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Don’t expect there ever to be a Last Dance or Get Back style reimagining of the fly-on-the-wall access granted to the Australian men’s team over the past few years.
Twenty years from now, should filmmakers go digging around the archives for uncut footage from the Amazon series about the Australian men’s team from 2018 to 2022, they will struggle to find any.
Test captain Pat Cummins in season two of the Amazon video series, The Test.
That’s because, unless there is a secret hard drive buried in a backyard somewhere, the hundreds of surplus hours of filming by the project’s primary cinematographer Andre Mauger have been destroyed.
This was done by mutual agreement between the filmmakers and Cricket Australia, on the basis that neither party wanted to see unused footage in the wrong hands, or cherry-picked out of context.
So the extra footage of countless meetings, training sessions and dressing-room reactions to undulations on the field of play from the period will never be glimpsed at any point in the future.
That season-one agreement, sources have told The Age and The Sydney Morning Herald, was less a contractual stipulation than a handshake and understanding between the parties about how the project would play out. The future of any uncut season-two footage is yet to be determined.
Back in 2018, unbridled dressing-room access to the Australian team was considered unlikely ever to be granted, despite years of requests by countless other broadcasters and filmmakers alike.
Cricket Australia had been fielding requests for that kind of window into the team since as early as 1996, when Year Of The Dogs took viewers inside the changing rooms and coaches box of what was then a struggling Footscray in the AFL.
Scenes from season one of The Test.
But those requests ran up against the fierce objections of the Australian team itself. As former captain Ricky Ponting put it when speaking at the Chappell Foundation dinner in Sydney in early 2020:
“I was very guarded as the Australian captain because I didn’t particularly want – and this will probably come across in the wrong way – the public to know about our team. There was a lot of mystique about what happened in the changerooms of the Australian cricket team and I found myself a guardian of our players, almost like a father figure to the players where I wasn’t going to let anybody know anything they didn’t need to know.”
So in the mess of emotions and concerns that followed the 2018 Newlands scandal, desires from CA for the team to open up more, and then new coach Justin Langer to balance these hopes with the traditions held dear by Ponting, the footage deletion agreement was reached.
In 2019, a reminder arrived of why that arrangement made sense to the concerned parties. The emergence of expletive-laden coaches box audio from former Bulldogs mentor Rodney Eade, sounding angry at his runner and the ruckman Will Minson in turn, raised plenty of eyebrows for coaches and documentarians alike.
Five years later, in the aftermath of season two of the Amazon series, the agreement to delete footage has left a range of views in the air. Some players wish they could look back on the cuts, if only to be reminded of how much the team has evolved.
Others, as documentary junkies themselves, like the idea of a fresh story being put together from all this footage in years down the track, as happened when Peter Jackson stitched together the unused film from the Beatles Let It Be project in 1969.
Discussions also relate to a question left tantalisingly in the air at the end of season two, which leaves the Australian team about to embark upon tours of India and England this year that will largely define the legacy of Pat Cummins and company.
Michael Jordan in a scene from ‘The Last Dance’ documentary.
If there is to be a third season taking in these epochal encounters, a lot is going to have to happen very quickly. The job is hugely demanding for Mauger in particular, encompassing long days and longer tours.
Filmmakers were able to film in India during season one, for a brief Australian white ball tour ahead of the 2019 World Cup, but visa and travel arrangements would still need to be finalised.
And all involved in the project are, for the time being, taking a deep breath while unsure whether they will get the call to go again in 2023.
Either way, the Amazon documentaries are largely a case of offering a valuable but contemporaneous and somewhat careful window into the Australian team, as opposed to vaulting up footage for history.
Michael Jordan, it should not be forgotten, held out nearly 20 years to give his approval for the Chicago Bulls’ 1997-98 footage to be used. In the case of the Australian team, the trade-off has been to ward off future leaks in return for something substantial in the here and now.
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