Keep WADA out of cricket

Our beautiful game is in grave danger. In the name of the global war on drugs, a zealous bureaucracy fitted to the very different world of athletics threatens to seize control of cricket. We will ultimately pay for it with the loss of great players for procedural improprieties. WADA, remember, had criticised Shane Warne's one-year suspension as "disappointing". If there is a drug problem in cricket, then WADA’s cure is worse than the disease. Since the BCCI until now has rejected the World Anti-Doping Agency’s advances, drugs have been on the mind of cricketers and fans worldwide, and sage commentators like Peter Roebuck and Mike Atherton have weighed in on the side of WADA. What’s the harm, they said, in submitting to international best practice on drug use in sport? Surely the innocent have nothing to fear? However, I think the innocent have everything to fear. We need to take a step back and ask ourselves, we lovers of cricket: What exactly is the problem? And is the solution going to cause more harm?

By all accounts, drug use is not a major problem in cricket. There are at least three main uses for drugs in cricket. The first is to recover more quickly from injuries. There are a lot of entirely legal techniques and chemical crutches to keep players fit for a punishing international schedule. While on the road to recovery, Andrew Flintoff’s veins were coursing with cortisone. Mohammad Asif, on the other hand, was banned for using non-permitted drugs to help him recover from injury. I’ll put my cards on the table here: I think players ought to be allowed to use drugs that help them recover from injury. In itself, using cortisone (or whatever) to play through pain doesn’t introduce an unfair advantage, except in as much as it’s unfair for Philip Hughes to have to face Flintoff around the wicket.

A second kind of drug use is more familiar outside the world of elite sport. I’m talking about recreational drugs, like alcohol, cocaine and marijuana. Ed Giddins, a middling English bowler, got in trouble for taking cocaine. He said someone must have spiked his drink with cocaine, though of course in some parts of the world it would be the alcohol that would have landed him in hot water. Phil Tufnell and Ian Botham actually admitted to smoking pot. In many countries this is against the law, but it couldn’t possibly be described as performance enhancing, unless by ‘performance’ we mean the ability to taste the colour in Pink Floyd. Recreational drugs have brought pleasure to some and destroyed the lives of others, but they aren’t a problem special to cricket.

‘Performance enhancement’ is the third, and, we would assume, most important, use of drugs. It might be confused with the first; masking pain can surely improve performance but it is usually associated with a different purpose, namely, to build up one’s body in order to run faster, jump higher and lift greater weight. In sports like swimming, cycling, running and other athletic events this is a massive problem because triumph is decided by a stopwatch or a yardstick and the difference between glory and failure can be a millimetre or one hundredth of a second. Twitchier muscles or more highly oxygenated blood confer a clear advantage for the users of certain drugs, who are rightly called cheats. Yet such drugs are utterly irrelevant to the enhancement of cricket performance. In none of the salient dimensions of the game of cricket - bowling, batting, catching - do medicines enhance performance. No amount of steroids would have made Steve Harmison hit the cut strip on that fateful Brisbane morning in November 2006. It’s not for want of pseudoephedrine that Alistair Cook plays across his front pad. And a pill has yet to be invented that can lend Graeme Smith the effortless beauty of Mahela Jayawardene’s cover drive.

So much for the disease. What about the cure? WADA developed stringent and zealous procedures in the context of athletics, and rightly so. But one size does not fit all. To apply rules designed for athletics and apply them to cricket is disproportionate and potentially destructive. The ‘whereabouts’ clause, to which the BCCI objected, means that violations of the procedure of testing become grounds for a ban. That is, by not giving your whereabouts correctly you will be treated as though you have taken banned substances.

A word of warning. If WADA had their way, Shane Warne would have been struck from the game. Think about that. Because an unapproved chemical was found in Warne’s bloodstream, one of the all time great players would have been kept from the stage for far longer. There was never any suggestion he gained an unfair competitive advantage. He just broke a rule. If you think about it, he broke a lot of rules, and that’s one reason he’ll always be my favourite. But it never was, and could never have been, the case that drugs made him great. If you imagine a 1920s international sports council populated entirely by pious American prohibitionists trying to ban Jack Hobbs for drinking a beer, you might get a sense of what is at stake. Cricket is our game, and it should be us, not athletics administrators, who make the rules. While the BCCI’s motives may be murky, if they can keep WADA out of cricket, they will be doing the game a great service.