Australia’s Naughtiest Cricket Boys, Ranked

Australian sport is defined by its naughty boys. Where would we be without our Bernard Tomics and Brendan Fevolas? Our players internationally renowned for their off-field antics, our cheeky young men with dedicated “Controversies” sections on their Wikipedia pages? It’s hard to say. We’d have to get a whole new national identity, really. One centred around something other than putting blonde-tipped white men with unchecked drinking problems on cereal boxes.

It’s true that not all Australian sports produce their fair share of naughty boy news stories. Tennis? Naughty boy central. AFL? So many naughty boys! NRL? Redacted! Test cricket though, a “gentleman’s game” played by unconventionally attractive dudes with dad bods wearing white woollen v-necks, traditionally bats well under the naughty boy average. Or at least that was the impression most people got, until last month’s objectively naughty ball tampering scandal revealed otherwise.

Ballgate ticked a lot of naughty boy boxes: crotch shots, locker room bullying, multiple teary press conferences. It suddenly became apparent that cricket has always upheld Australia’s national sporting tradition of cultivating and encouraging bad boy behaviour and then, with a lot of fanfare, decrying it. It would seem we’ve ignored the signs for too long, and need to make up for lost time. Who, then, are Australian cricket’s best and naughtiest boys? Who is Australian cricket’s most naughty boy? Let’s make the VICE office discuss.

Wendy Syfret: Brett Lee is the only cricketer I would recognise in an airport other than Shane Warne. But while my knowledge of Warney is gleaned from issues of New Idea my mum keeps by the toilet for comfort during traumatic evacuations—a topic, they taught me, Shane is familiar with—Lee came to me via Bollywood. Last year he made his Indian cinema debut in the rom-com UnIndian. He plays an Australian teacher who falls for an Indian single mum. That sentence positions him as antithesis of the “naughty boy cricketer”.

I don’t know what my co-workers are going to write about their passing cricket muses this afternoon. But I’d suggest we pause for a moment to celebrate this Weet Bix gorging, potato-faced sweetheart. As we peel back that peeling, sunburnt skin of the cricket community this year, let his beady eyes be a point of light.

Although, on the other side of things, his 2006 pop song “You're the One for Me” could legitimately be the most horrendous act committed by any Australian athlete, living or dead.

Shaad D’Souza: Ricky Ponting is not the name of a naughty boy. Ricky Ponting is a humble boy from Launceston who plays cricket because cricket is the least naughty sport, a chill event where you can look masc while still pulling a crisp all-white look and, if you want, doing next to nothing. Sounds like my kind of sport, honestly. Ricky P has his own line of deodorant, and it’s not even Lynx––it’s Rexona, the good boy’s choice of deodorant, and it probably smells like freshly cut grass and starched whites and, I dunno, horse riding, or whatever it is that good boys from Launceston do. (Naughty boys use Lynx or, if truly naughty, just sweat it out. Ever wondered why Cameron Bancroft looks so shiny all the time?)

Ricky’s not even a naughty boy off the field. Ricky Ponting stays so straight and so narrow that he didn’t even decide he wanted his name to be "Ricky"––he was born Ricky Ponting, not Richard Ponting or Rich Ponting or even Ricard (I dunno) Ponting. Dude couldn’t even shorten his own name.

Sure, Ricky had some issues with his performance towards the end of his career––I don’t know anything about “cricket”, but Wikipedia tells me he was the first Australian captain to lose the Ashes twice, which sounds bad, I guess––but like, Ricky also has an Order of Australia. Ricky might not be Australia’s naughtiest cricketer, but hey––if there was an award for Narciest Cricketer, Ricky would win it by a mile.

Kat Gillespie: Steve Smith makes it onto this list by default due to his role in the Ball Tampering Scandal of March 2018. All that aside, he seems like a fairly good boy. Smith is babyfaced and sweet looking, engaged to a lawyer, and considered to be the best test batsman in the world. A natural successor to Bradman, some have said. He’s known for his earnest dedication to the game; in the past he has apparently incurred the nickname “Captain Grumpy” due to a strict adherence to the laws of sportsmanship. Guess that has to be retracted now.

You know how there were those weirdly dedicated sports jocks at your high school who weren’t just in it to impress girls? Steve Smith is definitely one of those. Speaking of, he dropped out of high school in Sydney to play cricket for… England? Which seems to me kind of naughty. But again, grasping at straws here. Steve Smith, I think, might just be a big ol’ cricket nerd. So blinded by the fear of losing an important test match that he allowed himself to be turned to the dark side. He made one mistake in the heat of the moment and will regret it for the rest of his life, okay? He knows what he did. Over the course of writing this paragraph I’ve become extremely persuaded that he deserves more sympathy than he has received thus far. Someone pass the mascara because I’m about to go full Chris Crocker about this. Leave Our Boy Steve Smith alone! Naughty cricket boy rating? Zero.

Kat Gillespie: David Warner, on the other hand. Where to begin. I get some very pure naughty boy vibes from this guy. He has been labelled “thuggish” and “juvenile” by fellow players, and even before the Ball Tampering Scandal news broke he’d already made headlines during the South Africa test for getting into a “heated exchange” with a player who’d made derogatory comments about his wife Candice. These are the old school test match beefs that I live for: fisticuffs during the tea breaks. Sweaty angry men in cricket whites. Warner had to be physically restrained by his teammates during the altercation. Very, very naughty.

Also, the ball tampering thing. It seems pretty clear to me, a complete outsider, that Warner orchestrated the whole plan then persuaded Bancroft and Smith to get on board. Again, naughty boy styles. Other signifiers of naughty boyness: a predilection for speed dealer sunnies, and that scary Ben Cousins cropped haircut that a lot of young Australian sportsmen get. Even on the field, he’s something of a maverick—becoming the first person in 132 years to make the Australian national team without any prior experience playing first class cricket. On the other hand, he shills for LG electronics and was named Australian Sports Dad of the Year in 2016. Family man status? I’ll dock some points for that. Facts remain that David Warner is still a very naughty boy.

Julian Morgans: In the summer of 2005 everyone’s 8th favourite beer, Victoria Bitter, launched a promotion encouraging people to send them money in exchange for plastic David Boon dolls. The doll was about the height of a VB can, and featured a heavily-mustached, smooshed-faced little man who came alive at midnight to say things like, "When are we going to the pub?"

And that’s how I learned about David "Boony" Boon.

I think VB chose David Boon as their mascot because in 1989 he famously drank 52 frothies on a flight between Sydney and London. Interestingly Boon has always denied the charge, telling the Guardian that “if people haven’t got something else to talk about they have led a fucking boring life.”

So it’s likely he didn’t do this—or perhaps it’s more likely that he did do this, but now he’s a bit sad that this one event completely overshadowed absolutely everything else he’s ever done. And there’s the fact he was fined $5,000 and put on probation after he could barely crawl off the plane, so it’s even possible he regrets his actions.

In any case, David Boon dolls are now a collector’s item on Gumtree, even though none of them speak. You can just scroll through all the dead-eyed, dust-clad Boonies who no longer look naughty or even very funny and wonder to what your defining moment will be. Will it be something as rebellious as drinking 52 beers on a plane? You can only hope so.

Shaad D’Souza: Cameron Bancroft (or Cam Bancroft if, like me, you talk about him so much that it’s a genuine time saver to give him a nickname) might not be the hottest cricket boy. In fact, he’s almost definitely not the hottest –– I showed his picture to no less than twelve of my friends over the weekend and received wildly different reactions from each one, ranging from "He could embezzle all my money and I’d like it" to "His neck makes me want to vomit"––but god damn if he isn’t the naughtiest. His face, all forehead and jawline, looks like it belongs on a mugshot.

Cam’s recent mishaps with ball tampering have no bearing on his naughtiness. Sure, that was a naughty act, but hey––everyone likes to tamper a few balls here and there, and I reckon Cam’s naughtiness extends far beyond a tampered ball. I mean, just look at him. Cam might not have a very deep "Controversies" section on his Wikipedia page yet, but I look at that naughty, naughty face and see nothing but a lifetime of naughty boy antics to come. And cheers to that.

Ingrid Kesa: Shane Warne looks like the kind of guy you’d swipe left on faster than the speed of light, a sort of stock photo of a middle aged man whose life hasn’t quite worked out: probably owns multiple pairs of square-toed dress shoes, has a massage chair in his lounge room, doesn’t know how to upload a photo exceeding 72dpi.

Between his appearance on I’m a Celebrity… Get Me Out of Here (coincidentally the show in which he broadcast his views that he doesn’t believe in human evolution theory) to his underwear line Spinners to his promotional work for Advanced Hair, he’s raised new bars for Australian celebrity culture. It comes as no surprise that for his contributions to humanity he’s been immortalised in the highest tribute known to our nation: earthenware bong form and musical theatre stage production.

The pink-skinned icon has a long-documented history of being a naughty boy, from smoking darts after completing a charity run for cancer to testing positive for drugs (a banned diuretic his mum gave him). It would be remiss not to mention the many claims of sexual misconduct that he’s been embroiled in over the years, from very public affairs and infidelities to sex tapes to some really gross sexual harassment, which seems to be an ongoing narrative. I’m not going to get all high and mighty and say it would be inherently wrong to smoke a cone out of his ceramic head if the opportunity were to present itself, but we should probably question if Warnie is just a loveable little naughty boy or more an emblem of Australia’s blasé attitude to, and tolerance of, toxic masculinity.

While I’m in this Safe Space, it’s worth noting that there’s no way a woman would ever be cast in such a public spotlight and get away with being so repugnant on so many levels. He is proof of the phenomenon and he is everything that is wrong—but I’ll keep looking at his Twitter, so.