{"id":7055,"date":"2018-03-29T12:46:17","date_gmt":"2018-03-29T10:46:17","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.desertsun.co.uk\/blog\/?p=7055"},"modified":"2018-03-29T13:40:20","modified_gmt":"2018-03-29T11:40:20","slug":"crocodile-tears-of-a-nation","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.desertsun.co.uk\/blog\/7055\/","title":{"rendered":"Crocodile Tears of a Nation"},"content":{"rendered":"

This is pathetic<\/a>:<\/p>\n

An emotional Steve Smith has broken down in tears addressing the ball tampering affair that cost him the Australian cricket captaincy and a one-year suspension from the game.<\/p>\n

Smith cried on several occasions during the press conference in Sydney and had to be ushered from the room shortly after raising how he’d let down his father.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

You cannot one minute be leading a team of swaggering, foul-mouthed yobs who are forever telling their opponents they should “man up” when they make the slightest complaint about your conduct, and the next be crying like a girl on television because you’ve been fired for your own blinding stupidity. Either you are catastrophically weak as a person and should never have been in such a position of leadership, or you’re putting it on in order to garner sympathy.<\/p>\n

Nobody would mind if Australian cricketers behaved as gentlemen, as the New Zealanders do, and got a little emotional as Brendon McCullum sometimes did. It is the flip-flopping from one ludicrous extreme to the other that I find so grating, and which I mentioned in my previous post<\/a>. But this is probably a symptom of the country as a whole: for all Australians’ reputation as being tough, frontier folk (which they undoubtedly once were) they are rapidly becoming a nation of insecure, rather pathetic individuals desperate to score woke points from one another with excruciating displays of political correctness and virtue-signalling. They claim to be tough and uncompromising, but live in the world’s leading nanny-state. They want to be seen as confident, but can’t abide the slightest criticism of their country even if it’s something both obvious and undeniable.<\/p>\n

I’m being unfair to a lot of Australians, and I know many who don’t fit the description above or subscribe to the cultural Marxism which infests the country’s politics. But this is what makes it worse: Australia didn’t use to be like this, and it can still produce sensible people, but they seem to be lost at sea without a rudder. Instead of trying to tread a normal, sensible path they lurch from one extreme to the other, yelling from the rooftops in a manner which seems extremely artificial. Not everything<\/em> needs to be hyped up to eleven.<\/p>\n

Could Steve Smith and the rest of the Australian team not just gone out there, played cricket, done their best, and bask in either the glory of victory or go home and lick their wounds? That’s what every other team does, it doesn’t have to be the travelling circus it’s been turned it into.\u00a0England might not be very good at cricket, but you can be sure they won’t disgrace themselves in New Zealand other than by way of the batting and bowling stats. You sure as hell aren’t going to get the whole population goading the team into behaving like fucking idiots resulting in the tour literally ending in tears. And sure, cricket isn’t as big in England as it is in Australia, but football is and when the English team gets bounced out of the World Cup in Russia at the group stage it’ll only be a handful of fans who disgrace themselves.<\/p>\n

Australia needs to seriously grow up, and this process can start with their cricket team. Steve Smith should dry his fucking eyes then get back out and make a proper apology without all the theatrics. Their new captain then needs to tell his men to shut their mouths and play cricket, and keep it that way.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

This is pathetic: An emotional Steve Smith has broken down in tears addressing the ball tampering affair that cost him the Australian cricket captaincy and a one-year suspension from the game. Smith cried on several occasions during the press conference … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[62,5],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.desertsun.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7055"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.desertsun.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.desertsun.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.desertsun.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.desertsun.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=7055"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"http:\/\/www.desertsun.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7055\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":7059,"href":"http:\/\/www.desertsun.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7055\/revisions\/7059"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.desertsun.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7055"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.desertsun.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7055"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.desertsun.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7055"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}