That Cricket Australia even has that many people working for it is a red flag, and tells a story. So, the administration of cricket in this country is a bloated corporate.

As is the way of bloated corporates, Cricket Australia speaks in cliches, endlessly signals moral virtue, is run by marketers, is unspeakably greedy, has overseen cricket’s effective division into two separate sports, has reflexively covered up its many errors, and has thoroughly abandoned its grass roots.

CHEATS

It retains cheats on its books and sacks decent people. It hasn’t seen a woke cause it didn’t like.

The Australian newspaper’s cricket writer, Gideon Haigh, asks: Do you like the Australian cricket team? In bygone days this question would have made no sense.

Haigh explores the question “why we’ve fallen out of love with the Australian cricket team”.

Amidst the verbiage, he provides little more than an unconvincing, anti-populist apologia for the Australian cricket team, especially its captain.

Another pundit has weighed in: Brett Lee says the fan backlash towards the Aussie cricket team can be solved with one simple change — winning.

If only it were that simple.

To pick on just one issue, it is greed, essentially that has led to the “crowded schedules” that everyone complains about, as if the world’s cricket administrators themselves didn’t have a say in these schedules.

One perceptive English cricketer (Moeen Ali) recently described all the endless white ball cricket – if, indeed, the white ball version of the game can even be called “cricket” – as “meaningless”.

Correctly, Ali also used the word “contextless”. The three one day internationals to which he referred, following on from a whole month of white ball games, meant that Australia’s premier test cricketers were prevented from actually turning out for their States in the Sheffield Shield, the traditional nursery of test cricketers. To their eternal shame, cricket’s millionaires seldom do their States the courtesy of appearing in their colours.

I remember one Australian captain during the high-water mark period of one day internationals not even knowing who they were playing next in two days’ time.

The core cause of Greg Chappell’s mental meltdown in February 1981 which led him to win at all costs by instructing his brother to bowl the last ball underarm was his utter fear of having to play another bloody one-day game two days hence.

Yes, much of it is meaningless. It is there to provide vacuous entertainment for vacuous people who mistake overrated pleasures for underrated treasures (with apologies to Jimmy Dorsey).

It is the cricket equivalent of MAFS (marriage at first sight) style television. Or, perhaps, “the cricketer wants a contract”.

Speaking of contracts. Then there are the players.

First, we had the era of sledging, of “mental disintegration” as its chief protagonist, Steve Waugh, called it.

WEAPON

These days, a very old looking Waugh sells solar panels on television. Sledging can be funny and effective. But not when it is the core philosophy of the team and its chief weapon.

Back in the day, a cricket team’s chief weapons were batting, bowling and fielding. You crushed the spirit of opponents by attending to these core skills, not by systematic verbal abuse.

In any other workplace – for it is now a workplace to the people involved – you would be sacked for routinely verballing abusing others. Not these folk.

For them, bullying is a way of life. One of the chief bullies complains that he is excluded from leadership positions within the “playing group”. He is extremely lucky even to be there.

Feeling sorry for himself while he “earns” millions. Especially as he now can hardly score a run against the red ball to save himself. I will get to entitlement shortly.

Then we had the era of cheating.

Yes, they all do it. And yes, there are grey areas, say in relation to ball tampering. That doesn’t make it right.

When you become a laughing stock through your bungling incompetence of cheating, that doesn’t help, either.

Next, we had the era of entitlement.

Obscenely well-paid players and ex-players with $10m beachside mansions and private jets to ferry them around, who still whinge that they are not paid enough. They were whinging in the 1970s when all the bloated salaries started.

Back then, also, the whole thing was about television rights. The disastrous, unintended consequences of Kerry Packer’s self-obsessed revolution are scattered all about us now. The game is all but unrecognisable.

Then we had the era of sackings for doing no wrong.

Think of our former coach and our former captain, who between them salvaged what little reputation we had after the infamous Newlands (South Africa) affair.

SACKED

Justin Langer, sublimely successful, ruffled feathers. Our new captain, who has since emerged to be the prima donna’s prima donna, effectively got him sacked. He didn’t approve of coaches ruffling feathers.

Tim Paine was sacked when a private matter was leaked to the press. He said dirty things to a fellow employee, who said dirty things back.

All I can say is, thank God this sort of ersatz morality wasn’t around in Keith Miller’s day. Our greatest all-rounder (by a fair stretch) and war hero wouldn’t have lasted five minutes in the team, given some of his exploits off the paddock.

They say that the Australian cricket captaincy is the second most important job in the country, after the Prime Minister’s.

Whatever the truth of that in our age, we might also rejoice that excellent prime ministers like Harold Holt (1966-67) and Bob Hawke (1983-91) weren’t hounded from office for their private sins.

Now Tim Paine struggles to get a game for Tasmania. He did nothing wrong to warrant his ill-treatment. He saved our national cricket reputation with his sheer class as a leader. Along with his coach, he was bullied out of the team.

Finally, we have the era of public bleating by cricketers over Left-wing political causes.

Our captain now dictates who the team’s sponsors will be (despite the plausible deniability associated with the associated PR).

WARMING

Certain energy companies are unacceptable sponsors because he, the Australian cricket captain, thinks that the earth is warming. It isn’t. That it matters. It doesn’t. That we can do something about it. We cannot.

Who even needs to know what this upstart thinks about anything other than cricket? National “climate policy” – itself an oxymoronic and ludicrous notion – that will cause gross, possibly existential harm, bankrupt the nation and destroy lives, has been outsourced to cricketers. Useful idiots, Lenin would have called them. (The term midwit had not yet been invented).

And now he and his team are taking on the global non-problem of racism. “Doing their bit” by a show of cringeworthy white guilt. Joining the Marxist BLM cause. George Floyd, take a posthumous bow.