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...victims. The most vociferous condemnation player behaviour in recent years has come from the media.
Bill O'Reilly was one of the greatest spin bowlers of all time, and it is a minor irony that the American cable television personality of the same name calls his program The O'Reilly Factor a "no-spin zone". The American O'Reilly has a much more colourful turn of phrase than his Australian namesake, and he once memorably commented on changed security arrangements for the Statue of Liberty: "You can visit Liberty Park, but you can't go up the Lady."
The Factor's main brief is to keep out the spin doctors and publicity directors and correct the mainstream media's liberal bias by providing "fair and balanced" coverage. What Big Bill would make of the sports pages of Australia's newspapers is probably unprintable. Liberal bias and editorialising are rampant, and as Louis Nowra said when researching his Shane Warne biography: "Reading through newspaper pieces on him is to trawl through some of the most pompous, sanctimonious articles and Tall Poppy bashing I have ever read." Was it always like this? We shall see.
The Roy Murphy Show was a comedy about a sports commentator with a speech impediment (don't ask how he pronounced trots; he would have said "harness wacing" if the term had been in use then) and it premiered at the Nimrod Theatre in 1971. Ron Casey, often called "Wan", came to see it and later rang me to say how much he enjoyed my dramatic handiwork. A few years after that, I wrote a series of articles for the Fairfax press on tautology that ran from 1977 to 1983, and the chief target here, Rex Mossop ("He seems to have suffered a groin injury at the top of his leg", "They're not making much forward progress"), was another commentator who took the humour in good spirit.
Sometimes the bloopers came out of a perfectly logical sequence of thought, as when Tony Greig was watching a replay of a spinning ball coming off the bat and bouncing between the batsman's legs towards the stumps, which it just missed. "That's not a nice feeling, when it goes between your legs" may sound in isolation like a line from a Carry On film or a parody of a feminist poet such as Taslima, but it was an apt comment on the probable state of mind of the batsman...
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