Taking off from the present travails of Australia's cricketers, Sam de Brito speculates, in the Sydney Morning Herald, about why the present team are as unloved as they are by the Australian cricket-following public. His hypothesis: there's just too much - too much of them and for them. '[T]oo much cricket... too many formats, too many uniforms and too many players in those uniforms across those formats'; and too much media exposure, too many ads and endorsements, the cricketers overpaid.
I'm not going to quarrel with any of this. Maybe there's something in it. But even if it's true, I think there's something else more general which de Brito overlooks, though there's a clue to it in his own remark in passing (apropos the current state of 'unlovedness') that 'This is unheard of when teams are winning'. Exactly so. Anyone who watches live football will know the impulse which seizes some proportion of a team's supporters when the team is taking a beating, especially when playing poorly: the impulse to start shouting at members of the team in an angry, even abusive, way; to moan loudly about how pathetic they are. It's not the only impulse. There's also an opposite one, namely, expressing your support whatever: 'We'll keep the red flag flying high cos Man United never die', 'You'll never walk alone', and so forth, sung defiantly. Yet anger and abuse from the fans when their team is getting stuffed is one well-known response, all the same. Is it a psychological distancing? OK, that's my team but, bloody hell, I don't want to be associated with them in this guise, associated with this piss-poor aspect of them; I have my standards after all.
In any case, I'm with Australia, thick and thin. But they need to rebuild the side.