Russell Broadbent (McMillan, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

As long ago as I can remember—as a very small boy—I remember my father playing cricket against the Pakenham Cricket Club. In finals, every match was important. We learned lessons out of cricket, espoused by our parents and others, about the importance of playing the game and not just winning. On Saturday a week ago, Kooweerup, where I was born, played Pakenham in the grand final. I'm going to read from an article by Russell Bennett out of the Pakenham Gazette:

It wasn't just the legend of Kooweerup that grew on the weekend. So too did the legend of Phil Anning, the Pakenham Cricket Club president and former Kooweerup coach.

The little man with a heart of gold has always been a class act, but what he displayed on Sunday afternoon in the Kooweerup rooms straight after the Demons had belted out their song following a crushing win over his side was nothing short of inspiring.

Here are some excerpts of what Anning told the Kooweerup players, support staff, committee, and fans.

"I've got to say I'm extremely disappointed in the Kooweerup Cricket Club first off ... because I thought we had a mutual agreement that we took it in turns to win these!

"It's really interesting that for the past five or six years, through social media and comments from talking with people, every year after Kooweerup has been successful you hear things like 'Tubsy (Chris O'Hara) is too old' and 'the Bright boys (Paul, Matt, Chris, and John) have been there too long', but we sit back at Pakenham and think those people are living in a fantasy world to think that this club is just going to slide away and not want to better itself and continue to grow.

"We sit there and think that if we want to win another premiership, we're going to have to beat the best side in the competition—which is Kooweerup.

"We know that, and we were fortunate enough to win it two years ago, but over the past two years we've been beaten by a better side and that's undisputable.

"Dom (Paynter) said that to our players, and we've got a lot of work to do if we want to match you blokes.

"We'll do everything in our power at the Pakenham Cricket Club to make sure that your run comes to an end next year.

"If it doesn't, we'll put our tails between our legs again as we will tonight and we'll start planning how we can do it, because you are the benchmark and you should be very proud of that—whether it's Mark (Cooper) as coach, or Gilesy (Michael Giles) before him. Whoever.

"Our season will not be defined by the result of today's grand final. It will be defined by getting four sides into the grand final.

"It's no coincidence that our Premier sides are playing off in a grand final, our second sides are both playing off in grand finals, and our junior sides are playing off against each other in the under-16s. We're doing something right, and while every other club wants to sit back and have little snide remarks and play silly mind games, we'll continue to go out there and play the game in the spirit it was meant to be when it was first developed.

"No other club has taken the mantra of the Pakenham or Kooweerup cricket clubs and thought 'maybe this is the way we need to improve ourselves'.

That was last Saturday week. What we woke up to Sunday morning was quite different. I read from Catherine McGregor's article in the paper today:

Cricket, according to Smith, has a "rich poetic heart". And Dravid was the embodiment of its finest instincts. The Great Wall of India was a "timeless champion of steel and dignity". Having been the beneficiary of Dravid's grace and chivalry at a very difficult time of my life I can attest to his integrity, humility and decency.

Today that rich poetic heart is broken. And the Australian public feel betrayed and enraged at the failure of our national cricket team to live up to the tenets of that amorphous, imprecise code known as "the spirit of cricket".

The spirit of cricket mentioned at Kooweerup for their grand final spirit and here by Catherine McGregor has been something important to this nation. We held ourselves up as doyens of people who played the game in the spirit it ought to be played. Someone said to me, 'How dare you be enraged about this issue, when there are so many other important issues that we should be addressing.' That's fine, except this game of cricket has been part of our national DNA, part of who and what we are, and it's going to be embarrassing to walk on the national stage ever again after this event. I felt personally upset about this. I know that people I spoke to were personally upset about this, because we—as a nation, as sportspeople—believed we were better than that. We are better than that on the ground at Kooweerup and Pakenham, and Phil Anning explained that beautifully when he said:

… play the game in the spirit it was meant to be when it was first developed.