Category Archives: Shumpty Speaks

What next in the Blake Ferguson saga: an explanation of the legal steps

June 18, 2013 By in Shumpty Speaks Tags: , , , Leave a comment

I have long been bothered by the rampant disinformation about matters of law sprouted by the sports journalists of this country when a player gets into trouble. To make matters a bit clearer for fans I thought I would commit to writing what the process is from here, as I see it, for Blake Ferguson.

Let’s start, obviously, with the charge: Ferguson has been charged with, as far as I can glean, one count of indecent assault. I have no knowledge of the facts leading to the charge and make no comment about them. What follows is a generic explanation of the next steps based on my experience and a little confirming research.

Obviously, though rarely it seems reported in cases involving sportsmen, every defendant charged with a criminal offence in this country is considered to be innocent until proven guilty beyond reasonable doubt. This is a immutable right that every individual in Australia has and which is enshrined in the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights which has been ratified by Australia.

Most reports make much about the fact that there is another Court date coming up for Ferguson in July. If you are a watcher of American legal dramas you may have cause to think that this will be when the trial occurs. Sadly, justice does not operate that quickly in Australia or, frankly, in an 1st world jurisdiction.

Assuming Ferguson pleads not guilty the process between now and a trial could take anywhere up to twelve months or more. This is because, in part, in Australia for offences such as that which Ferguson is charged with it is necessary for the parties to go through a committal hearing which is a hearing before the Local Court at which the prosecution must place before a magistrate its evidence to determine whether there is sufficient evidence upon which the defendant may be convicted at a trial.

The period between the charge and the committal hearing is punctuated with mentions of the matter before a magistrate that deals with matters such as the continuance of the defendants bail and the provision of the evidence upon which the prosecution wishes to rely at the committal and later at trial.

At the committal hearing the magistrate can decide whether the matter proceeds to a trial before, in the case of an indecent assault charge before a District Court judge or to dismiss the charges. If the matter proceeds to a trial that will be another delay for another series of mentions that will again go to the question of bail, the evidence that both sides want to put at trial and any legal questions the parties have. All of this takes time and thus a swift resolution to this matter should a not guilty plea be made is unlikely.

It is, of course possible for negotiations about charges to occur before a committal and before a trial. Following negotiations between the prosecution and defence, in some cases the accused may agree to plead guilty to a lesser charge e.g. assault occasioning actual bodily harm becomes assault, or to the same charge but with the facts changed in some respect.

All in all this is a long and drawn out process, in the case of a not guilty plea at least. A swift resolution could only come from negotiation between the parties, if the complainant withdrew her complaint or upon a guilty plea. I, for one, will be watching with interest the next steps the parties take.

Player Behaviour: Ferguson, Dugan, Tamou, Warner and the lament of a fan

June 17, 2013 By in Shumpty Speaks Tags: , , , , Leave a comment

The events of today in Rugby League in Australia have again led to a player being suspended from a representative game and have his contract, for all intents and purposes, ripped up (I am aware that his registration has been suspended and not cancelled but lets be honest, that is the next step). The punishment meted out on Blake Ferguson tonight, it must be noted, is as a result of a series of breaches of the rules surrounding player contracts regarding alcohol and bringing the game into disrepute. Tonight’s incident was just the straw that broke the camel’s back it seems.

If the ultimate outcome hypothesised tonight, that Blake Ferguson will be out of a Canberra Raiders jersey for at least the rest of the season, becomes a reality then the issue of player behaviour will leave the Canberra Raiders without, arguably, their two best players for the remainder of the season. I am a Canberra Raiders fan and as a fan of this proud club that fact leaves me feeling more than a little let down.

Add to that the fact that the other Canberra Raiders player to have his contract terminated this season is already playing rugby league for another club and, apparently, is about to rewarded with a multi-million dollar contract and my anger at the state that the conduct of these two players has left my club in rises.

Just to focus on the impact that player behaviour is having on the Canberra Raiders though it short sighted in the extreme though. The indefinite suspension of Blake Ferguson is only the tip of the iceberg when it comes to bad player behaviour this season. Indeed until the Ferguson issue many thought the problems with player behaviour in the NRL had reached their epoch with the dangerous driving and unlicensed driving charges laid against James Tamou last week. I am sad to concede that this week’s events have raised the spectre of player behaviour to a whole new level.

The events of last week though also show that the issue of player behaviour is NOT isolated to the NRL. David Warner’s alcohol fuelled punch of an opponent should leave watchers of sport in no doubt that it is not just the NRL that has a problem.

Now many will say that to suggest that a particular sporting code has a problem because of the conduct of a few is a sweeping statement that is ill considered and ought not be made. However, I am not just saying that: the facts indicate a much worse scenario; that sport (in general) in Australia has problems with player behaviour. I have mentioned four examples from a veritable smorgasbord of conduct that goes to this point. If you need any further convincing you can easily add the drugs in sport scandals that are going in the AFL and the NRL, the issues had by the St Kilda AFL club a couple of years ago and the ongoing poor conduct of Kurtley Beale and Digby Ioane in Rugby Union to the list of conduct that even to a sight impaired observer must be indicative of a broader problem.

I think it can be plainly stated, and I am not going to shy from saying, that there is a problem with behaviour in the ranks of professional sportsmen in this country. As a fan of sport I openly lament that the conduct of whom I believe to still be a few in a minority has such a broad impact on the standing of the whole of codes of sport and indeed sport in general but that is where I think we are at at the moment.

As a sports fan I have heard every excuse under the sun for poor player conduct from the players have too much spare time on their hands through to it is society’s fault for placing these young men on pedestals. I am sick to the back teeth of the excuses: just because players have a massive disposable wealth, only work a couple of days a week and are treated like gods does mean that they can, without penalty, break the law and last time I checked kids are still taught at school that breaking the law is wrong.

That fact gets me to the second lament of this post: have we as a society moved so far that the players of our sports actually do not believe that the law applies to them? I heard a very interesting interview with the player welfare officer from the Parramatta Eels on the weekend (on ABC Grandstand) in which he mentioned that getting young players to actually get a license, despite the often high powered cars they drive at least to and from training, was a massive problem for clubs. If it takes a player welfare officer to ask for a copy of the license of each player to start the process of actually getting these 18-25 year old men their first license is that not indicative of a disregard for rules and the law that is both alarming and also obviously has the potential to escalate into incidents such as those of yesterday evening?

I have no solutions that have not already been raised or that are not obvious. The fact is though that if these young men do not respect the basic laws of the land such as having a license to drive a motor vehicle will any of the solutions work? I am a strong advocate of a duel approach of holding all but money for the bare essentials in trust for young players until they are retired from the game coupled with forcing young players to have a job outside of the sport they play. Whether this would have the effect of stopping the players breaking the law I do not know. What I do know that making the players live on $50K a year out of their contract surely would make it less likely that they would on the grog on Sunday night before going into State of Origin camp, for example.

Sport in this country has problems and player behaviour is right at the forefront of those problems. With competition for kids activities never stronger from the likes of Apple, Nintendo and the like why would an unknowing parent chose to place their child into an environment as obviously troubled as one of the sporting codes when they can stay at home fully supervised? I know that is an extreme example but can anyone tell me that is not where we are heading?

The fact that things seem to be heading that way is an abomination and an affront to the 99% of sportsmen who work extremely hard to play the games that they love and who do not wantonly break the laws of this country. It is those players for whom I lament the state of the games they play because all of the good that they do is washed away by the conduct of a few. It is easy to forget that almost 250 players took the field in the NRL at the weekend and only 1 has been suspended indefinitely because of his conduct off the field at the end of said weekend.

So I leave this post with a challenge for readers: whilst we, as sport fans are lamenting another case of poor player conduct bringing one of the games we love into disrepute, do not forget the exemplary conduct of those many many players who do conduct themselves in a manner befitting their station in life. To forget such conduct means that sport in this country could find itself in serious trouble sooner rather than later!

The Nathan Lyon Conundrum: the second inning fallacy

June 13, 2013 By in Shumpty Speaks Tags: , , , , Leave a comment

I wrote earlier in the week about Nathan Lyon and the obscene haste with which Fawad Ahmed seems to have been pushed forward as his replacement. I received a large number of comments with respect to that post but a common refrain was that Lyon was not a performer under pressure in the second innings of matches. I found this to be an interesting argument and sought to look deeper at it.

Simply put: I consider the argument that Nathan Lyon is not a performer in the second innings of matches, when he is supposed to be winning games for Australia, is an absolute fallacy. What follows are my reasons for this view:

Venue

Nathan Lyon has played 22 test matches for Australia. Those test matches took place at the following venues for the following results:

Lyon #1

Considering the venues in question, it can only clearly be said that the Indian venues and possibly Sydney and Adelaide are what might be termed spinning wickets or even wickets on which a spinner would be expected to win a game for his team. Simply, Lyon has not played a plethora of games at “spinning venues” to date.

How much is Lyon actually bowling?

Obviously comparisons will be made between the various spinners in the game at the moment. Here are the statistics on current spin bowlers playing test matches for their respective countries presently and their records in the second innings. I have filtered this table to only include performances since the retirement of SK Warne:

Lyon #2

The results of this analysis are obvious: Nathan Lyon only bowls some 14.54 overs in the second innings of matches. This, when compared to his fellow spinners, is arguably consistent with significant underbowling. The best bowlers of this period have consistently, in the second innings of said matches bowled, on average, more than 10 overs an inning more than the Australian spin bowler. Simply: if he is not being given the overs to bowl how can he be expected to take wickets?

The 4th Innings: that is the real question

The problem with the blanket statement that Nathan Lyon is a non-performer in the 2nd innings of matches ignores that quite often a bowler will actually be bowling in the 3rd innings of the game rather than the 4th innings. If the question is one of performance under pressure by Nathan Lyon then surely the 4th innings of matches needs to be considered and, further the target that Lyon has had to bowl at. The following table is instructive:

Lyon #3

There are some compelling points that come from this table:

1. The last 3 tests Lyon has played have seen the opposition team, India, run down small targets. He has bowled a high proportion of overs in those innings in obvious losing causes. He can not be blamed for this.

2. If you exclude the last 3 tests in India, Australia’s record when bowling in the last innings of a test match to win it is simply outstanding with only one loss to the South Africans in Capetown the only blemish. It is compelling that in that game Lyon was only given 3 overs over 50.3 on a seaming wicket and that Australia was trounced by 8 wickets.

3. I concede that there are some games in this list that Australia has won where I would have expected Lyon to play a bigger role in the win. However, there are reasons for this: for example the game against Sri Lanka in Hobart was one dominated by fast bowlers and in which Lyon played a key roll in keeping one end tight whilst the fast bowlers where rotated.

4. The draw against South Africa in Adelaide is a game that sticks in the mind of many. I think people need to look again at this game though because Lyon is the only spin bowler in a game that took a wicket. Indeed the spinner from South Africa, Imran Tahir, had game comparable to that of Bryce McGain’s first test and has not been sighted since for the Proteas.

So where does this leave N Lyon?

The fact is that at venues where one would expect Nathan Lyon to lead the Australian bowling attack to victory, particularly in India, he has never been given enough runs to actually bowl at to do so. In games that Australia has won and he has bowled a large number of overs in the final innings of the game he has, to be frank, played a significant positive roll in those victories whilst not always being the match winner. That, of itself, is admirable given that he is bowling for captain who does not bowl him anywhere near as much as his contemporaries from other countries.

To suggest that Nathan Lyon is not a “pressure bowler” and does not bowl well in the final innings of games is not supported, in my view, by the objective evidence. Of course many people will have a subjective view and that is based on their own experiences watching him play. I simply ask those of you with that different view to take a look at the numbers above and reconsider!

I think Australian cricket has, continues to, do Nathan Lyon a disservice by the seemingly constant pressure being placed on his position. He can only bowl when he is asked to and within the construct of the match situation given to him by the other ten players on the field. To say that he has done anything other than his job and that he is anything other than a solid international spinner is just a fallacy.

Postscript: the tables created for this post have been done by me from score cards retained on the Cricinfo website. Any errors are my own and I apologise for the bad formatting!

Come in spinner: why is finding one for the Australian team so hard?

June 10, 2013 By in Shumpty Speaks Tags: , , , , , Leave a comment

It has long been the lament of fans, pundits and journalists alike that in the “post Warne” age we (Australian cricket) have not had a consistently selectable or, indeed, match winning spin bowler. This problem has become so “acute” in the prelude to the coming battle for the Ashes against England that the parliament of Australia has seen fit to change the laws of immigration in this country to allow for the fast tracked citizenship of a 31 year old leg spinner from Merguz in Pakistan who has played only 13 first class games just so he may be available.

Before the “Era of Ahmed” a compendium of spin bowlers used by Australia since 5 January 2007 (when the “Era of Warne” ended) reads like this (this list necessarily removes batsmen who bowl a bit): 

SCG MacGill (4 matches)

GB Hogg (3 matches)

B Casson (1 match)

CL White (4 matches)

JJ Krejza (2 matches)

NM Hauritz (16 matches)

MA Beer (2 matches)

BE McGain (1 matches)

XJ Doherty (4 matches)

NM Lyon (22 matches)

GJ Maxwell (2 matches)

Australia has played 67 test matches in that span and have won 33, lost 21 and drawn 13 of same.  The present incumbent, Nathan Lyon, comes into the Ashes with a record that shows that he has taken 76 wickets in his 22 test matches at an average of 33.18 runs per wicket and with an economy rate of 3.12 runs per over. 
Am I alone in considering those numbers to actually be good numbers and, indeed, unworthy of the pressure being placed on Lyon’s place in the team by seemingly all and sundry including Cricket Australia?  Let’s consider for a moment the records of the other spinners presently playing test match cricket and see how the record of Lyon compares (the qualification make for this exercise is 20 wickets taken):

Player  Games Wickets Average Economy 

Swann  52        261       28.69      2.91 

Singh   44         175       35.79      2.86 

Herath  35         165      28.48      2.71 

Ajmal    26         133      27.6        2.66 

Ohja     22         102      31.78      2.68 

Ashwin 16          92       28.53      2.89 

Patel     18         49        49.02     3.22 

Vettori   39        131       34.66     2.45 

Panesar 35       122       33.8       2.71 

Mendis   17        64       34.2        3.08

Looking at this numbers now and comparing those of Nathan Lyon to them is all of the angst about his place in the Australian team and, indeed, the pressure being exerted by Ahmed’s selection really warranted?  His performances and statistics are all the more admirable give that he plays the bulk of his matches in Australian on less than friendly pitches, he rarely has the support of a second spinner and he has been, it must be conceded, poorly captained by captains who are themselves seemingly remembering the days of Warne.
Despite those impediments he is still tracking to have similar numbers at similar times as players of the stature of Singh, Vettori, Herath or Panesar.  I am more than a bit certain that Cricket Australia and cricket supporters of the Australian team would happily accept any of those players in the current lineup.  So, at the risk of becoming repetitious but still restating the question, what is the problem with relying on N Lyon? 
The answer to this question gets on back to an examination of the question posed in the title to this post:

Why is finding a good spinner for the Australian team so hard?

It must be clear from what has gone above that that question is unfair stated or, in fact, redundant because Australia already has a good spinner in Nathan Lyon.  The problem is that the Australian public, pundits and, possibly, players are NOT looking for a good spinner.  Rather they are looking for an answer to this question: 

Why is it so hard to find the next Shane Warne?  

That is a question that can simply must be answered this way: we will never find a spinner like Shane Warne again.  Therein lies the rub: we, the Australian cricket public, pundits and players, are searching for something we can not and will not ever have again.   Until we as a cricketing nation can get our heads around that immutable truth we are going to continue to “burn” our clearly good spinners with the pressure that comes with expectation.  Surely now it is time to get behind Nathan Lyon and back him to get the job done because, simply put, we already have a good spinner in him. 

On player behaviour: time for some credit where it is due

June 10, 2013 By in Shumpty Speaks Tags: , , Leave a comment

The question of the behaviour of sportsmen has been a topic of regular comment on this blog.  I have bemoaned the lowering of standards of behaviour and praised those clubs and codes prepared to make a statement about such behaviour.  I have commented on domestic violence and sportsmen and the massive double standard that seems to pervade such cases.  In the interests of, therefore, fairness it is important also recognise when a player of sport conducts himself in a positive way.

Quade Cooper and his conduct in recent weeks has been nothing short of exemplary and deserves our acclamation.  Simply, has there been a player under more scrutiny from the fans and the pundits in recent weeks? The focus of attention has been on Cooper because of the ongoing saga of his selection or otherwise in the Wallabies squad to face the British and Irish Lions.  During the totality of the recent weeks when all and sundry have been talking about whether he would be selected and, more particularly, the “feud” with Robbie Deans he has remained respectful and honest in his work with the media and has continued to play solid, if not error free, rugby.  
If the story, and this blog, ended here such conduct would still be worthy of acclamation particularly in light of where Cooper was behaviour wise last year.  Certainly under more scrutiny now than ever before his “toxic culture” comments and certainly baited by some quarters in the press he has kept his mouth shut and clearly has shown that he has learned from his previous falls.  However: this is only half the story. 
It has now been made official that he will not be in said Wallabies squad to face the British and Irish Lions.  I have commented vociferously about that on twitter and will let my twitter comments and lack of future attendance at Wallabies games speak for themselves in that regard.  
Since the announcement that Cooper was not to be selected in the Wallabies squad he has conducted himself in a manner, in my view, beyond reproach and deserving of acclaim.  His interviews about this topic, whilst others have bayed for Deans’ blood, have been direct and honest without bring himself or the game into disrepute.  More particularly, when faced with an abusive “fan” yesterday evening in a pub in the suburbs of Brisbane and doused with a full beer, he declined to take the first punch and declined to get involved in a physical confrontation. 
Evidence from years past suggest that this is not the approach that Cooper would have taken previously and it is the maturity shown in not rising to the bait of a physical altercation having just had his British and Irish Lions dream shattered that must now impress those who previously have been “haters” of the person Cooper is without knowing him other than to read about him in the paper or watch him play the beautiful game.  
We are quick to jump all over the players of sport that we watch when they make a mistake.  We are less swift to give them the acclaim they warrant when they conduct themselves in the right way and, indeed, show that they have learned from the past.  
Well done Q Cooper: for how you have conducted yourself in the face of the scrutiny surrounding the “Deans feud” and for your conduct in declining to take the first punch.  I, for one, salute you!