The joy of the excuse

The Spurs forward Emmanuel Adebayor has come out with a remarkable excuse for his lack of goals this season - his mother is a witch and has put a curse on him. Cue a string of jokes about how she's obviously done it several times during his career, how she has now extended it to Roberto Soldado etc etc. But it's easy to imagine how it has gone down amongst the Tottenham hierarchy, who pay Adebayor many thousands of pounds per week.

Sport in general, and certainly professional cricket, is officially a no-excuse culture. Google "cricket excuses" and you'll find a long series of results, mostly involving England, along the lines of "Cook: No excuses for failure against spin/pace/Mitchell Johnson/the Netherlands" and so on. The professional game is a pragmatic place in which everything is explainable and everyone is accountable - at least in public. There's no room for excuses, and due to their usually high level of competence, a pro needs them less. Indeed, without excuses to get in the way, genuine bad luck is often more visible. A good player in a bad trot can have respite without the need to cook up unlikely reasons for it.

The amateur game is different. In the amateur game, the excuse is not only king, it is almost essential to survival. A professional must face up to his faults, undergo a period of introspection and then remedy them. An amateur can simply blame the wind, the sun, last night's hangover, the sad lack of DRS at the local park, and a hundred other things. The amateur's excuse is actually designed to prevent that unnecessary self-reflection that makes you realise you're not actually any good at cricket. Especially if you can convince yourself - and even better, your team-mates - that your excuse is actually true.

One of my trusty fallbacks is "I just didn't pick it up", which is useful for a dropped catch at a ground surrounded by trees. Grounds without sightscreens have a built-in reason for any dismissal. Outfields bearing divots, stones, lines drawn to mark out football fields, or which simply haven't been mown to the standard of, say, Lord's, provide ample reason for not diving, or even not running after the ball. Or for the one that just bounced over your hand or stayed low and went through your legs. A really long boundary on one side of the wicket can be patrolled in genuine peace, safe in the knowledge that most of your team-mates - and certainly your captain - are too far away to see the truth of what happened anyway. I've whiled away many contented hours in those circumstances.

A team-mate once explained that he hadn't batted well because he'd been "looking for a flat all week". Another of our much-loved warriors has, on various occasions, been seen on the boundary sending an email, absent from the field in order to take a phone call about the Scottish referendum, and once borrowed a pencil from the umpire to write down a sentence that had been eluding him - in the middle of an over he was actually bowling.

The joy of a good excuse is its unlikeliness, and also its ability to live on long after the incident it was concocted to explain has been consigned to the scorebook. Writing is a decent occupation to have in excuse terms, because most writers have thousands of them to hand to explain away missed deadlines. Cricket can come in useful there too, sometimes:

"Oh, you needed it today, did you mate? Sorry, you see I was playing cricket yesterday and I've only gone and left my mobile in the pavilion, and it had your email on it."

So hats off to Adebayor and his mother, the witch. Long live the excuse, and all of us that rely on them.