Of sticks and stones

Last night, in an attempt to put “Jellygate” into some sort of context for an 11-year-old mind, I tried to explain the intricacies of sledging to my son. “Very immature,” was his considered response. Which made me feel more than a little guilty about my own initial reaction.

Having spent many summers talking tactics and philosophies with him while he coached Sussex, Peter Moores, in my experience, is an exceedingly bright, hard-working, fair-minded man, a chap of principle. Which made it all the more surprising to hear him infer that it might be better for all concerned if stump mics were terminated with extreme prejudice, the better, presumably, to permit the players get on with their yakkety-yakking without fear of being rumbled.

As for the jelly beans, Moores managed to dig himself an even deeper hole. "Nobody would argue that a couple of lads put a couple of jellybeans down there. It was meant to be a joke and now looks a bit silly. I think people will try and read things into it, but it has no meaning whatsoever."

No meaning whatsoever? I’d contest that with some vehemence. The meaning was abundantly clear: in the interests of mental disintegration, we are prepared to stoop to anything, even pathetic schoolboy pranks. That the “tactic” appeared to galvanise Zaheer Khan, however, should be seen as punishment in itself. If you’re going to stoop that low, the inherent risks must be acknowledged, as they surely are with all forms of sledging. How can you NOT know that such a gambit might inspire rather than disrupt or deflate? But let’s not confuse the pros and cons of all this with ethics. Just because you find something daft, ludicrous or even perverse should not be grounds for moral objection.

International cricketers are unluckier than most sportsmen. There is no scrum mic to catch front-rowers gnawing at each other’s ears or whispering sour nothings; no penalty-box mic to pick up the pleasantries centre-halves hurl at centre-forwards; no saddle-mic to nab jockeys abusing rivals or even horses. Would Muhammad Ali be quite so universally adored had there been a clinch mic to broadcast his taunting of Ernie Terrell or Floyd Patterson? Only tennis is as exposed as cricket.

To pretend that sledging is a recent phenomenon, a product of increasingly filthy amounts of lucre, is a bit like suggesting the Victorians had such upstanding values that they conceived their babies without recourse to intercourse. WG Grace was no less a master of verbal abuse than Steve Waugh. Any Yorkshireman with his eyes on a professional career had to know how to get under an opponent’s skin. Club cricketers of my experience have always sought to gain an edge by throwing insults, most of them sexual and crass. And they play for fun, not a living.

Earlier this summer, Alex Rodriguez, who signed the heftiest contract in any team sport when he joined the New York Yankees a few years back, incited even more hostility than usual when a TV microphone caught him calling out the baseball equivalent of “Mine” while rounding the bases, the aim brazen: to deceive the fielder as he settled under a catch. Emails to ESPN appeared to be evenly divided between those who believed that there was no place in the game for such shameless gamesmanship, and those who shrugged their shoulders. It wasn’t as if such incidents were unusual, ran the latter argument. It was a familiar divide.

Cricket still has behavioural standards that other team sports envy. In individual sports such as golf, that purported bastion of dignity and decency, hypocrisy and cheating are far more evident than the likes of Peter “Jolly Fine Shot” Alliss and Co would ever have you believe. Yet stamping out verbal self-expression in the heat of battle would be doubly unfortunate.

For one thing, it would deprive the majority of spectators (ie those in armchairs and propping up bars) of smelling and tasting a physical battle designed to involve no physical contact. Spectator sport, after all, must provide theatre if it is to have any value. In addition, suppression would, in all probability, diminish a player’s concentration and hence effectiveness. Do we really want to see neutered batsmen and bowlers pursing their lips and making like statues?

If we agree that Test cricket is currently as vibrant as it has ever been – and everyone I speak to feels just that – is that not in part because of the comparative evenness of standards (the six sides in the ICC Test table between Australia and West Indies are separated by wafers rather than gulfs; World Cups are generally open affairs)? This evenness heightens competitiveness, of which sledging is an inevitable symptom. Besides, what was that old saw about sticks and stones?

The game may no longer be the paragon the unblinkered would say it never was, but it’s still nowhere as bad as it once appeared destined to become. Lest we forget, for all Sreesanth’s dainty shoulder-to-shoulder effort against Michael Vaughan at Trent Bridge, cricket in the Burnout Era has produced nothing as low as Colin Croft’s barging of a New Zealand umpire, nothing as reprehensible as Javed Miandad threatening to decapitate Dennis Lillee, much less Trevor Chappell’s grubber to Brian McKechnie. All those incidents took place a quarter of a century or more ago.

None of this is to decry the so-called “Spirit of Cricket”, merely to apply some much-needed proportion. The MCC probably won’t concur, but sledging is as much a part of that “spirit” as walking, embedded as it is in both history and grassroots. Cricketers may be better behaved than most sportsmen but that doesn’t mean they don’t behave badly, have always behaved badly. Where, pray, would cricket folklore be (let alone the cricket book business and after-dinner circuit) without the witticisms handed down through the generations? Provided the abuse is not racist, shouldn’t players be big enough and ugly enough to look after themselves?

If you happen to be one of those who sincerely believe that the players are/should be servants of the “gentleman’s game”, may I respectfully suggest that you are probably a rate-payer in cloud-cuckoo land. If it was a game confined to gentlemen, what does it say about it that so many of its greatest exponents, Lillee, Miandad, Waugh, Fred Trueman, Shane Warne, Ian Chappell and countless others, have been onfield blackguards? Would the game, our culture, our lives, really have been better off without them?

Cricket, especially at the highest level, demands more of its participants than just about any other sport I can think of, and the reason for that is the fact that it takes so damn long to play a match. At a time in their lives when patience and self-discipline can be so elusive, we expect players to endure hour upon fruitless hour going against age and nature, stifling the impatience and selfishness of youth. For the most part, they somehow manage to do so. When they fail, can we not tolerate and forgive them as we tolerate and forgive our children?