US President George W. Bush tries out cricket in Pakistan in 2006
• Australia’s first Prime Minister, Edmund Barton, was a cricketer of some note, later becoming a first-class umpire. America’s first President also played cricket, with historical records indicating that George Washington took part in a game referred to as “wickets” in 1778.
US President George W. Bush tries out cricket in Pakistan in 2006
Australia’s first Prime Minister Edmund Barton (1901–1903) in cricket gear in 1870
• V.V.S. Laxman is the great-grand-nephew of a former Indian President. Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan became India’s first vice-president in 1952 and its second President, holding the position between 1962 and 1967.
• Elected to the Queensland parliament in 1983, Brian Littleproud had twice played for the state’s country XI against international teams. A member of the National Party, and a minister for education and the environment, Littleproud scored a duck against the touring South Africans in 1963/64 and 17 against the Pakistanis in 1972/73.
• George Robert Canning Harris, better known as Lord Harris, was a towering figure in both cricket and politics captaining England and serving as Under-secretary of State for War. Governor of Bombay during the 1890s, Lord Harris appeared in the last of his four Tests in 1884, but kept playing first-class cricket until 1911.
• A British government minister admitted in 2007 that he would fail the so-called “Tebbit Test” by supporting India over England at cricket. Of Indian origin, Parmjit Dhanda – elected to the seat of Gloucester in the 2001 general election – said he unashamedly barracked for India: “I’m a supporter of Liverpool Football Club and I fail Norman Tebbit’s cricket test by supporting India against England at cricket.” A minister in the government of Margaret Thatcher, Norman Tebbit had once suggested that immigrants moving to Britain should be required to back the England team over those of their country of origin.
Representing the Lords and Commons cricket team in 1994, Mr Tebbit’s son dismissed the two openers who had chalked up 1,000 first-class matches between them. Opposing the Sir J.P. Getty’s XI, William Tebbit dismissed John Edrich and Roy Virgin, finishing with figures of 2-93.
• In celebration of becoming the West Indies’ most capped Test cricketer, Shivnarine Chanderpaul became an honorary citizen of Dominica in 2011 courtesy of the island’s Prime Minister, Roosevelt Skerritt. The middle-order batsman marked Dominica’s debut Test by appearing in a record 133rd Test for the West Indies and scoring his 23rd century, a match-saving 116 against India at the Windsor Park ground in Roseau.
• When the son of a Sri Lankan government minister was called up for his country’s Twenty20 squad in 2013, the selection was defended by another politician. Sanath Jayasuriya – a member of Sri Lanka’s national parliament and the chairman of selectors – went in to bat for the Media and Information Minister’s son Ramith Rambukwella, who, at the time, had just ten domestic Twenty20 matches to his credit: “Ramith is a left-hand batsman who bowls right arm off-spin, who can clear the boundaries and can hit hard. We don’t just bring in players who perform, we also bring in players with talent.”
Later in the year, Jayasuriya scored his first ministerial gig as a politician, becoming Deputy Minister of Postal Services.
• A former British Prime Minister resigned from the MCC committee in 2011 following a disagreement over redevelopment plans for the Lord’s cricket ground. John Major (pictured), PM between 1990 and 1997, tendered his resignation after design plans for the ground had been watered down: “For me cricket has been a lifelong and enduring passion and it will remain so. The solace the game has given me in good times and bad, the friendships I have made, and the sheer joy of the game will never fade. My decision to resign from the committee of the world’s pre-eminent cricket club has been reached with very great sadness.”
• Former Indian captain Mohammad Azharuddin scored a century for the Indian Parliamentarians XI in 2012. The MP got his ton against the visiting Lords and Commons cricket team in a match played at Dharmasala.
• A future Australian Prime Minister top scored in a limited-over match in Sydney in 1975 batting against a team that included Test stars Jeff Thomson, Max Walker, Gary Gilmour and Kerry O’Keeffe. Playing for an invitational XI against a side billed as Australia, Bob Hawke hit 39 in 48 minutes batting at No. 8, and sent down a single over that cost five runs. Australia won the match by two wickets.
Australian Prime Minister Bob Hawke with Don Bradman at the launch of The Bradman Albums in 1987
• An Australian politician who rose to the rank of Deputy Prime Minister lost a family member after a mishap with a cricket ball. The younger sister of National Party MP John Anderson died after he hit a ball into her neck while playing cricket with his father.
• In 1938, Stanley Baldwin became the first British Prime Minister to take on the presidency of the Marylebone Cricket Club. A Conservative PM on three occasions, Earl Baldwin’s son-in-law George Kemp-Welch played first-class cricket for Warwickshire and Cambridge University in the 1920s and 30s.
• Arthur Jeffreys, a London-born batsman who played first-class cricket for MCC, Hampshire and New South Wales, was a Conservative Party politician elected to the seat of Basingstoke in 1887. His father, Arthur Jeffreys, was a member of the New South Wales parliament in the 1850s. A grazier, he purchased a large property in the south of the state which he named Acton, now an inner suburb of Canberra in the ACT.
• Four members of parliament played in the Prime Minister’s XI match instituted by Robert Menzies in the Australian summer of 1951/52. Tasmanian Liberal MPs Athol Townley and Bill Falkinder appeared in the first match at Manuka Oval in Canberra; the Country Party’s Mac Holten, a vice-captain of the Melbourne cricket club, played in 1960/61, while Don Chipp, a future leader of the Australian Democrats, appeared in the 1962/63 match, playing alongside Don Bradman.
Harold Holt – who became Prime Minister in 1966 – was selected for the inaugural match but withdrew due to illness.
“It is occasionally left to people like me to carry with them through life a love and growing understanding of the great game – a feeling in the heart and mind and eye which neither time nor chance can utterly destroy.”
Australian Prime Minister Robert Menzies
Australian Prime Minister Robert Menzies with the opposing captains – the MCC’s Ted Dexter and Don Bradman – for the 1962/63 PM’s XI match in Canberra
• British Prime Minister David Cameron revealed that his biggest thrill of 2013 was receiving batting tips from former England opener Geoff Boycott. The two bumped into each other during the second Ashes Test at Lord’s: “Boycott told me, ‘You’ve got to do it like this lad, you’ve got to do it like this.’ He wouldn’t stop until he’d got my elbow sticking out properly. It was quite extraordinary.”
In the run-up to the 2015 general election, Labour’s then-leader Ed Miliband vowed to give Boycott a knighthood if he won power. The cricket-loving Miliband cites the former England batsman as one of the people he most admires, saying he was attracted by “the charisma of imperfection”. Theresa May, who became Home Secretary upon the election of Mr Cameron in 2010, is another big Boycott fan: “He kind of solidly got on with what he was doing.”
British Prime Minister David Cameron has a bat with youngsters in Mumbai during an official visit to India in 2013
• An apology was sought from a British Labour Party MP in 2004 after claiming in parliament that there was “deep-rooted embedded racism in Yorkshire county cricket”. The speech was delivered by Bradford North MP Terry Rooney in the House of Commons: “Virtually every Test player from Yorkshire started in the Bradford League. About 60 per cent of cricketers in the Bradford League are from the Indian subcontinent. Not one of them, despite their skills and abilities, has ever been adopted by the Yorkshire County Cricket Club … even at trainee level.”
The club responded defiantly with chairman Robin Smith highlighting that Ajmal Shahzad had become the first British-born Asian to play for the county, a landmark achieved earlier in the year: “To say that I am livid about Mr Rooney’s comments is an understatement. The thing that annoys me most about his remarks is that they are factually incorrect. Had Rooney made the comments outside parliament, we would have been able to consider the option of suing him.”
• John George Davies, who appeared in seven first-class matches for Tasmania, later became a member of the state’s House of Assembly. On his first-class debut in 1870/71, Davies was captain, wicketkeeper and opening batsman in the match against Victoria at the MCG.
Sir George held the seats of Fingal and Denison for the Liberal Party and was parliamentary speaker from 1903 until his death in 1913.
• In 2013, Australia’s then-deputy Prime Minister and Treasurer used the Bodyline Test series to reignite debate about Australia becoming a republic. In an opinion piece published on the eve of Australia Day, Wayne Swan referenced the Bodyline series of 1932/33 suggesting it helped promote a greater sense of national pride that he said was still being felt 80 years on.
There’s no one source of our national character. It comes from our indigenous heritage, the struggles of the early settlers, the Federation period, and, of course, our nation’s experiences at war.
And perhaps for Australians more than any other, it comes from sport.
This summer marks the 80th anniversary of arguably the most significant and defining event in Australia’s sporting history: the Bodyline cricket series. Countless books have been devoted to retelling the torrid saga, but it is worth recounting because of the role it played in our national story.
At its core, Bodyline amounted to a calculated attempt by the English cricketing establishment to attack the Australians – specifically the wunderkind Don Bradman – with brutal, intimidatory, even life-threatening tactics.
Hostilities reached their zenith during the Adelaide Test match, when Australian captain Bill Woodfull was struck with a barrage of balls to the torso, including one blow just below his heart. Such was the level of animosity that a pitch invasion by the crowd was feared, with police standing guard along the boundary ready to repel the furious onlookers. At the end of this distasteful day, Woodfull uttered words that are quoted and mythologised to this very day: that while there were two teams on the field, only one was playing cricket.
This accusation of English unsportsmanlike conduct propelled a bitter stoush, elevated to forceful diplomatic cables from the respective cabinet rooms. The Australian Board of Control for Cricket’s cable went as far to say that: “Unless stopped at once it [Bodyline] is likely to upset the friendly relations existing between Australia and England.” In the world of diplomacy, words rarely come stronger.
The enduring impact of Bodyline is deeply rooted in Australian sporting folklore, but it was about a lot more than cricket. As esteemed historians Ric Sissons and Brian Stoddart concluded in their chronicle Cricket and Empire, from a British perspective, Bodyline was principally about teaching Australia “a lesson in imperial superiority”.
An obvious question is how Bodyline defined the way Australians of the time viewed our place in the world, and our relationship with Britain. I think the answer throws up some surprising insights into the national character – surprising because it contradicts some of the clichéd myths that surround Australian sporting and national behaviour.
The most interesting fact about this episode is we Australians found ourselves the defenders of the supposedly English ideal of “fair play”. Interesting because the accepted wisdom is that when it comes to cricket especially, we are the ruthless, the English the polite. Yes, we unleashed Lillee and Thomson. And, yes, Mitch Johnson is still breaking hands today. We play hard, but we play within both the letter and the spirit of the rules.
What the Bodyline series showed was that while we refuse to put on airs and graces, Aussies are not a ruthless, “whatever it takes” people. Rather, we are a plain-speaking lot, who play hard but fair, and expect no less. Ours is not a gentleman’s code; it is a democratic code.
Douglas Jardine had no interest in honouring any such code. By directing his bowlers consistently to target the body, and placing fielders to prevent strokes to defend themselves, not only were life and limb threatened, the spirit of the game was deeply contravened. Obviously what was at stake was a sporting trophy; this was not war.
But Bodyline left a mark on our national consciousness because it symbolised wider issues of the period that actually did in the long run involve our sovereignty.
To understand that we have to put ourselves back in that summer. Australians were in the middle of the Great Depression, with the mass unemployment, homelessness and betrayal of hope that it brought. Australians did not cause that Depression and to a great extent we were powerless to tackle it because we lacked full economic sovereignty.
At home, our adherence to the gold standard and low foreign exchange reserves made it impossible to increase public spending to raise demand. Even worse, austerity was strongly recommended to us from on-high overseas – largely by English gentlemen whose gentlemanly rules had little interest in the welfare of ordinary Australians. Honouring deals between bankers was more important to them than equal sacrifice from all and fair play for working people.
The result? Catastrophic unemployment and hardship. Australians were mad as hell. So when Jardine bent the moral code to win at all costs, people joined the dots. It was only cricket, but it was typical. It symbolised the need for a new assertion of national sovereignty underpinned by the democratic rather than the gentlemanly values – to play hard, within the rules, to look after each other.
I believe Bodyline caused many Australians to wake up to the urgent need of making Australia’s interests our No. 1 priority and to do so in a typically Australian egalitarian manner. Bodyline played a big role in embedding a sense of independence and a desire for true sovereignty in Australia’s international outlook. It did not invent these ideas that had surfaced at various points in Australia’s past – but it amplified them and took them in new directions. Wartime Labor Prime Ministers John Curtin and Ben Chifley were heavily influenced by the awakening of egalitarian national sentiment that followed the Depression, and it informed their determination to stand up for the country’s defence interests.
Today Australia stands almost alone in having stayed out of recession during the most significant global downturn since that Great Depression. This in part speaks to an enduring determination for our country never again to be at the whim of anyone who claims an inherent right to make and break the rules at our expense.
The democratic and egalitarian assertion of our national sovereignty provoked during Bodyline and the Great Depression continues to serve us well on Australia Day 2013. I believe that reflecting on those events will eventually hasten the approach of an Australian republic, even if it has fallen from the national agenda over the past decade. While England will always be our most respected cricketing foe, and among our very closest allies, I think our national conversation is sold short when it does not include a debate about our relationship with the Crown.
So let’s use the day to reflect on, and recommit to, the great things Australia stands for: playing hard, playing by the rules, looking after every citizen, and always defending our national interest with courage and with conviction.
• Essex and Cambridge batsman Hubert Ashton scored over 4,000 runs in first-class cricket, later becoming Parliamentary Private Secretary to the Chancellor of the Exchequer. Conservative MP for the seat of Chelmsford between 1950 and 1964, he was named a Wisden Cricketer of the Year in 1922 and married the sister of the Labour Party leader Hugh Gaitskell in 1927.
• British Conservative MP Chris Grayling, who became Leader of the House of Commons in 2015, claims to be the only member of the UK Parliament to have hit Dennis Lillee for four. His big moment came in a charity match for Phil Edmonds.
CHRIS GRAYLING’S DREAM TEAM
Geoff Boycott (E)
Sunil Gavaskar (I)
Brian Lara (WI)
Viv Richards * (WI)
Sachin Tendulkar (I)
Ian Botham (E)
Allan Knott † (E)
Shane Warne (A)
Dennis Lillee (A)
Joel Garner (WI)
James Anderson (E)
British Conservative Party MP Chris Grayling
• While he was Australia’s Prime Minister, Joseph Lyons played in a cricket match in Hobart in 1933 in which he batted and bowled for both sides. In his first effort, the PM scored six and with the ball took 2-3. He then top-scored with 22 (retired) and took 1-1.
• When former Australian batsman Sam Loxton switched from sport to politics he became the youngest MP to sit in the Victorian parliament. Aged 34, Loxton wrestled Prahran from the Labor Party by the slender margin of 14 votes in the 1955 state election and held on to the seat under Premier Henry Bolte for 24 years.
• The two big guns who went head to head in Pakistan’s general election in 2013 were both former first-class cricketers. Running for the prime ministership were the PML’s Nawaz Sharif – who had one first-class match in 1973/74 – and the PTI’s Imran Khan, who appeared in 382 first-class games between 1969 and 1992.
On the eve of the election, Imran ended up in hospital after an accident at a rally, with Mr Sharif going on to claim victory, becoming Pakistan’s Prime Minister for the third time.
Imran Khan, the politician, at a rally in Islamabad in 2008
• Bangladesh pace bowler Ziaur Rahman, who made his Test debut in 2013, shares the same name as his country’s seventh President. Three years previously, Nelson Mandela Odhiambo – a medium-pacer named after South African President Nelson Mandela – made his Twenty20 debut for Kenya.
N.A.M. McLean, who appeared in 19 Tests for the West Indies, sports the names Nixon (Richard Nixon – 37th US President) Alexei (Alexei Kosygin – Soviet Union Premier) McNamara (Robert McNamara – 8th US Defence Secretary). His cousin Reynold McLean, who played in ten first-class matches, possesses the middle names Julius and Jefferson. Fellow West Indian Nikita Miller, who made his Test debut in 2009, was named in honour of former Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev.
“When I met Mr Mandela it was one of the most memorable days of my life. A truly inspirational human being. He will live on in my heart forever.”
former Indian batsman Sachin Tendulkar on the death of Nelson Mandela in 2013
South Africa’s first black President Nelson Mandela with two future members of parliament – Mohammad Azharuddin (left) and Sachin Tendulkar – during the South Africa-India Test match at Cape Town in 1996/97
• When Australia took to the field for the opening Test against Pakistan in Dubai in 2014/15, players wore black armbands to mark the death of an Australian Prime Minister. Gough Whitlam – who has a cricket oval named in his honour in Sydney – was Australia’s 21st Prime Minister between 1972 and 1975 when his government was brought down by the Liberal Party’s Malcolm Fraser. On the day Mr Fraser died in 2015, the Australians wore black armbands in the World Cup quarter-final match against Pakistan in Adelaide.
Australian Labor Party legend Gough Whitlam wields the willow, with party comrades Bob Hawke and Clyde Holding behind the stumps
• A leading Ireland all-rounder incurred the wrath of officialdom in 2013 when he took to social media upon the passing of former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher. After the news of her death had trickled through, John Mooney, who made his one-day international debut against England in Belfast in 2006, tweeted: “I hope it was slow and painful.”
• Tom Hiley, a grade cricketer in Brisbane, was a member of the Queensland parliament assuming the office of Treasurer in the conservative government of Frank Nicklin in 1957. A wicketkeeper, Hiley was president of the Queensland Cricket Association in the late 1960s.
The Country Party’s Jack Pizzey, who succeeded Mr Nicklin as Premier in 1968, played for the state’s Colts side. A slow left-arm bowler, Pizzey had been selected to make his first-class debut for Queensland in the early 1930s, but the match was washed out.
PETER BEATTIE’S DREAM TEAM
Matthew Hayden (A)
Bill Brown (A)
Greg Chappell (A)
Viv Richards (WI)
Allan Border * (A)
Ian Botham (E)
Tom Veivers (A)
Ian Healy † (A)
Ray Lindwall (A)
Wes Hall (WI)
Jeff Thomson (A)
Peter Beattie – Queensland Premier from 1998 to 2007 – and his all-Queensland team
• Former Indian batsman-turned-MP Navjot Singh Sidhu threatened to go on a hunger strike in 2013 over the stalling of funds for his constituency of Amritsar. Sidhu, who appeared in 51 Tests and began his political career in 2004, listed a string of developments which had been delayed, including bus services, bridges and waste management: “I will sit on a fast unto death.”
• A school cricket match was abandoned in 2009/10 due to a lengthy interruption caused by a helicopter carrying a politician. The game between St Sylvester’s College and Kalutara Vidyalaya in Kandy was called off when the chopper transporting a former Tourism Promotions Minister landed on the ground and stayed there all day.
• A Test famously attended by a US President contains the only instance of both captains taking five wickets in an innings in the same match. After Richie Benaud had taken 5-93 in the first innings of the third Test against Pakistan at Karachi in 1959/60, his counterpart Fazal Mahmood responded with 5-74. Dwight D. Eisenhower – the 34th US President – attended proceedings on day four.
• South African all-rounder Clive van Ryneveld, who appeared in 19 Tests during the 1950s, later played a major role in politics. In 1959, the year that followed his final Test, van Ryneveld was one of 12 MPs who quit the United Party to form the Progressive Party: “The Nats had got in and they brought in a lot of legislation that was repugnant … the Group Areas Act; they expanded the Immorality Act to stop any sort of contact between white and black. You had separate education systems for blacks, which was very inferior. There were a lot of things that worried a lot of us. Our views were uncommon at the time for white South Africans. They just couldn’t see all the Africans and the coloureds being able to take part in a democratic process. Whites were, frankly, quite afraid of what would happen if all the blacks got the vote. It was unusual and although there was a Liberal Party, it had no representation in politics at all.”
In the general election that followed, 11 of the 12 MPs who defected, including van Ryneveld, lost their seats. In his 19 Tests, van Ryneveld scored 724 runs at 26.81 and took 17 wickets at 39.47. He scored four centuries in first-class cricket, with a highest of 150, and picked up 206 wickets, with a best return of 8-48.
• Irish politician Martin McGuinness lent his services to a fundraising campaign in 2015 by dressing up as W.G. Grace. The Sinn Féin minister was one of a number of prominent people from Northern Ireland who took part to help raise funds for a children’s hospice on the outskirts of Belfast: “When I arrived for the photoshoot and saw the false beard and the cricket gear along with a make-up artist I wondered what in heaven’s name I was getting into. But it’s a fantastic idea.”
• Gloucestershire batsman Derrick Bailey, who appeared in 60 first-class matches in the 1940s and 50s, had impressive family and personal connections with leading political figures. One of his godfathers was Louis Botha, South Africa’s first Prime Minister, while his half-brother was married to Winston Churchill’s daughter Diana.
• Australian Labor Prime Minister John Curtin was a player and administrator who also umpired the occasional game in Perth. The country’s 14th Prime Minister, Mr Curtin was a long-serving vice-president of the Cottesloe Cricket Club.
• Sachin Tendulkar copped a barrage of criticism from Indian MPs in 2014 over his lack of attendance in parliament. In 2012, and while still a Test cricketer, Tendulkar was nominated to join the 250-member upper house of the Indian parliament, saying, at the time, that representing India would remain his focus, not politics. But two years after he accepted the nomination, and a number of months after retiring, Tendulkar had only attended parliament three times.
SHASHI THAROOR’S DREAM TEAM
Virender Sehwag (I)
Sunil Gavaskar (I)
Rahul Dravid (I)
Sachin Tendulkar (I)
Nawab of Pataudi jr * (I)
Gundappa Viswanath (I)
Kapil Dev (I)
Budhi Kunderan † (I)
Anil Kumble (I)
Bishan Bedi (I)
Zaheer Zhan (I)
Prominent Indian MP and minister Shashi Tharoor
• After Yorkshire had reached their highest first-class home total against Essex, they went on to achieve an innings victory on the day that Britons went to the polls in 2010. Their 516 included two centuries, with Yorkshire becoming the only First Division team to gain a positive result on election day.
• When the then-leader of the Federal Opposition was ejected from a session of the Australian parliament in 2012, one of his front-bench colleagues described the incident in cricketing terms as a “soft dismissal”. In condemning the Prime Minister over the government’s carbon pricing legislation, Tony Abbott became the first Opposition Leader to get the boot in 26 years.
Victorian Liberal MP Greg Hunt – who had once dated the granddaughter of former Australian captain Bill Woodfull – leapt to Mr Abbott’s defence: “If there was an action replay, I would think that most people would say the ball pitched well outside off stump … it wasn’t going to even hit the stumps. It was a very soft dismissal.”
RICHARD MARLES’S DREAM TEAM
Herbert Sutcliffe (E)
Len Hutton (E)
Don Bradman * (A)
Sachin Tendulkar (I)
Graeme Pollock (SA)
Garry Sobers (WI)
Adam Gilchrist † (A)
Shane Warne (A)
Dennis Lillee (A)
Curtly Ambrose (WI)
Jeff Thomson (A)
The Australian Labor Party’s Richard Marles, who became a federal minister in 2013
PHILIP RUDDOCK’S DREAM TEAM
Gordon Greenidge (WI)
Barry Richards (SA)
Sachin Tendulkar (I)
Don Bradman (A)
Viv Richards (WI)
Garry Sobers (WI)
Richie Benaud * (A)
Rod Marsh † (A)
Michael Holding (WI)
Shane Warne (A)
Wasim Akram (P)
The Liberal Party’s Philip Ruddock, a former Australian Attorney-General
• A group of British activists sent out a letter to 600 politicians in 2005 seeking a game of cricket outside the Houses of Parliament on May Day. The group accused MPs of acting dishonourably over a number of issues, including the war in Iraq and identity cards: “We the Space Hijackers, hereby challenge you and your fellow members of Parliament to a game of cricket. We challenge you to show us that your morals and behaviour are fit to govern this country. Prove to us that your support of the Olympic bid was not just more hot air. Prove to us and the rest of the country that you are what you claim to be. Prove it to us on the batting crease. We look forward to receiving your acceptance or decline of the challenge in the very near future. A decline of our challenge will be seen by us and the entire British public as acceptance that you are the morally and honourably corrupt government that we suspect. We shall see you at the pitch.”
• Upon his triumphant return from England in 1921, Australia’s winning captain Warwick Armstrong was feted by the Prime Minister of the day. Australia won the series 3-0, with Labor PM Billy Hughes presenting Armstrong with a £2,500 cheque: “If ever there was a man singled out as a king of sport it was Mr Armstrong, who had gone out to give the people of England a chance to regain the Ashes and who had returned, like Imperial Caesar, who came, saw and conquered.”
• Ian Botham copped a bouncer from Australia’s Prime Minister in 1992 after the England all-rounder had walked out of a World Cup function when a comedian had lampooned the Queen. Paul Keating – Prime Minister between 1991 and 1996 – said Botham had over-reacted: “These things happen. I’m not real dead keen on impersonators myself, but you’ve got to take all this in your stride.”
Australian Prime Minister Paul Keating with Mike Atherton and Mark Taylor during England’s 1994/95 tour of Australia
• Former fast bowler Nathan Bracken stood as an independent candidate for a seat in New South Wales at the 2013 Australian federal election. Bracken, who appeared in five Tests and 116 one-day internationals, stood for the seat of Dobell, gaining over 6,000 votes and coming third behind the Liberal and Labor candidates.
In 2010, one of Bracken’s former fast-bowling team-mates was approached by the New South Wales Nationals to consider a career in politics. The leader of the Nationals party spoke to Glenn McGrath during the Sydney Test match in 2009/10: “You never know what the future holds, but it’s not something I’m seriously considering.”
• On the same day that the Kevin Rudd government lost power at the 2013 federal election, a former Labor leader tweeted news of a cricket win in Washington. Kim Beazley – who led the Labor Party to two election losses and later became Australia’s top diplomat in the United States – proudly boasted that Australia had made the final of the Ambassadors Cricket Cup.
• During an official trip to India in 2014, Australia’s Tony Abbott met Sachin Tendulkar in Mumbai with the Prime Minister made a life member of the Cricket Club of India. Two months later, India’s PM Narendra Modi travelled to Australia for the G20 summit, later paying a visit to the MCG. After the summit, held in Brisbane, Mr Modi attended a function hosted by the Queensland Premier and officiated by former Australian fast bowler Michael Kasprowicz.
• Henry Mulholland was Speaker of the Northern Ireland House of Commons between 1929 and 1945 and played first-class cricket for Ireland and Cambridge University. In all first-class cricket he scored 1,642 runs with a best of 153 opening the batting for Cambridge against the touring Indians at Fenner’s in 1911. Two years later, he returned the outstanding figures of 5-9 against Middlesex at the same venue.
After the First World War, Mulholland entered politics, becoming a member of the House of Commons of Northern Ireland for the seat of County Down, and married Sheelah Brooke, sister of Basil Brooke, Northern Ireland’s Prime Minister between 1943 and 1963.
• When Kevin Rudd became Australia’s Prime Minister for the first time, in 2007, he revealed his childhood cricketing hero had been England’s Colin Cowdrey. Mr Rudd also nominated as one of his fondest sporting moments the time Garry Sobers hit 254 for a World XI against Australia at the MCG in 1970/71: “Just a stupendous batsman. I thought this guy has got the gift, the gift of the gods about him.”
Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd (right) with former Australian wicketkeeper Adam Gilchrist in 2013
• Upon his retirement from cricket in 2012, rumours swept through Westminster in London that former England captain Andrew Strauss would switch from Lord’s to the Commons. A staunch Conservative Party supporter, the South African-born Strauss had raised £25,000 at a Tory fundraiser in 2011.
• Launching the Labor Party’s campaign for the 2015 New South Wales election, Opposition Leader Luke Foley compared winning government to a famous Australian cricket victory. Mr Foley spoke about The Oval Test of 1882 in which England needed just 85 runs to win: “Our greatest fast bowler – Fred Spofforth, ‘The Demon’ – told his team-mates at the final change of innings: ‘This thing can be done’. And they did it. At this election, this can be done. Anyone who has lived through the last ten years of Australian politics and says an election is un-winnable is a fool.”
In the match that gave birth to the Ashes, Spofforth took 7-44 opening the bowling with Tom Garrett, whose great-grandson Peter Garrett went on to become a prominent politician. Elected to the Australian parliament as a Labor Party member in 2004, he was appointed federal Environment Minister in 2007 and later School Education Minister.
• Braima Isaacs, a wicketkeeper who appeared in 53 first-class matches in South Africa, later turned to politics. Isaacs scored a century while opening for Western Province against Natal in Durban in 1979/80, later becoming an ICC match referee and then a member of the Western Cape parliament representing the New National Party.
• A day’s play in a Habib Bank-Karachi Blues match in 2010/11 was lost due to the burial of a Pakistani politician who’d been assassinated in London. Another first-class match was similarly disrupted in the same season when a day was lost in the State Bank-KRL game in Rawalpindi following the murder of the Punjab governor.
