Tim Nielsen and the art of the good areas

Thank you Greg Baum and Will Swanton for pointing me to the first bit of fun of this series. To Tim Nielsen's blog, (edited since, alas) where he talked of a cliché contest among the Australian team during the media interviews at the start of the tour. Seriously?

Well, actually Daniel Brettig, a travelling journalist from Australia, did vaguely mention the contest earlier. But I found it ridiculous that Nielsen, the undisputed champion of the Super Bowl of Clichés, should be holding such a contest. I can't get over the face of a colleague who almost threw up in a Mohali press conference room last year at Nielsen's repeated use of "we are behind the eight ball". I mean, you don't say Timmy.

"… The media circus rolled on with our open media session," Nielsen wrote, exclamation marks and all. He also counted the number of cameras and journalists present at their arrival press conference. "… As I'm sure you can imagine, with so many interviews you tend to get asked the same question over and over, and we had a bit of a competition running to see who could work the most sporting clichés into one answer. Surprisingly, big SOS [Shaun] Marsh won the competition with a particularly cliché-filled interview with one Indian journalist - he just took it one day at a time and kept his eye very firmly on the ball!"

Marsh must have some skill to have beaten Nielsen: I am led to believe that the wily coach was present at the interview session. Surely Marsh can't have done it alone.

I look forward now to the time Marsh scores a boring century at a strike-rate of 200, and then tells us in an electrifying manner how he wanted to stand up and be counted, and so played every ball according to its merit, and was proud to wear the baggy green and rub shoulders with great competitors.

It's a difficult art, is speaking in clichés. Like chucking, you can't do it on purpose. I have tried throwing but can't get the ball to the other side. I sometimes try speaking in clichés, but it is difficult to keep up. That's why I respect cricketers the world over - they make it look so natural. In fact, speaking in clichés can be a good team-building exercise, one that John Buchanan would have been proud of having thought up, but that's a different matter.

Like in every pursuit, there are spoilsports here too, people like Graeme Swann, Ricky Ponting and Virender Sehwag. For example, Nielsen wouldn't have liked this exchange between a journalist and Ponting one bit:

Ponting: "Harbhajan didn't take the game away from us, though he did come close."

Journalist: "But Harbhajan did play well."

Ponting: "Yes he played well, but not well enough."

What is the point of indulging in such humour and honesty? Ponting could easily have said, "It was a good game, and it's always good to play a team that never says die. Harbhajan is a top-class competitor, and at the end of the day cricket was the winner." Not as if Harbhajan would have started sending Ponting Christmas cards.

No wonder Ponting was not available at the interview session that hosted the cliché contest. He seems a gullible fellow, one who has come to, like the rest of society at large, look down upon rote exchanges between players and media.

Folks like Ponting, Sehwag and Swann are a threat to the noble art of speaking a lot and saying little. Alas, society doesn't understand it; instead they like these straight-talkers. Only because of these societal pressures, being ridiculed for his clichés, must Nielsen have come up with this contest: in an attempt to make those who look down upon clichés believe that it's all just a game, that he and his team are doing it for fun, for genuine entertainment.

Baum and Swanton have, sadly, gone all serious for no reason, and in their stinging criticisms of Nielsen, called it "just not cricket" and "disrespectful to Indian journalists". How the writers of such reputed papers as the Age and the Sydney Morning Herald are, er, behind the eight ball here.