The Riddle of Peter Siddle

Filed in Other by on December 19, 2012

Bellerive Oval mightn’t host a Test match every year, but it sure has witnessed its fair share of cricket-related controversy over the journey.

As newshounds from the national tabloids froth over the potential for this week’s ball tampering non-incident to create a big enough rift between the Australian and Sri Lankan camps to fill a few back pages, my mind harks back to a noteworthy incident of yore.

Remember Scott Muller?

I’m sure you can – but you might need your memory jogged.

“Can’t bowl, can’t throw…”

Yep, that’s him. The two-Test, seven-wicket Queenslander with blonde tips and a fantastic story to tell the grandkids.

Muller was no Keith Miller, sure. But he probably didn’t deserve to be pilloried in the manner he was following the 1999-2000 Hobart Test. I’m sure there are plenty of blokes who’ve done less during brief and abortive careers at the top level.

Despite the tribute hair-cut, it appears Muller was no Shane Warne disciple. And if he was, it seems safe to say Warne viewed him as the Judas of the gang.

The proverbial black sheep in white clothing.

Australia’s 708-wicket superstar was long rumoured to be the responsible party in uttering those famous four words after a wayward throw from deep. It appears Muller was no Jordan Silk, either.

On the record, and for the record, Warne refutes any claims linking him to the infamous remark.

And thankfully for him, long-serving Channel 9 cameraman Joe Previtera stuck his hand up and took the fall just as the story started to get out of control.

It still smacks of the ol’ two-bit-gangster-copping-a-stint-on-the-inside-to-save-a mob-boss-the-trouble kind of storyline favoured in black and white schlockers of yesteryear.

Joe was probably given a job for life in return, but such speculation is baseless.

Whether Joe was present at Bellerive during the first Test against Sri Lanka this week is another fact I haven’t bothered to check.

But the romantic in me wants to believe it was Joe that thought he’d spotted something amiss as Peter Siddle turned at the top of his mark at one point during Sri Lanka’s first innings and zoomed telescopically in on the Victorian’s fiddling fingers.

As the full magnitude of what was (or wasn’t) occurring dawned on the director, he no-doubt relayed the information to Channel 9’s crack crew of commentators by way of new-fangled touch screen technology.

(As an aside, is it just me that thinks Nine’s new gimmick is reminiscent of the table-top video games that filled Milk Bars of my youth and, as such, are really not that great a leap forward for the network?)

I can only believe the footage was replayed ad nauseam, and supplemented by vision of Ed Cowan polishing the red rock, as the commentators each tried to dream up a reality in which they’d never acted in the exact same manner, because from what I saw there was no evidence of any wrongdoing from Siddle, Cowan or any other cricketer in the greater Hobart area.

Now, though, Siddle is reported to be so angered by Sri Lanka querying the footage with match referee Chris Broad that he has a new set of veneers on order in case he happens to clench his teeth tight enough to grind through his current ones.

The Sri Lankans are on the back foot, harried by local scribes and probably wondering why their own press chose to report the issue so pointedly in the first place.

But Channel 9 is conspicuously quiet – and seemingly blameless.

In reality, though, it was Nine that kicked off the whole shebang in the first place.

After play on Tuesday, Sri Lankan skipper Mahela Jayawardene fended off increasingly venomous barbs from the local media in a manner not seen since moments earlier when Rangana Herath had somehow defied Mitchell Starc thunderbolts for 43 gruelling minutes.

The Jayawardene press conference didn’t last as long as Herath’s brave – and strangely amusing – stand, but the Lankan captain did manage to assert himself in front of the cameras in a manner his team-mate had failed to emulate at the batting crease.

“It wasn’t from our management,” Jayawardene told reporters. “It was something we saw on television which was shown and that was it, nothing else.”

“We just wanted to make sure the officials saw what we saw on television, simple as that. We never made any official complaint about it, we just moved on.”

“It’s not just that we picked up something, it was shown on television. The minimum requirement would have been to at least have a chat and see what happened and for us all to move on, simple as that.”

Fair play, Mahela. Straight bat, dogged defence and a point well made.

If the ‘incident’ was dubious enough for the official broadcast partner to call it into question with close-ups and stills, surely it requires clarification.

And who better than the match referee to check with?

I mean to say, it was the former England opener Chris Broad’s job to maintain the spirit and integrity of the game in all other instances, so why not this one?

And why would esteemed members of the Australian press want to level an accusation of ‘dobbing’ at the Sri Lankans, anyway? An accusation that could certainly be seen as a tit-for-tat, playground-level response that Siddle may not have received 18 months ago when he was a relatively-unfashionable, meat-eating change bowler scrapping for his spot in the side – not the gutsy, bag-taking herbivore he is today.

Oh, to shift papers and further justify their place at the Bellerive lunch buffet, I suppose.

But the elephant in the room here is still Channel 9.

In the summer of ’99-’00 we heard too much courtesy of their microphones. And now, to my mind at least, we’ve seen too much too often.

Let’s all just focus on the cricket, and if the action pitch-side is on the slow side, pan west across the beautiful vista dominated by the sparkling Derwent and hulking Mt Wellington.

Best do it soon, too, because next time Test cricket makes it below the 42nd parallel south the only view available may well be a brand new, eternally-empty grandstand.

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