Thane and regret: an Australian idiot’s tale
The parallels are striking. On the one hand Shakespeare’s Scottish villain, seduced into infamy by a lust for power, destroyed by “vaulting ambition which o’erleaps itself”. On the other the Australian cricket captain, driven to cheat by a desire for victory, scythed down by the avenging sword of truth. The one-night performance was a sell-out: MacSmith, the Australian Play, at a tearful, packed press conference near you.
Perhaps I’m pushing it. Perhaps it’s because I’ve just seen Shakespeare’s original for the first time in years that the comparison skips so readily into view. Or maybe it was the inflated response – the ludicrous disproportion which, for a news cycle or two, pushed ball tampering to the top of the agenda, far above such pesky trivia as nerve agents or chemical war – that first brought it forcibly to mind.
But consider the facts. When we first meet Macbeth he is Thane of Glamis, a valiant noble doing his bit for king and country. Then he starts hanging out with some really dodgy birds who tell him that the world is his oyster, and before you can say ‘dagger’ he’s bumping off the monarch and plunging Scotland into despair.
Finally his crimes catch up with him and he is slain in battle, overcome by regret and a sense of futility which – by way of scant consolation – he gets to express through some of the most memorable lines in history. Every cloud, as they say.
When Steve Smith first stole into the Australian team, he seemed about as destined for greatness as the Smurfs. Fast-forward a few years, however, and he’s knocking out centuries like there’s no tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow. Soon the press – and all the weird sisters and brothers on Twitter – are making hyperbolic claims, calling him a Bradman in the making.
Unlike Macbeth, Smith gets the top job through fair means, not foul, taking over the captaincy and putting English upstarts to the sword. But South Africa proves a tougher nut: defeat looms.
“That is a step on which I must fall down, or else o’erleap,” thinks Smith. “For in my way it lies.”
But Smith’s lieutenant – the uncompromising Thane of Sydney – has a plan. Why not get one of the junior warriors to rough up the ball with sandpaper in the hope that it will start to swing? Smith goes along with it.
“If it were done when ‘tis done, then ‘twere well it were done quickly,” he muses.
But the ruse is rumbled and he is left to dissemble – “false face must hide what the false heart doth know” – in a room full of gory-locked media.
“Thou canst not say I did it,” he somehow manages to imply. “Never shake thy microphones at me.”
But, of course, he did do it, as his second, contrite interview betrays. The brief candle of Smith’s captaincy is out. Now he is just a shadow of himself, a poor player who became a very good one to strut the cricketing stages of the world.
How sad that, for all their sound and fury, his great triumphs now seem to signify nothing.
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