I tried yesterday to explain to someone who doesn’t understand cricket why there has been such a terrible fuss following Australia’s victory over England at the weekend. It wasn’t just Jonny Bairstow who was stumped. This was not a straightforward situation to explain. No one had cheated to gain an advantage, no rule had been broken, or even bent, and no incorrect decision had been made.
Yet what happened on the field at Lord’s on Sunday afternoon has developed into a full-blown international incident between the two countries, an event of such import that the Prime Minister has felt it necessary to weigh in.
Rishi Sunak’s spokesman said that the PM “simply wouldn’t want to win a game in the manner Australia did”, and, predictably (you may say), the response from down under has been somewhat less than diplomatic. The nation’s media called England “cry babies” and a former High Commissioner to the UK said the English were “bad losers”.
In trying to illuminate my friend, and without going into the technicalities of what happened, all I could say is that the Australians had applied the laws of the game by the letter, but maybe not by the spirit, in claiming the wicket of Bairstow, a key English batsman.
Sportsmanship is defined by the Collins Dictionary as “behaviour and attitudes that show respect for the rules of a game and for the other players”, so you couldn’t even say, by its strict definition, that the Aussies had been unsportsmanlike. Certainly, in the historical sweep of Ashes contests between England and Australia, which have been marked in recent years by unruly crowds and the exchange of verbal abuse between the players on the field, it wasn’t exactly out of context.
We were told it just wasn’t cricket, but this phrase, which has become synonymous with fair play, should perhaps be interrogated. Cricket is a sport which likes to think it holds itself to higher standards of conduct than other games, but what happened at Lord’s is not an isolated example of questionable behaviour.
As far back as 1933, England were accused of intimidatory tactics by targeting the Australians’ bodies rather than the stumps with their bowling. And down the years, in the wider world of cricket, there have been cases of match-fixing, ball-tampering and countless accusations of sledging.
In 1981, the Australians bowled the last ball of a game underarm to prevent their opponents from scoring. More materially, an independent report last week concluded that there was “widespread and deep-rooted” racism, sexism, elitism and class-based bias at all levels of English cricket.
It’s not that cricket is worse than other professional sports in the modern age, but maybe we should forget the idea that it is still the repository of old-fashioned, dare we say gentlemanly manners. There is a febrile, alcohol fuelled atmosphere at Test matches these days, much of the chanting is borrowed from White Hart Lane and, and undoubtedly the outraged reactions of spectators to Sunday’s incident – despite coming in the morning session, before lunchtime refreshments – were inflamed by the copious intake of grog.
Even those dressed in blazers and the egg-and-bacon coloured ties of the MCC were incandescent, and the Australian players had to run a gauntlet of accusation and abuse in the Lord’s pavilion, the holy of holies of the world game. Rather than acting professionally in the way of, say, footballers who face such insults, and much worse, all the time and merely walk on by, the Aussies engaged with their accusers. Stewards had to intervene to prevent a physical confrontation. It was a highly unedifying spectacle, and merely added to the impression that cricket, far from being the gold standard of behaviour, has something of a problem.
At its most basic level, English cricket fans feel that what happened at Lord’s was simply unjust. It’s true that all sports should be underpinned by the concept of fairness, but sport – and life – can never be fair, even after review by video (as happened with Bairstow’s dismissal). A level playing field, so to speak, is an illusion.
So now the two nations prepare to face each other again on Thursday, and there is the foul smell of perfidy, betrayal and iniquity. Extra security has been employed to keep the spectators, if not the players, in order in such highly-charged circumstances. It would be too much to say the sport itself is under examination, but there’s much more at stake at Headingley than the destination of the Ashes.
