Sandpaper and all that: behind the scenes with the Australian cricket team
A fly-on-the-wall documentary gives us unprecedented access and bursts the side’s famed ‘gilded bubble’.
“I just hope people can relate to us,” says Mitchell Marsh towards the end of The Test, an ambitious eight-part documentary series tracing the Australian cricket team from the damnation of Sandpapergate to the salvation of the Ashes. “We’re just normal blokes playing cricket.”
It’s a commonplace observation but unusual to hear in this context. Australian cricketers are generally loath to do more than the bare media minimum. Access to them has been steadily sterilised and sealed off. Even autobiographies and tour diaries, those Father’s Day staples, have dwindled. Thus the “gilded bubble”, as the realm of elite cricketers was described in the Ethics Centre’s scathing 2018 appraisal of Australian cricket culture.
As much as it was an ethical lapse, however, Sandpapergate was also a brand crisis — one that had been building for a good many years, Cricket Australia having failed to read its own market research runes.
The public had soured on the Australian team long before Newlands; events that day merely provided a rallying point. So now the dressing room doors have opened, Cricket Australia holding them for Amazon.
And though glamour and prestige still sell, “relatability” is a criterion of value whose time, in these levelling days, has come.
(For the purposes of the subtitle, tellingly, they are not the “Australian team” but “Australia’s team”.)
This may sound cynical. It’s not. The unexampled degree of access that Australian cricketers have offered to the makers of The Test is an artefact of how keenly they felt the shame of two years ago, and how genuinely they wish to be better understood.
“I’m fully supportive of this project,” one-day captain Aaron Finch told executive producer Adrian Brown when they first met. “I’ve been wanting to do something like this for a long time.”
Spinal Tap territory?
It should not be underestimated what a huge deal it is for them to have welcomed outsiders into what had for the 140 years of Australia’s involvement in international cricket been a sanctum sanctorum. Dressing rooms see the best and worst of their occupants. And the fly-on-the-wall documentary is ever within touching distance of the excruciating: thus David Brent, Spinal Tap, Borat et al.
Early on, Brown admits, he had no idea how he would string out an eight-part series; he thought he might be able to guarantee two hours, like Outsiders (2017), his documentary about the Western Bulldogs in their premiership joy.
Later, Brown felt completely overwhelmed by the abundance of material at his disposal. Every training session and team meeting was filmed; every player was interviewed multiple times; every game threw up incidents, dramas, successes and failures.
An estimated 2300 hours of vision — equivalent to 96 days — was shot. There were so many stories. Which of them was he meant to be following? He likens the project to trying to complete a jigsaw puzzle even as additional pieces are being continually thrown in.
In fact, Brown seems to have just about nailed it, and the players to have been rewarded for their trust in him. One comes away with the feeling that it could easily have been longer.
One of Brown’s great challenges is that there is not one Australian team but three: the Test, one-day and T20 teams. This has the effect of turning coach Justin Langer into a narrator, insofar as he is the only continuous voice — and continuous is used advisedly, because the likeable Langer is a great talker.
This in turn presents a problem, which Brown strives valiantly to address: is Langer always the best judge of his own handiwork? Sometimes, we get a hint, not even Langer is sure.
There is an excellent juxtaposition of scenes in episode one, where Langer is shown battling his temper with the team after consecutive defeats in Australia’s one-day series against England in June 2018. As the team is trussing itself in theories, Langer complains: “None of you are good enough to have theories yet!”
Next we see Langer walking into a coach’s meeting, where he asks his staff for feedback: was he too harsh? Strength and conditioning coach Aaron Kellett observes that Langer has hitherto been preaching “process”, and could that be at odds with such an abrupt emphasis on outcome?
Langer relents, a bit. “I can’t be saying ‘process process process’ and be affected by us losing two games,” he acquiesces. “Yeah, I agree 100 per cent with that.”
Then: “It’s just me emotional about losing. We want to win, don’t we?”
Later, there are glimmers of tension between Langer and his charges, against Pakistan in the UAE (episode two) and India in Australia (episode four), with Usman Khawaja frank enough to hint that the coach is causing him to think negatively, fearful of error, rather than freely, according to his nature, and that others share his feelings. Shot in indifferent light with quiet audio, you feel as though you’re listening at a keyhole.
The art of letting go
Langer again equivocates. He nominates 2019 as “the year of letting go”.
He is observed to smile in the dressing room. But it is easier said than done.
In episode six, the rehabilitated David Warner is seen at odds with himself at the outset of the World Cup. “Something was over me,” he confesses, as his fluency is checked by the fear of failure.
Interestingly, it is not Langer who cuts through this, but Ricky Ponting, temporarily Langer’s assistant coach.
“If you’re caring about getting out, f..k that,” says Ponting reproachfully. “You want to be thinking about getting runs, not about making a mistake. I’ve been there. Start thinking about making mistakes as a player, you’re f..ked.”
You can see the message sink in at once — and for the rest of the Cup, Warner flourishes.
In episode eight, the Australians respond to their defeat at Headingley in the face of Ben Stokes’s last-day onslaught — and by now the camera has achieved such familiarity in the dressing room, more than a year into filming, that players show only the slightest awareness of it.
Captain Tim Paine is, in the circumstances, vastly impressive. As his players droop in the dressing room afterwards, ashen and exhausted, he exhorts them to stay the course. “The process we’ve got in place is going to win it,” he says.
The next day, Langer insists the team watch a replay of Stokes’s last-wicket partnership with Jack Leach. They are clearly uncomfortable. Nathan Lyon, fumbler of a run-out, is seen watching through his fingers. Marcus Harris, dropper of a catch, squirms.
Langer is obsessing over a single that Paine’s field setting allowed Stokes to retain strike at the end of an over.
Paine is trying to defend himself and the team: “We didn’t panic. We didn’t shit ourselves. We tried our best. We had a crack. A bloke had a day out.” Finally, he concedes the field placing. It is uncomfortable viewing.
Australia, of course, wins the next Test, and retains the Ashes. So who has been right? Those who are straining to accentuate the positive? Or their coach, who wants them to look the negative in the eye? Perhaps the point is that preparation for sport is all at once in conflict between the objectives of building confidence and of banishing error, both being needed.
Coaching’s mysteries
Alternatively, especially where coaching is concerned, we frankly don’t know. We are heavily invested in the idea of coaches having “messages” that they “communicate” to players — a simple, one-way process.
But particularly in cricket, where players are so autonomous, this relationship is surely more dynamic. Maybe the best that can be said is a kind of paraphrase of Lord Leverhulme’s famous line about advertising: that half the effort in coaching is wasted; the trouble is that no one knows which half.
Anyway, this is where The Test is at its strongest. If it does not answer these questions, it allows us to ask them. If anything, one comes away with a higher opinion of Langer, so passionate, so committed, dedicated to making a difference even where he can’t, his weaknesses perhaps the excess of his virtues.
About 30 Australian cricketers passed through the three national teams in the period dealt with by The Test. If there is never the danger of us forgetting who they are, there is the challenge of keeping up with how as individuals they are going.
At any one time, a sporting team is composed of those going well, averagely and badly. It’s arguable that The Test doesn’t spend enough time among the last. Those dropped vanish from view — although, to be fair, this reflects the actuality.
It has proven too difficult to capture, for example, the eclipses of Khawaja and Cameron Bancroft, Mitchell Starc’s languishing on the sidelines and David Warner’s ruinous run of outs in England.
In a way, the trials of Finch — who, in and around three abortive Test appearances in 2018-19 also went a dozen short-form matches without passing 30 — act as their proxy. You would be hard-pressed not to like Finch. He is modest, unselfish, funny, good-hearted. Yet in cricket, bad things are always happening to good people.
Hardest to watch is Finch falling in the second innings of the Adelaide Test of November 2018, when he declined to review a catch to short leg, feeling what he thought was a ball glancing off his glove but which proved, on replay, to be his pad.
“F..k!” storms Finch as he learns of his mistake. “F..k me!” Langer turns his back on the player in his own fury.
Later, we follow Finch in the car after another day’s failure, driving home and slumping on the couch to watch television with his wife and a beer in a dimly lit room. He might be any Joe Sixpack unwinding after a downer of a day at work. He’s been talking to his coach, he explains. “Yeah, was a good chat.” A beat. “Just not getting any f..king runs.”
Finally, Finch does — which allows the scope for hindsight reflection. “There were times I was waking up in the middle of the night and thinking about getting out,” he confesses.
“‘I’m facing Bumrah tomorrow. He’s getting me out for fun.” Waking up in a cold sweat, thinking: “Bhuvneshwar, he’s getting me out a lot with the ball that’s coming back in.
“At the start it was: ‘I’m in a bit of a lean patch and it’ll come good.’ Then I genuinely thought I could be left out of the World Cup as the captain of the side.”
No cricketer will fail to identify with such sensations.
There is, too, the random cruelty of injury. Sequences showing injuries to Khawaja and Shaun Marsh during the World Cup feel almost voyeuristic. The camera captures the worried faces in the dark dressing room at Lord’s as Steve Smith is felled by Jofra Archer, and the solicitous way teammates keep their distance when he is out.
Some viewers will approach The Test sceptically. How candid can an official project be? They should be prepared to be disarmed.
It is a positive portrait, as well it might be: the team played progressively better cricket over the period concerned.
The episodes themselves improve in quality, as the filmmakers seem to grow in confidence alongside their subjects.
It invites us, too, to reflect on the episode that preceded it. Sandpapergate looms out of view throughout — unspecified, unelaborated, as indescribable as the “VUE” (Violent Unknown Event) in Peter Greenaway’s mockumentary, The Falls.
Yet it originated in a dressing room very much like those in which The Test largely takes place, involving many of the same dramatis personae. It is hard to avoid thinking about what cameras might have captured that day had they been around; after all, Sandpapergate also involved normal blokes playing cricket.
The Test: A New Era for Australia’s Team premieres on Amazon Prime Video on March 12.
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