Big Interview: How an Ocker became NZ's most intriguing cricket reporter (damn it!)
Jarrod Kimber is a force of nature as much as he is a journalist but if you love cricket, you'll love him. PLUS: The Chiefs "bold" move and the inaugural Midweek Book Club.
The best New Zealand cricket reporter is… an Australian who lives in London.
Yeah, it hurts a bit to write that but it’s true. Over the past 15 years, Jarrod Kimber, a former Melbourne grade cricketer, has transformed himself into the most intelligent and versatile chronicler of the great game.
Whether Kimber is talking, writing or preparing videos about broad-based issues or tactical and statistical minutiae, his combination of sardonic wit, untrained eye for an angle and, above all else, deep-seated passion for the sport has elevated him to a pedestal all of his own.
Others might write with more real-world experience - Michael Atherton, for example - break more stories, or write more purple prose, but none put together a package to match the output of Kimber.
He is, quite probably, the prototype international cricket citizen journalist. He writes about most cricket-playing nations and he does so in a way that is perceptive yet never patronising.
His work has not been without controversy. His co-direction of the must-see docu-lament Death of a Gentleman (2015) saw him almost banned from the press box.
That was a bold project, yet he started out with more modest ambitions. Last week I patched into a long-distance interview with one thing on my mind. How did he turn himself into this magnificent machine? What I found was not only a unique cricket mind, but what a coach might refer to as universal “learnings”.
The chat went on for a long time. I had booked in half an hour and it sailed a long way past that, so for ease of reading, I've broken the chat into two parts. Part II will be posted tomorrow.
(Answers are abridged and edited for clarity).
Where does your love for all cricket, not just Australian cricket, spring from?
As you know, Australian cricket is very insular. Up to the age of 11 or 12 all we knew was Australian cricket. My first heroes were club cricketers, my second were Victorian cricketers [the state, not the era], and then it was Australian cricketers. That’s where most Australians stop.
The difference for me was Pakistan toured in 1991-92 I think and I watched Mushtaq Ahmed and Wasim Akram and thought, “We talk about how great we are at cricket but these guys seem really cool and I don’t know anything about them.” I became a legspinner just before Pakistan toured and Mushtaq cemented it for me - it was just before Shane Warne came along.
My next hero was Martin Crowe, the captain. The two things I loved was slip fielding and captaincy, which is probably why I never made it as a professional because they don’t promote you off the back of those two skills! I had a white helmet and took the visor off to look like Crowe. We didn’t even have thigh-pads in our league, it wasn’t a big thing, but I wore one because Crowe wore this big chunky one.
Through them, I had an interest in other teams that you just couldn’t have in Australia.
For a while there the ABC radio commentary team was probably the best there’s ever been. They had Tim Lane, Jim Maxwell, Peter Roebuck, Kerry O’Keefe and they were all firing. I remember an occasion though when Adam Gilchrist had come in and had played for about six months and somebody said: “Would you say Peter, that Gilchrist is the best batsmen in the world?”
This is 1999 and we’ve got Steve Waugh, we’ve got Brian Lara, Sachin Tendulkar and Inzamam-ul-Haq and I remember that comment so clearly because Roebuck was just like, “What are you talking about? The guy has just started, we don’t know what he’s going to be like.”
All those things, it just kept pricking at me that there was something Australia was missing about cricket. It was always clear Australia and the world weren’t together in cricket; Australia was out on its own, partly because they were so good.
I wanted to learn about other countries. It started with Pakistan, New Zealand was next, then India. The West Indies were fading at that point but I was still interested. South Africa and Zimbabwe were coming through so I started learning about them. Once you start learning about all these cricket cultures the other stuff comes naturally.
You go from a monoculture where the only thing you know is what Ian Chappell tells you, to suddenly understanding why South Africa played the way they do, or how the West Indies developed they way they did and then you understand why New Zealand hasn’t been as successful as they should be, yet overachieved at other times.
When did these cultural learnings crystallise into journalistic output?
In 2003 I backpacked around the world and went to the World Cup [in South Africa]. It was the first time I had seen a professional cricket game outside of Melbourne. In South Africa I was staying in all these dodgy hostels with Indian fans, with Pakistani fans, with New Zealand and England fans. There was a mix of 30 percent people from Portugal just there to smoke weed and 70 percent hardcore cricket fans.
Suddenly you’re having these conversations and you’re seeing Australia through a different light. It was a culmination of all those different things.
I started my blog in 2007, Cricket With Balls. I didn’t know what the fuck I was doing. All I knew was that me and my mates were having these really interesting discussions about cricket and I’d read stuff in Australian newspapers and think, “This is shit”.
Great reporters, guys like [Robert] Crash Craddock, I was obsessed by Crash, and Ken Piesse in Victoria, Malcolm Conn, we knew all the names. It wasn’t that they didn’t know anything about cricket, but they were writing cricket news most of the time. It wasn’t cricket writing, it was cricket news: Who’s going to get dropped next? Is the coach under pressure?
There was no talking about the opposition or explaining you through the game. What you had were people who knew a lot about the game but weren’t writing about it, yet me and my mates were having these deep conversations about it. All of it came together when I started a cricket blog. I ran a film production company and most of the time we were unemployed, so when I didn’t have work I wrote about cricket. I wrote about all countries and that had never really happened before.
Every other cricket writer before that had written about their country and maybe they had a pet country. I didn’t know the rules enough to know I was doing something different. Not only was I doing it in a way that hadn’t been done, but suddenly I was getting fans from New Zealand, from Sri Lanka, from Bangladesh, Nepal and all these random places, giving me feedback. Back then blogs were king, then social media picked up in 2008-09 and suddenly you were getting instant feedback.
It meant my fanbase was completely different to every other cricket writer on the planet and it was helping educate me about all these different parts of the game. Once you start learning about all these inequalities in the game, there’s no going back.
I don’t write so much about cricket politics now because once I did Death of a Gentleman, I was spent. There were legal pursuits against me, people tried to ban me from the press box, I lost my ECB accreditation. You try to interview a player and they’d start by telling you that an administrator had just told them that I was the worst person in cricket. It just got to the point where you were spent, but I couldn't let it go.
I’ve just done a big piece on Pakistan and New Zealand and England walking out on them.
Your take is?
It all comes back to this way we’ve set up cricket which feeds into the inequalities. It’s set up through bilateral series that make no sense and don’t fit into the modern world and allows teams to just go, “I’m not going to play in this one. It’s alright, we’re not going to lose much money so we’re okay with this.”
When did it become more than a hobby?
When I got to England in 2008 it became a profession. I’m probably the first ever global cricket writer, completely by accident, and that meant the politics and the business of cricket came with it. You couldn’t get away from it. It would be disingenuous for me, when I'm writing about Sri Lanka or New Zealand, to pretend they are the same as Australia, England or India. They are fundamentally not the same.
I was asked to write a book about the history of cricket. I knew a bit going in but spending a year doing that and getting obsessed by everything and that’s when you start to put things together.
Because I didn’t know the rules... I remember when Death of a Gentleman came out and John Etheridge [cricket writer for The Sun] was on one of those shows in the UK and he said, “I was taught in my career that you wrote about men in boots, not men in suits.” No one ever told me that! I probably look more like a pioneer than I should because it was more a case of me bumping into things and occasionally getting it right.
The culture of Australian cricket has come under fire. Having grown up immersed in it, is there something about the grassroots of the game in Australia that develops this hard, confrontational type of cricket and cricketers?
The first thing I would say is I don’t think there is, outside probably the West Indies, a more working-class cricket culture than Australia.
Not only is it working class in Australia, it is painfully working class to the point where you have guys who have been through private education who struggle to get through. That changes the dynamic of the sport and then you have to think of cricket more in the way you’d think of football.
Look at the Australian crowds of the ‘90s, the MCG crowds specifically: those crowds are worse than football crowds in Australia by a considerable distance. Obviously the sun and drinking play a big part in that but it is unlike other cricket cultures.
If you go back to the early Australian cricket teams you can see it: it’s the Irish and Scottish expats trying to beat the Poms. It spread through that community in a way it didn’t in other cricket countries, for whatever reason. It’s more like football, where everywhere else cricket is like cricket. I mean, England used cricket to colonise; they were trying to find the gentlemen in India, New Zealand, wherever. In Australia, it went fully football.
If you look at Australian cricket coaches, they’re much more like football coaches. If you look at the physical nature of Australian cricket, it’s got that. Cricket grew in Australia at the same time as Australian rules and rugby league did. There’s a link there. I don’t think anybody has done the big piece yet about how AFL still dominates cricket to this day. In the IPL they have a preliminary final, that comes from rugby league and Aussie rules. Half the things the ICC did in the 1990s and 2000s comes from Aussie rules because it was there before them.
Cricket and Aussie rules and to a slightly lesser extent rugby league grew up together.
It comes through grade cricket. I played grade cricket when I was 15 and once the other team thought they had me out caught behind and spent the next 15 minutes telling me they were going to beat me up and when they worked out my mum was on the boundary told me they were going to rape her. I was 15! I had braces!
That was a normal thing. I’ve been on a field when someone has tried to stab someone else with a stump. I saw two brothers punching each other in the face in a final once because they were on other teams. It is such a brutal, brutal system.
So there’s a cultural thing and also it became part of Australia’s national identity. We’re a masculine culture in the way some of those other places aren’t. The mix of the working class and the masculine culture came together to produce what it did.
It’s interesting that the women’s team I have heard can be very arrogant, and they should be because they’re the best team in the world, but they’re nowhere near as bad. So it feels to me like it’s a very male, masculine thing. Cricket is a contact sport in Australia in a way that it just isn’t in other cultures.
Will it ever change?
I do think it’s changing. I don’t think you can get away with it as much anymore. Also, Australia is not as good.
This is the thing that always shits me is we say, “We sledge because it gives us an advantage.” No, 90 percent of the time you sledge because you’re winning. If you’re 300 runs behind and you’re sledging no one cares, no one even remembers what you said, right?
Because of social media and stump mics, I don’t think it’s as bad at international level now.
Also, in the ’70s, ’80s and ’90s Australia was still a very working-class society. It’s now one of the richer, middle-class places on Earth, so people are changing as much as anything.
That’ll do for Part I. Tomorrow we cross the Tasman to talk New Zealand cricket and examine how the recent cancellations could create a dystopian cricket future (my words, not Jarrod’s), where teams outside the “Big Three’ abandon international cricket for money-making domestic leagues.
ALL (ACTUALLY JUST SOME OF) THE NEWS
Warren Gatland is staying at the Chiefs, but as director of rugby. The whole Gatland is coach one year, off the next to do the Lions, then back again thing was curious and Newshub reports that it saw him “lose” the dressing room (for future reference Warren, you go down the stairs, through the double doors and turn hard right). GM-coach and director-coach type set-ups have been around for decades in US sport in particular and they make sense. They can also be disastrous when egos collide. Chiefs CEO Michael Collins is going to have to ensure both Gatland and coach Clayton McMillan have clearly defined roles. Super Rugby in New Zealand is a copycat league - if it works at the Chiefs, the rest will follow.
This topic and more was discussed on Ian Smith’s The Panel this morning with myself and Andrew Gourdie.
I’m deeply sorry to hear the global pandemic has been inconvenient for our best mixed martial artists, because it’s been such a breeze for the rest of us.
Yeah, I’d say Lionel Messi has got a bit left in him.
Simone Biles, from The Cut. Key quote: “If you looked at everything I’ve gone through for the past seven years, I should have never made another Olympic team,” Biles says, her eyes filling with tears. “I should have quit way before Tokyo, when Larry Nassar was in the media for two years. It was too much. But I was not going to let him take something I’ve worked for since I was 6 years old. I wasn’t going to let him take that joy away from me. So I pushed past that for as long as my mind and my body would let me.”
MIDWEEK BOOK CLUB
What is it?
The Best American Sports Writing 2020
Who wrote it?
No single author but the guest editor was sports writing doyenne Jackie MacMullan and the series editor is Glenn Stout.
Publisher: Mariner
Genre: Anthology
Why read it: Because the series showcases some of the best sports writing and reportage in the world and the 2020 edition is the 30th and last. That saddens me no end because BASW has been a big part of my life, opening the blinds and letting a little brilliance into the room through the likes of the incomparable Gary Smith (the best), Frank Deford, Dan Jenkins, Leigh Montville, William Nack, MacMullan, Jane Leavy, Wright Thompson and many more.
The final edition traverses a wide range of topics and styles, including the hunt for a man-eating tiger (only just qualifies as “sport”), a Venus Williams profile, some detailed reportage into a scam-artist basketball executive and the diets of chess grandmasters.
It’s not the best edition, but it’s pretty bloody good. BASW, I miss you already.
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