NOT so long ago Australia held almost every international trophy on offer from the sports it contested.
The national trophy cabinet was bursting with silver and gold. World cups, the Bledisloe and the Mandela cups, rugby league, rugby union, cricket, hockey, netball – we excelled at them all.
But a significant and often overlooked event wiped out our prowess within a single generation.
By 2020 Australian sport was a write off. The once proud (and invincible) sporting nation was ranked fifth by the ICC in test cricket and fourth in the one day game. It was ranked an appalling sixth in rugby union and second in rugby league. Second! The list of failures goes on.
What happened and why so quickly?
FOREIGN
Some commentators blamed what appeared to be an overdose of foreign coaching staff. They just didn’t have the Aussie spirit to inspire success, we were told.
Others said we’d filled our teams with too many foreign born players. Our international teams are now filled with ex-pats from the nations we used to thrash, they said.
Yet others said the staging of the 2000 Sydney Olympics had made Australian sport “artificially” successful and things were now returning to the pre-Olympics status quo.
To top it off, Labor PM Julia Gillard and her sports minister Kate Lundy were blamed for wreaking havoc in 2013. They falsely claimed doping was rampant in Australian sport and proceeded on a witch hunt that destroyed too many sporting careers and weakened too many sporting teams.
But the problem is bigger than all of the above. And has now infiltrated every field-based sport in every part of the nation.
COLLAPSED
The problem was first observed while watching Australian teams play in wet weather.
In short, they almost always lost – badly.
They constantly dropped the ball, they slipped over, their scrums collapsed, they fell off tackles and they played as though they’d rather be rugged up indoors sipping cocoa.
The image of a damp Kurtley Beale slipping and landing on his backside while attempting an easy match-winning penalty goal against the British Lions in 2013 summed it up in an instant.
The reason modern Australian athletes rarely win in wet conditions is because they rarely play nor train in wet conditions.
Over the past 20 years, local councils have closed down sporting fields at the slightest hint of rain. They say it’s for health & safety or to protect the playing surface or to save money or for some other bland reason.
MUDDY
Meanwhile the trophy cabinet is bare.
Could you imagine if New Zealand or the UK closed their fields every time it rained or snowed? Their kids would never get a game.
No, it’s only the over-regulated Australian kids who suffer.
It’s time councillors got out of the way and let kids get a bit muddy now and then. As they were encouraged to do when Australia was winning.PC
MAIN PICTURE: Playing in the mud is a lost skill in Australia (courtesy corporate-games.com)
This is so blindingly obvious. As always, there is some truth in all the reasons and yet a major truth mentioned was hidden in plain sight, albeit the lenses were muddied up!
Also – remember we exported our best coaches in all sports overseas around 2000 because we believed that our dominance would kill off interest in the various sports internationally and we needed to strengthen other countries to create genuine contests?
Trouble is, along the way, our arrogance caused us to lose sight of our real strength – our mongrel underdog status that was the source of our humility and self-respect.