What times! What habits!

A common cry is that professionalism has turned our cricketers into mere automata, similar in many more respects than they are different. Cricket Australia’s compendious media guide provides some empirical support for the complaint, having surveyed each of the country’s first-class players of their heroes, philosophies, recreations, and favourite dishes. If it wasn’t for barbecues, it soon emerges, many Australian cricketers would surely starve.

Yet perhaps the most revelatory dimension of the questionaire involves bad habits, where Australian cricketers reveal themselves as almost abjectly inoffensive. Some are lazy. Some are messy. Justin Langer may leave wet towels on the bathroom floor. His wife tells him he does; he apparently remains unconvinced. Political correctness has made inroads. Metrosexual South Australian rookie Lachlan Oswald-Jacobs chides himself for failing to lift the toilet seat; cerebral New South Welshman Greg Mail confesses to ‘studying maths’. Doesn’t anyone smoke, or drink, or shag any more? Shane Jurgensen owns up to ‘annoying my wife’; the alternative of annoying other people’s wives would surely be far more interesting. While on the subject of wives, Shane Warne’s worst habit is ‘losing things’.

Runaway bestseller among bad habits, and the choice of champions, is nail biting, conceded by the following: Ricky Ponting, Shane Watson, Mitchell Johnson, Michael Bevan, Brad Haddin, Moises Henriques, Tim Lang, Aaron O’Brien, Grant Roden, Craig Philipson, Dan Marsh, Damien Wright, George Bailey, Tim Paine, Michael Klinger, Adam Crosthwaite, Dirk Nannes, Peter Siddle, Jon Holland, Alex Doolan, Grant Baldwin, Matthew Gale, Murray Bragg. Maybe they taught it at the Academy. You could cut the tension in the Victorian dressing room with a knife: it contains no fewer than seven cricketers hard at work gnawing their cuticles. It must be an atmospheric place, too, what with Jason Arnberger’s ‘foot odour’, Matthew Harrison’s ‘flatulence’ and Brad Hodge ‘wiping underarms with towelettes in public places’.

Gnawing at nails may ease butterflies, but it isn’t exactly going to sweep the nation. In Australia, there is a nostalgic hankering for cricketers cut from a coarser cloth – thus the strange post-career celebrity of David Boon, always bemoaning the constant harking back to his beer drinking record en route to England, yet cheerfully and lucratively the poster boy for a brewer. Drinking 50 Gatorades on the way to England somehow doesn’t cut the mustard. Perhaps the problem is that we now know too much about too little. If Australian cricketers can’t develop some diverting habits, it’s arguable they should give up answering questionaires.