.

Amanda Smith: Now when W.G. Grace, the great English captain, left Australia at the end of the 1891/92 tour, his main plea to cricket authorities here was to improve the standard of umpiring, which he said was deplorable in Australia. Now I presume it has improved over the last 100 years or so?

Darrell Holt: Well we would hope so! I think with today's technology, people read more things, they understand where they've got to go to get certain information. Cricket umpiring is mainly to do with laws and rules, and there are now some good publications out on cricket umpiring. And my guess is that the actual knowledge level has increased dramatically. We obviously haven't got any better eyesight or better hearing, but the knowledge of people who are undertaking it has increased. So hopefully we've improved a little bit since W.G. Grace.

Amanda Smith: What still needs to be improved though?

Darrell Holt: I think the first thing that needs to be improved is the recruitment. At my level, at the Victorian Cricket Association, they've obviously got enough umpires, because we just pick the eyes out of the other cricket associations. But if you wander around the suburbs on a Saturday, or up the country, you'll see lots of games of cricket being undertaken where the players themselves are actually umpiring the game. So there is a lack of cricket umpiring. That's the first thing.

The other thing that needs to be improved I believe, is the examination of the knowledge of the laws and rules that umpires have. Certainly we know in England, to become a member of the Association of Cricket Umpires and Scorers over there, they require a very strong pass mark in a very difficult examination. Here in Australia we do test our umpires and we do have an accreditation procedure, but it's not to the same extent that's operating in other countries.

Probably a third thing that is required here is a better look at how the performance of umpires is actually assessed. In Australia, traditionally cricket administrators go on the reports submitted by captains at the end of the game. I tend to believe that we should be following what other sports are doing, and having a much more wider assessment.

Amanda Smith: And a more independent assessment?

Darrell Holt: More independent, and assessing a lot more details of what the umpiring job is all about. Umpire technique, umpire's knowledge, physical fitness, those sort of things.

Amanda Smith: Darrell, in your 22 years of cricket umpiring, have there been occasions where the players have got to you? Where you've been perhaps unnerved by the intensity of appeals, or the players' reaction to a decision you've made?

Darrell Holt: Officially, no. But unofficially, yes, we're human beings. If you can get through a game without having caused anybody any aggro in the game, if you can get by in the game of cricket where you haven't given anybody out that wasn't out, you can go home reasonably happy. But there are many situations in the game of cricket where not everybody sees the decision you've given as being the correct decision or the right way to go. And I guess that's part of the psychological welfare of being an umpire: you've got to hack the bad stuff with the good stuff. Hopefully the enjoyment overrules any of the bad stuff that sometimes comes out in a game of cricket. But yes, many times, at all levels, you know you've disappointed some of the players.

Amanda Smith: Well to the observer, there does seem to be in some ways an almost spiritual calm about cricket umpires. Do you find the experience of umpiring meditative, or are you a mass of nerves and tension underneath a calm exterior?

Darrell Holt: I can assure you sometimes our hands are sweating and the perspiration's running down our trousers because the pressure is on. It's a cauldron effect, particularly at first class standard. The secret of course is to try and maintain your composure, and the people that are obviously very good at that are more respected than the person who looks a bit jumpy about it. I would imagine that most umpires around the world have experienced the difficulty that they're under pressure, and that they've got to try and maintain calmness. We had a famous Test umpire in Australia, Robin Bailhache, who always used to say he felt like a duck swimming: it was nice and quiet and tranquil on top, but underneath his legs were paddling like billy-o. And really, that's the way you feel, but the better umpires don't show that nervousness.

Amanda Smith: Cricket umpire Darrell Holt, the recipient of this year's Churchill Fellowship for cricket.

On the 11th November, 1880, the notorious Australian bushranger, Ned Kelly, was hanged in Melbourne. A few months earlier, in the same city, another flamboyant, but now lesser-known figure came to a violent death. At the age of 45, Thomas Wentworth Wills committed suicide by stabbing himself in the heart. Although he died a penniless alcoholic, this was the person who had dubbed the 'W.G. Grace of Colonial Cricket', as well as having been the central figure in the invention of Australian Rules football.

Author and journalist Martin Flanagan has spent the last five years immersed in the life of Tom Wills and his contribution to Australian sport. And the result is a book, released today, under the title of 'The Call'. Interestingly, Martin Flanagan has chosen to write a novel about Tom Wills, rather than a biography.

Martin Flanagan: Above all else I wanted to bring him to life. And if I'd written it as a biography, if I'd observed the principles and laws of biography, I would have had to say 'viewed from this angle, he appears this way; viewed from that angle he appears to be that'. I wanted to create a living presence. I wanted to put this person, this character, into Australian folklore in the way that Les Darcy is in Australian folklore, in the way that Victor Trumper's in Australian folklore, in the way that Ned Kelly is in Australian folklore. That was the single aim with which I began the book.

Amanda Smith: You cast Tom Wills as a character of tragic genius. What was his genius, and what was his tragedy?

Martin Flanagan: His genius, if we accept that there is such a thing as sporting genius - and you'd be thinking about people like George Best; in the Australian context possibly Laurie Nash - people who approach sports with very well established patterns of behaviour, and take an entirely novel view and approach to them. That would be my definition of sporting genius. Wills had that. Having grown up, his father was the first white settler at Ararat, he grew up with the Djabwurrung people who played Aboriginal games. Then at the age of 15 he was sent to Rugby School in England. And by the time he's left there, he's dominating the school at sport. He's the captain of the Rugby XI. And he is listed in Bells Sporting Life as being one of the most promising young cricketers in England.

He comes back to Australia and he promptly revolutionises Victorian cricket, because Victoria has never defeated New South Wales. And that is a far more serious matter then that it is now. It's more like the need that South Australia and the Crows have to win the AFL. It's about the identity of a state overthrowing a larger, more powerful one. So it had a lot of political ramifications. They'd never done it; he promptly led them to victory. He then said 'We could win in Sydney', which no-one thought they could. He believed they had to toughen up. And then it would become an issue of codifying the game of football. And again, at that time, people presumed because he'd been to Rugby that rugby would be the game that would be introduced, and he famously declared 'No, we shall have a game of our own'.

Now at that moment, he opened the door on the possibility of an indigenous code of football. And what makes him so remarkable is that this was a time when all our models and patterns of behaviour were being imported. And here you have this young man who says 'No, we'll have a game of our own'. And this is a period in sports history when the captains, particularly in these sorts of games like football, the captains made the rules as they went along. And Wills, which again is consistent with his genius, fought with everyone, nearly everyone, not exactly, but nearly everyone. And in that sense he's something like John McEnroe. Like when John McEnroe argued with umpires, if you ever listen to what he said, there was logic in it, it was just that everyone else had agreed on a different set of rules. Well that was the position Wills was constantly in. He could see a way, but eventually he brought the whole sports establishment down against himself. His period of political eminence is very brief, it's only about 12 months at most. Thereafter he's always on the edges and increasingly moving out to the edges. So he has that quality about him.

The sense in which he's tragic, that's really interesting because I think the modern sense of tragedy is that a person must be knowing of the magnitude of what they are attempting to do and what it is they risk failing to do. I don't think he had that, I don't think he realised that he was in fact imprinting a whole different model for Australian sport. But he is in the classical sense, he's tragic, in the sense that character is destiny. He is an Australian Icarus. He is the young man who takes it for granted that he can reshape the world as he sees fit. He is the young man who thinks he can fly by the sun. He is the young man who crashes.

Amanda Smith: What was the influence of his education at the Rugby school in terms of that sporting outlook, or outlook on the world?

Martin Flanagan: Very, very important. Rugby would have been huge, a huge experience. The school had the great headmaster of that period of English history in Thomas Arnold. Arnold had died I think seven years before Wills got there, but he had completely changed the character of the school. He had incorporated the boys into the government of the school, and his philosophy was that of muscular Christianity. He wanted young men who were rugged enough to deal with the reality of the new age that was dawning: the industrial cities, the crime, the pestilence, the disease; young men who could walk through this. He didn't want people retiring into monasteries, he wanted young men who could walk into the reality. And games were of value, because games could teach spiritual values. And if you read 'Tom Brown's Schooldays', that book begins with an account of the old village games, but the villages have been destroyed the Industrial Revolution, and Arnold saw that, and he saw that there had to be some response to it, and that there had to be new leaders for the new age. And at the end of the book, Tom Brown sees that games like cricket and football are necessary, because they teach team work, and they teach a different sort of leadership. And Tom Wills gets back to Victoria in December 1856, 'Tom Brown's Schooldays' hits Victoria in 1857. In some minds, Tom Wills is Tom Brown. In fact when I was doing research on the book, this elderly woman in Queensland told me, she said, 'You do understand, don't you, that Tom Wills is Tom Brown'. Well I knew he wasn't, because Tom Brown's based on Thomas Hughes, and Thomas Hughes' brothers, and they were at Rugby in the 1830s and Wills didn't get there till, as I say, Dr Thomas Arnold was dead. But there was this confusion, he did have this cultural power from this meeting and merging of cultural stereotypes.

One of the reasons that he was such a disappointment to his father was that when he came back from Rugby, so magnificent in so many ways, on the sports field he was this absolute mountain, but off the sports field his life was chaotic.

Amanda Smith: Now H.C.A.Harrison, Colden Harrison, a cousin of Tom's, was also an important figure in colonial sport. And it became really Harrison, rather than Wills, who was later dubbed the 'Father of Australian Football'. There's an interesting quote in your book where Harrison is described as an athlete, whereas Wills is described as a sportsman. What's the difference?

Martin Flanagan: I think that's a journalist of the day, and I think the point he's making, he believes Wills was the great leader. I think he saw Wills as a sportsman with all the command of strategy which that word implies, but Harrison was an athlete, that is, someone who runs because he loves running and has a gift for running.

But the point about the relationship between Harrison and Wills, which is enormously interesting because when I said earlier that I think Wills fought with almost everyone, I don't think he fought with Harrison. But the sporting and cultural elite in Melbourne at that time was basically English and English educated. Wills was probably the only Australian among them, and he got access because he'd been to Rugby, and nominally to Cambridge, though in fact he never did go to Cambridge.

Amanda Smith: He played cricket for Cambridge?

Martin Flanagan: He played cricket for Cambridge. Now Harrison got entry into those circles through Wills. Wills then being the turbulent, creative type - and basically Wills was a leader, he was nothing else, he couldn't take second place or third place - so he shoots through this company like a comet and ends up in the dark lonely spaces on the outside of Victorian society. But Harrison is a cautious, conservative fellow. He stays within the institutions, and eventually climbs to the top. And in sport - sport always bears a relationship to the politics of the day, always. And by the time of the 1908 Jubilee of Australian Football in Melbourne, Wills has been dead 28 years and is a largely forgotten figure. Harrison is the former Registrar-General of Titles for Victoria. So in addition to having been a great athlete, which he undoubtedly was, he might have run a world record for the 400 metres, and having been a great footballer, he is also a model citizen.

Amanda Smith: Martin, Tom Wills also captained an Aboriginal cricket team in 1866 and '67, the Australian Native XI, which was the side that toured England in 1868, the first team ever to represent Australia overseas. Now why didn't Wills go on that tour, given he'd been so involved with the team up till that time?

Martin Flanagan: Well I've taken the view that it was to do with his alcoholism. And the fact that on the tour which he accompanied the Aboriginal team, which was up the east coast of Australia, I think four of them died, and there were murmurings that there had been drunkenness in the team on a pretty consistent basis. So the matter of who took them became a major issue. But that was an undoubtedly, I think, very sad thing for him, because had he gone back to England as the captain of the Aboriginal team, not only would they have performed better, there is the possibility they would have beaten the MCC at Lord's. The Aboriginal team led the MCC at Lord's on the first innings but then lost. With Wills they might have won. That would have been I think the crowning moment of his career, because then he would have been, in effect, 'Tom Brown' who had taken the games back to the colonies and then brought it back to England. I think that is how he would have seen it.

Amanda Smith: What was his attitude and relationship with Aboriginal people though Martin, because his father and 18 others were killed by Aborigines in Queensland in 1861, in a massacre, and Tom was one of only two survivors of that?

Martin Flanagan: Well it's known that he spoke an Aboriginal language, he could sing their songs, he collected their weapons of war. The cricket team which toured England came from the Western Districts of Victoria, he had grown up in the Western Districts of Victoria. It would appear that he grew up with the Djabwurrung, their language was a contiguous language to that spoken by most of the players, that he spoke that language with them. So there's every reason to believe that he had a connection with Aboriginal people. And I suppose what's so important is to understand this in the context of the times. This country was hit very hard by Social Darwinism, and the idea that the inferior races would die out. That was a very big idea. The racism in Australia at that time ranged from the highly paternalistic to quite vicious racism. Now he exists in all that, yet he appears to have retained, throughout his life, a completely simple and unclouded view of Aboriginal people. And he doesn't stand as a great Christian reformer, he just stands - it's sort of like Botham's relationship with Viv Richards and Joel Garner at Somerset. You know, it's that affinity which great sportsmen have for one another, because they speak a different language and they speak it commonly. A lot of people don't realise, because sport is so commonly, particularly in Australia for some reason, sport is often belittled and put down, but for example the southern States of America, baseball was a major force for desegregation. Because sport has its own dynamics, and there are aspects of sport which are pretty troubling, but sport does have certain dynamics which push to other results. And on the whole, sport has been a force against racism, you'd have to say that.

And my sense of Tom Wills is he was a great sportsman, and he appreciated it as a child at a very early age. He understood that Aboriginal people had a great ability at sport, and he loved them for that. In the aftermath of the massacre, he was obviously deeply disturbed, you know, he made belligerent statements at that time, but there's no evidence he ever joined any retaliation party. And there is some evidence that he was admitting Aboriginal people back on to the property. So I'm not making him out to be a Christ-like figure, but I am saying that those qualities which made him a great sportsman, which is that in a sense insularity, and that singularity of purpose, incorporated into that was an appreciation of Aboriginal people which was not typical of people of his age.

Amanda Smith: And you believe that Wills was influenced in his development of a game that became Australian football by Aboriginal games when he was growing up as a kid in Western Victoria?

Martin Flanagan: You've got a series of things all meeting at one point. There's no denying that the early organisation of the game was done by Europeans. But what makes Wills remarkable is that Wills has this Aboriginal influence early in his life, and then he resists the English form of the game, because he knows it's not the only game, because he's seen other versions of it. Now he just opens the door, the game evolves after that. Now clearly Australian football has remarkable similarities with Gaelic games, and there is a great Irish influence in Victoria at that time. And it's coming out of the Eureka Stockade and it's building up to the Kellys and it's alive and vital and spirited and loud, and a lot of that bleeds into the poetry of the game and into the spirit of the game. I've got no doubt about that.

What I can say about Australian football, what I can state as a fact, is that whatever melting and merging of influences created it, is that Aboriginal people around Australia believe it is an Aboriginal game. And what makes it so important to me is that it is a place where white Australians and Aboriginal Australians have looked at each other over a relatively long period of time with minimal distortion, and in a public place. Now that has happened very rarely. So as a result of that now, we've got this thing which - although we're still importing culture, we're still trying to work out who we are despite the flooding of American images, far less perhaps European images now, but American images - but here we have this game which undoubtedly comes out of this land, by whatever combination of forces. But this is where it comes from. It has white legends and it has Aboriginal legends, so it's culturally unique. And I love it. And I want other people to appreciate it fully.

Amanda Smith: Martin Flanagan, and the place of Thomas Wills in Australian sporting culture.

And that's The Sports Factor for this week. I'm Amanda Smith; look forward to your company again next Friday.

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The Sports Factor can be heard on Radio National, 8.30am Fridays (Repeated Friday evenings at 8.30pm).