Failure to ban Marcus Stoinis after slur sees homophobia wins as officials dodge issue
Marcus Stoinis hit the right note with his sincere apology for an on-field homophobic slur, but the fact he was fined rather than banned for the offence proves officials just don’t get the seriousness of the issue.
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Marcus Stoinis should not have played the Big Bash match against Sydney Sixers where he scored a record 147 from 79 balls.
He should have been serving a ban, but it turns out it wasn’t such a bad thing. Some good came for it — and it wasn’t the performance with the bat.
Strange how life goes. Wrong process. Right outcome.
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On January 4 Stoinis called another player a “f**king faggot”. It was an insult that echoed and bookended an incident from the earliest days of the summer when James Pattinson said the same thing to an opponent in a Sheffield Shield game.
What a curious coincidence.
Both times the term was directed at opponents who were or are teammates in another format. On neither occasion did the game stand up and reveal what was said and on neither occasion was the player banned for what they said.
Pattinson paid a fair price, he missed the first Test, but we were told that was because he had an accumulation of demerit points. We can assume that under the current code of conduct he would have got away with it if he didn’t have priors.
We know that Stoinis got away with it because the punishment was $7500. No ban. Pass Go. As you were.
It was a slap on the wrist and that’s what’s nagging about this. The game doesn’t seem to get how serious that offence is, the first reactions of players and coaches has been to defend, excuse and equivocate. Wagons are circled, comments aren’t forthcoming. Condemnation remains in the corner.
They look as comfortable fronting this reality as the Coalition is fronting the reality of a climate changed.
There’s always some way to muddy the waters.
Marcus Stoinis got it and he should be applauded for that. He looked sheepish before making a duck in the following game. In the next match he belted 21 boundaries in an extraordinary display of T20 power hitting. He used that moment to address the issue.
“There’s absolutely no excuses,” he said.
Better still, he didn’t make any. He went on, but the tone was the same.
It was surprising that a man like Stoinis would use such an ugly slur. He takes a male friend on dates to cricket events, he and Adam Zampa are the two most humorously metrosexual cricketers to have played the game.
They’re very comfortable in their own skin. They make shopping videos where they dress up in outrageous clothes because they are a touch outrageous.
In years not long passed they’d have been labelled with the phrase he used just for daring to be different. Bigotry lives long in the dark corners of sports dressing rooms and small, frightened hearts — or it does until somebody shines a light on it and proclaims it intolerable. That a person like Stoinis could say it hints at how deep the roots of homophobia are in male sport and in most of our backgrounds if we dare to explore deeply enough.
It’s a learning curve for the male game and one it needs to accelerate along.
Compare and contrast Stoinis’s reaction to others.
Cricket, as noted, gave him a slap on the wrist. A fringe female player makes a joke on Instagram about a game not played and is suspended for 12 months to send a message. What sort of message does a slap on a wrist send?
Either way they are wrong. They look defensive around a subject they need to be transparent about.
The reaction around the Pattinson ban was even more depressing. So many excuses were made.
They were mates so it didn’t matter. The person called a “faggot” has kids, so how can it be bigoted? The person called the faggot didn’t care.
One of the officials was gay, so, you know. Pattinson isn’t a homophobe. It was the heat of the battle.
What happens on the field …
Even Pete Siddle, vegan and animal rights activist, made excuses for his mate.
“He’s always going to be a player that’s going to be pushing the line,” he said. “His brother did the same thing when he played for Victoria back in the day. It’s just a part of the game. That’s why we love him. That’s why Australian cricket loves him.”
Stars coach David Hussey said similar things about Stoinis.
Yeah, nah. Twice.
Neither Pattinson nor Stoinis consider themselves homophobes, but have had to confront the fact that when they lost their temper they reverted to hate speak.
Let’s get things clear here: the F word is the equivalent of the N word. It is completely taboo. It’s the extreme end of all gay slurs. There’s no context that excuses it.
I realised that when I saw the look on a gay friend’s face when he heard the Pogues song where Kirsty MacColl sings to Shane MacGowan “You scumbag, you maggot, you cheap lousy faggot, Happy Christmas your arse, I pray God it’s our last”.
I thought it was funny and permitted in context. I was wrong.
Imagine what it is like to be wrestling with your sexuality and hearing somebody spoken to like this. Closet door gets a bit harder to open. Shame gets a bit deeper. The gulf between you and the gang gets wider.
Pattinson got his response wrong, not because he is a bad person, but probably because he is not as articulate as Stoinis and almost certainly because he is still very much of the old school.
Hidden from media inquiries for over a month, when he was asked he made the same noises as those making excuses for him. I understand he was abject when apologising to the team on the eve of the match, inconsolable, but his public stance wasn’t a good look.
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“And I suppose if that’s pushing the line, it’s pushing the line,” he told Nine newspapers ahead of his return to the game.
“But I think obviously when you go through setbacks like that and getting suspended you have to obviously, you know, think about that a little bit more. But again, I think I get the best out of my cricket when I’m, you know, when I’m getting up there and, you know, going 100 per cent so, you know, I think I’m not going to hold back.
“Obviously there’s a line, sometimes you cross it and I think I look back on that. You just sort of you know, you learn from those mistakes and you try to address them.”
You can’t blame someone for not getting it when, to varying degrees, the game they play doesn’t.
Originally published as Failure to ban Marcus Stoinis after slur sees homophobia wins as officials dodge issue