Cricket scandal review: Gideon Haigh and Geoff Lemon on Australia's disgrace

CRICKET

Crossing the Line
Gideon Haigh
Slattery, $24.95

Steve Smith's Men
Geoff Lemon
Hardie Grant, $29.99

It is the modern way to conduct at least two inquiries into a scandal. Cricket Australia followed this course in April this year in the wake of Sandpapergate in Cape Town, empowering one probe to look into the workings of the team and another into the culture Australian cricket generally.

CA were beaten to the punch. By the time the reports were melded into one and released, explosively, last week, two other reviews were already in circulation in the form of Gideon Haigh's Crossing the Line and Geoff Lemon's Steve Smith's Men. The inexhaustible Haigh might have been speaking also on behalf of the intrepid Lemon when he said that his account of the "omnishambles" was "less official, far cheaper, but genuinely independent". He could have added more erudite, too, and more timely.

Haigh interviewed about 50 players, ex-players and officials, most anonymously. One day, we will hear from them in their own voices, in books and interviews, nothing surer, but while they remain under contract to CA or obligation to friends still involved, it could only be this way. It is almost the point.

Crossing the Line is a remarkable feat of pulling focus in a short time. It is full of grainy detail without blurring the big picture. As ever in Haigh's writing, the prose is deft and distinctive, worth reading in its own right, but above all made to serve the project of forensic fact-gathering and logical storytelling. It is why he calls himself a journalist, not an author.

Lemon is a poet, and looks and writes like one. Steve Smith's Men is more lyrical, but less forensic than Crossing the Line, psychoanalysis as much as analysis, vivid in its on-the-ground eye-witness perspective to complement Haigh's kind of jurist's overview.

Lemon's book is rich in metaphor. Batting in (Perth) conditions is "like drinking Fernet: fierce if you're unaccustomed, delicious once you acquire the taste," he writes. "Smith relished it." On the next page, on Mitch Marsh facing spin: "He was a Clydesdale trying to pick blackberries with its teeth." But Lemon is no mere trickster. His book includes the most lacerating damnation yet of the way Candice Falzon, David Warner's wife, was demonised, and of sport's feudal treatment of women generally.

Haigh, too, writes in layers and registers. His interrogation nearly complete, he dwells philosophically on Australian cricket's superiority complex: "It's not even a particular pride in cricket, but the arrogance of wealth and privilege. In this there feels decreasing scope for cricket to exist organically, spontaneously, joyfully." He writes as an undying fan of cricket, but disillusioned with the Australian cricket machine. "I cannot deny that the big cricket I am engaged in watching and writing about feels less precious, less special, less representative and less part of civic life than it used to; more the property of a commercial and bureaucratic elite puffed up with its own importance."

What emerges from both books is a grim account of an ever-growing bureaucracy, an ever-more cloistered team and an ever-growing distance between them. In Crossing the Line, you can hear the gears grinding as they change from year to year, captain to captain, coach to coach. You can sense the jaded atmosphere among the players, so indulged, but also so regimented – "enjoyment" is a box to be ticked, like balls bowled or laps run – and under so much pressure to honour the winning imperative, though at least one of Haigh's informants says this "muscular ideology" did not come naturally to many of them.

You can see where the players' own code, their Spirit of Cricket, suddenly disappears from the paperwork. You can feel the wear and tear. Haigh says Justin Langer, as a visitor in 2017, "was shocked at the dressing room's degeneration, its inward focus, its pervasive hauteur. Yet that was a brittle cockiness, masking weakness and unease." You can divine the lack of resilience in the face of the outcome that must not even be countenanced, defeat.

Lemon, who was pitchside for the ABC in South Africa, interweaves cover drives and clips off the pad with a discussion of the reverse swing conundrum – both at the heart of and incidental to the whole saga – all the while detailing the escalating animus in the series and its wearying physical and mental toll on all, and the way it clouded judgments.

For a poet, he packs a punch. It is clear to see that when the high moral ground was South Africa's for the taking, they tried to burrow their way to it, all too typically, I have to say

And yet the question that starts both books still lingers half-answered at their ends. Haigh says his working thesis is that "no one goes to bed honest and wakes up a cheat". Yet at least three woke up one day having completely lost their moral bearings. In the end, he and we are trying to make sense of a loss of senses. Of one thing, Haigh is sure: that it was too neat, too quick and too smart by half to pin it all on only three men. Duly, the CA inquiry agreed.

Lemon's insight also was ahead of the curve. "At its upper levels, CA has developed a culture where aggression isn't just tolerated, it's encouraged," he writes. "Where accountability isn't just lax, it's eliminated. Where enemies are are created and the culprits are rewarded. CA of the last few years has been abrasive, selfish and immune from consequence. It would have been a miracle if its cricket team had been anything else."

Stop me if you've read that since. CA's consultant, The Ethics Centre, got a fat fee for its work; Haigh and Lemon got enough for a new pair of trousers each. Who'd be a writer?