The truth about team culture

Winning isn't everything; it's the only thing - Vincent Lombardi

As much as I love cricket, I can't bring myself to sift through the entire contents of the Argus report. I'll take the soft option and look to someone else to do the hard yards and provide a synopsis of the most important bits. From what I've read, it sounds like some Australia cricketers stand accused of doing just that at times during these last few years. There's a lot of talk about 'team culture' etc. and I must confess that I'm genuinely unsure as to where I sit on this sort of management-speak jargon. I've heard the term bandied about increasingly, a hand-me-down from the corporate world no doubt but how relevant is it to this conversation about Australian cricket?

The old-fashioned cynic in me leans towards dismissing any serious analysis of the whole team culture thing. In some respects, it's an easy excuse for covering up the most basic cricketing fact of all - the team that scores the most runs and takes the most wickets generally wins. If you look back to the so-called strong team culture that pervaded the Mark Taylor/Steve Waugh/Ricky Ponting era from the mid 1990s through to about 2009, they had some fabulous cricketers. With players with those egos inhabiting the same dressing room, you could be forgiven for wondering if that was a fertile ground for a negative team culture. Yet, reading the autobiographies and listening to interviews from that era of Australian cricketer, the universal theme that comes through is one of a strong team ethic and a powerful culture that bound these strong, proud, sometimes arrogant men together. So what's changed? Winning! Well, not winning.

It's amazing how the simple act of winning or losing cannibalises itself. In order to win regularly, you need great players. Australia had that in spades during that 15-year period. No wonder they were nigh indomitable. Sure, they enjoyed a strong team culture but it's the age-old question - which came first; chicken or egg?

A few of those same players are still in this current team. Ricky Ponting, Michael Clarke, Michael Hussey, Brett Lee, Shane Watson. As intelligent men, they could have surely brought that culture of winning with them into this squad. Except of course that it's hard to create a winning culture when ... when ... um ... um ... when you're not winning.

Look, it's a complex issue and there are a million text books and management bestsellers out there that espouse the value of organisational culture. I do not doubt for one moment that there is immense value in understanding and fostering that theory. In sport though, it's sometimes too easy to revert to corporate analogies that obfuscate the blindingly obvious - if you have the cattle to win trophies, you magically seem to have a good culture and when you start losing a few series, that culture soon turns sour (apparently). Sometimes it can be the difference between a great catch, a lucky snick through the slip cordon or losing an important toss. Do we really need a report that took 6 months to write to tell us what we already know? Australian cricket had a wonderful halcyon period; eventually that had to come to an end. India took over the reins briefly and England have now come into their cycle of ascendancy. Think of Ian Bell's horror Ashes series in 2005? Has he just grown up and become a far better batsman or has the winning culture of the England dressing room suddenly given him a talent infusion that would otherwise have been lying dormant?

Think back to the great West Indian era of the late 1970s through to the mid 1990s. Their team culture was apparently awesome to behold and their high-five celebrations became the symbol of that domination. High-fiving is now the way all cricketers celebrate; from even the youngest juniors through to the oldest park cricketers, it is one of the great legacies that Clive Lloyd and his calypso men left behind (some jazz-hat cricket in England remains thankfully resistant). As soon as they started to lose their mojo, even the players who were part of that great culture were suddenly victims of the complete opposite. Richie Richardson, Courtney Walsh and Carl Hooper saw both sides of the coin and they probably didn't become toxic overnight. They just stopped winning as often. And then some management guru analysed them to death.

Why is it so hard to accept that winning and losing is a cyclical thing? Always has been; always will be. Yes, I do believe that in time to come India will dominate the game for increasingly longer periods but that's purely down to the fact that they have a huge population of cricket-mad people who by virtue of sheer numbers will swamp the other cricketing nations. But even India will go through patches of mediocrity, even with all-time greats in the team. If you look at it from a pure numbers perspective, the latest injuries to the Indian bowling attack shouldn't really have had that much of an impact. With the depth that they should have in the country, there really should be a dozen Zaheer Khans and Harbhajan Singhs waiting to come through the system. Fact is that they've lost a few Test matches, barely a few months after they won a World Cup, no less. So what do we make of their culture now? Is it world champion stuff or 4-0 loss territory?

Australian cricket can analyse itself to distraction but I can't see it making that much of a difference to be honest. There might be a few areas that can be improved and modified but unless the Cricket Australia management are prepared to be as harsh on themselves as they are on non-performing players, the Argus Report may achieve very little. That is the romance of sport. If we knew that one team would continue to win forever purely because of culture, cricket would be a boring, soulless place. Fortunately, it remains a place of dreams, of bad luck, of heroism, of improbable chance, of inexplicable umpiring and of sheer unadulterated talent that even the best systems in the world simply cannot produce from even the most comprehensive reports. Players like Sachin Tendulkar and to a lesser extent Shane Warne are living proof of that. They defy organisational culture and team ethos and even their own foibles (in Warne's case). Some things are just a gift from the gods and will forever be thus. No analysis required please.

The Argus report reminds me of the old joke about culture, applicable to any race that you wish to have a friendly jibe at. I've been sledged with it and I've used it on myself in moments of self-deprecation. "What's the difference between yogurt and XYZ nationality? Yogurt's got more culture." Similarly, what's at the heart of the Australian cricket team's so-called 'poor culture'? Having just won a series in Sri Lanka, maybe they've suddenly got a great culture. Or maybe they just batted, bowled and fielded better. Didn't need 6 months and a few hundred pages to tell you that!