Australia misguided as they bid to draw inspiration from the past ahead of first Test

SAM MORSHEAD AT EDGBASTON: An incorrectly attributed Winston Churchill quote is helping the tourists unite ahead of facing England in Birmingham

Australia’s Test squad have been using words attributed to one of history’s most famous Englishmen for inspiration ahead of the Ashes summer. But there’s a problem: the Winston Churchill quote in question appears to be fake.

With the ball-tampering trio of Steve Smith, David Warner and Cameron Bancroft widely expected to feature at Edgbaston on Thursday, the focus on the Aussie players’ on-field conduct remains intense.

Captain Tim Paine, who fell into the job in the aftermath of the Cape Town scandal, has spent pretty much his entire tenure straight-batting questions about the cricketing culture back home, the mythical line which should not be crossed and the responsibilities those who wear the Baggy Green have as role models to aspiring players, both in Australia and around the world.

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Paine is evidently at the end of his tether when it comes to the subject and, in an effort to steer journalists onto different land, he revealed this week that he and his players intend to prove their moral rebirth by the way they play the game.

It’s an ‘actions speak louder than words’ stance, and an admirable one. There is, after all, bound to be enough reference to what happened at Newlands from the stands, without the need for the skipper to whip the media into a frenzy.

It is unfortunate, then, that the Aussies have fallen into a common trap when it comes to motivational quotations.

“We’re going to play competitive Test match cricket like any other nation does. Our guys understand what’s expected of them,” Paine said, when answering one of the half-dozen conduct-related questions at his pre-match press conference on Wednesday.

^{Tim Paine has led the cleansing process of Australian cricket}

“There’s been a quote hanging around the changing room this week from Winston Churchill and that’s that ‘behaviour doesn’t lie’. We can talk all we like about how we’re going to behave, ultimately you guys will see how we behave and can judge for yourselves.

“Brad Haddin brought (the quote) up with me the other day in one of the chats we had and I quite liked it. We’ve raised that with our own team. We’ve also internally spoken about our behaviour and the way we’re going to be seen. I think it’s a great quote for us and it’s a great quote for you guys. It’s amazing, we come into every press conference in the past 12 months and talk about our behaviour - you can just watch us and judge us.”

Churchill is a widely and often wildly misquoted figure, so much so that there is a specific term for the process.

“Churchillian Drift” sounds like a semi-successful prog rock band but was actually coined by gnomologist (collector of quotes, not garden ornaments) Nigel Rees for the false attribution of words to the former British prime minister.

^{David Warner, Steve Smith and Cameron Bancroft will be the centre of attention}

And according to Richard Langworth - a senior fellow at the Hillside College Churchill Project - Paine and the Australians may well have been duped by a fraud.

The quote “behaviour never lies” is among the dozens listed by Langworth on his blog as either being unfounded or having been incorrectly attributed to Churchill down the years.

“Fake quotes are a problem,” Langworth writes. “And they keep coming at us on that daily cacophony of wisdom and foolishness, the World Wide Web”.

So whose wise words are the Australians actually using?

Well, the phrase “behaviour never lies” appears as a single-sentence article written by the conspiracy theorist David Icke for his website, it is the title of several self-help books currently available on Amazon, and it is lesson two in a series of acting classes put on by one particular Canadian drama school.

But it did not belong to Churchill.