Respect the baggy green
Australian cricketers wore VB promotional caps on their opening match of the West Indies tour overnight, causing a furore among die-hard fans and former players.
“Money talks, you’re selling your pride, selling the baggy green, what price is it? It just cheapens things,” former Test player Greg Matthews said.
“Personally I would have worn my baggy green, I wouldn’t have given a razoo what they told me. If someone said to me I had to wear a VB hat, I’d tell them to piss off.”
Cricket Australia’s public affairs manager Philip Pope said the decision was not made for commercial reasons, but because team management wanted uniformity.
He said not every player had access to a baggy green.
I’m in the dark a bit here. Australian teams have been touring overseas for 130 years so surely this issue has been addressed before, but honestly I don’t know how.
It’s a guess, but I assume non-capped touring players wore their club or state/colonial caps on previous tours, or the ubiquitous white floppy.
Cricket Australia’s Peter Young suggested that CA may now look at coming up with a neutral Australian cap for warm-up matches.
“Maybe a cap with just the Cricket Australia logo would work. I think they’ve just been caught on the hop here. They’ve arrived in the West Indies with broad-brimmed hats, training caps and baggy greens, and they’ve just all chosen to wear the same.”
Why were they “caught on the hop”? They’re a professional sporting team representing their country.
The wearing of beer hats is unprofessional and demeaning to the history of Australian cricket.
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I love my sport. Played basketball for 30 years but also had a go at aussie rules, squash, tabletennis, volleyball and, of course, cricket too. I’v never made it to the top in any of them but I still trudge along.
But I would be absolutely devasted when it came to my turn to represent Australia. To live that dream of all dreams and reach the pinnacle of sport, only to get handed a worthless blue sunshade instead of the real thing, the “baggy green” that spells out champions like Sir Donald Bradman, Dennis Lillee, Adam Gilchrist, Alan Border … and the list goes on and on and on. Say no more!
That was an extraordinarily stupid decision by the team management. Sends entirely the wrong message.
This is a storm in a tea cup. It was a team decision, it was a warm up match against the Jamaica IX and not the opening of the series as you state.
It was actually done to preserve the tradition of the baggy green that Steve Waugh started: players only get their baggy green on the morning of their first official test match. Brad Haddin hadn’t played yet.