Stuart MacGill, the Australian leg spinner, was a different kind of Baggy Green. He had, according to Fox Sports Australia, “an indifferent relationship with Cricket Australia and teammates throughout his career”.
Singing Under the Southern Cross as a team was mandatory after a victory. No-one was allowed to leave the dressing room or the ground until the last note.
MacGill didn’t see it that way. After one win, when the beers and stories had been drunk and told, he looked at his watch, stood up and said he was off to dinner with friends and family. Legend has it the room was in shock.
He played in the time of Shane Warne and would have managed more than his 44 Tests and 208 wickets had it not been for Warne, Glenn McGrath, Jason Gillespie and Brett Lee as the Australian mainstay attack. He did things differently.
“He read books in the dressing room — actual books,” wrote Ben Pobjie for the Roar.com.au website. “He was a connoisseur of fine wines in a team of beer drinkers. He bowled an intoxicating variety of massive leg breaks, wicked wrong ’uns, fizzing topspinners and a fair share of long hops and full tosses — giving it a rip with glorious unpredictability, just like the leggies of yore, while carrying himself with vein-popping intensity relieved only by the cathartic roar of triumph when a batsman fell for his tricks.”
“In 2004, he was the only Australian cricketer to make himself unavailable for a tour of Zimbabwe on moral grounds. Shortly before he retired a few years later, he refused to appear in a KFC advertisement despite it being a major sponsor of Cricket Australia,” wrote Fox Sports Australia.
“‘The problem for me is that KFC and Cricket Australia are hitting parents where they’re vulnerable,’ he said. ‘Parents are already under a lot of pressure from kids to buy this stuff and when you get the Australian cricket team endorsing it, you just increase that pressure. It’s just wrong in so many ways’.”
In 2015, he took Cricket Australia to court seeking $2.5m after he claimed they “failed to pay him injury payments after his retirement in May 2008”. The matter was settled out of court in 2017.
He has been back in court over the last few years and on Thursday was found guilty of the charge of “drug supply”. He was, reported the AAP, “acquitted of taking part in a large commercial drug supply that began under his restaurant in April 2021”.
That was an A$330,000 deal for a 1kg brick of the Devil’s Dandruff. The latter charge carries a potential life sentence, but he may still face jail time. The jury found “MacGill knew the cocaine deal between his regular dealer and his brother-in-law was taking place but was oblivious a 1kg brick was changing hands”.
The deal took place between MacGill’s regular drug dealer — “Person A” — and MacGill’s brother-in-law, Marino Sotiropoulos, in the car park under Aristotle’s, the restaurant he ran on Neutral Bay. MacGill stood a metre away from the deal, which may have saved him from big jail time.
It went a little pear-shaped after that. At a second deal, for A$660,000 worth of coke, “Person A” gave them a “vacuum-sealed bag of A4 paper concealed by A$50 notes before turning off his phone and deleting the encrypted app he was using”.
Threats started to come in demanding the location of Person A or the return of the money, leading to MacGill’s kidnapping later in April. The former Test bowler was bundled into the back of a car by several males and taken to an abandoned shed at Bringelly, in Sydney’s west, where he was assaulted, threatened and released, the jury heard.
He is not the only cokehead in cricket or sport. Wasim Akram struggled with addiction to the drug throughout his career, former Zimbabwe captain Brendan Taylor admitted in 2022 he had taken cocaine and a $15,000 bribe to fix games from an Indian bookie.
Vice.com, appropriately enough, found that of the 147
ex-professional soccer players now in adult prisons in Britain, 128 of them — 87% — are inside for drug offences.
Michael Kinsella, a former Liverpool FC under-15s goalkeeper started selling cocaine in Liverpool after his career ended prematurely.
“In 2007, police raided his home and found £300,000 worth of cocaine, £2,000 worth of heroin and a list of dealers. He was sentenced to seven years,” reads Vice.com.
“He was sentenced to another nine years for being part of a Liverpool-based international cocaine smuggling ring that imported hundreds of kilograms of cocaine, ecstasy and heroin on to the streets of Merseyside from Amsterdam and Spain.”
From Baggy Green to orange overalls, from white line fever to white line fever. The Devil’s Dandruff is an unforgiving mistress.
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