Have you ever cheated on the cricket field? I thought so ... not that you haven't cheated but that you have never admitted it.
Cricket pretends its soul is without original sin, a proposition that those titled Georgian twits who gambled on matches to win dubious bets a couple of centuries ago would find preposterous. And any finger-spinner who tells you he has never chucked should be laughed out of the bar. Play up and play the game? Right. Newbolt intended his awful poem about cricket to be a metaphor for life, that wars ought to be fought like games at public schools, all honourable and fair.
The First World War put an end to that daft notion. And you have only to read Tom Brown's Schooldays to know what a spiteful, cheating lot those oiks were. Cricket, more than any sport, has suffered down the years from sentimental overload. It is not that fair play and consideration for others are not virtues worth preserving but they do not always represent real life. To pretend cricket is pure when it is not is like living in a loveless marriage. Sooner or later disillusion sets in.
So, a confession of sorts. While captaining The Observer in a match against the Sunday Times last summer I shamelessly (and I do mean without any sense of shame) instructed our left-arm spinner to make his final delivery - and the last of the match - a no-ball the umpire could not possibly miss. The idea was to get one more ball at the last man in and possibly force a win we had been unable to secure in our allotted overs.
As it happened, the batsman kept out the extra ball and the game was drawn. Was it cheating? Borderline. It is murky water, that pond in which law-breaking and gamesmanship co-exist, but I thought it was more a laugh than mean-spirited. I am not sure the opposition would have found it amusing had we won.
I raise the question because of a recent item about a club wicketkeeper last season being banned for twice pretending to have missed taking the ball down the leg side, then running out the batsman as he took off for what he imagined was an easy single. It was deemed to be against the spirit of the game. But was it out-and-out cheating? More so than our fake no-ball, I would say - but not much different from what I remember seeing occasionally at a much higher level years ago when smart outfielders would kid the batsman to attempt a run by pretending to misfield.
Predictably England's tours of Pakistan and India have raised the usual outcry about over-vigorous appealing - by the opposition, naturally. (It was touching, on the other hand, to see the novice spinner Monty Panesar forget to go up with conviction in his first over in Test cricket to prosecute more effectively what was a decent shout for lbw.)
The reaction to the loud and the dodgy reflects the slowly growing perception that the game is going the way of football: that umpire-bullying, the screaming appeals, sledging, refusing to walk, ball-tampering, claiming ground-skimming catches as legitimate and all-round boorishness constitute cricket's answer to shirt-tugging, tripping and diving.
I am not so sure. I love the mental side of cricket, as long as it is not racist or unfunny (often one and the same). I admire the passion of footballers too but I think they overstep the mark when they try to get opponents sent off with acting that would put Madonna (and Maradona) to shame. You can make a distinction between legitimate mind games - Steve Waugh's `mental disintegration' - and claiming that catch you know hit the ground in front of you.
I am with Waugh on this one. If a batsman at Test level cracks because short leg makes some smart remark about his wife, he does not deserve to be there. Shane Warne, one of the shrewdest competitors of modern times, found out that Daryll Cullinan could not cut it and destroyed him before a ball was bowled. I do not see how anyone could have a problem with that. But, if allegations that some Australians have wound up West Indian players in recent years with racist taunts are true, then those culprits should be named and thrown out. That is not simply undermining the so-called spirit of the game. It is low-rent and cowardly.
Mark Boucher touched a few raw nerves in these pages last issue when he revealed that "nasty things" were said between South African and Australian players in the recent series. He complained too of racism in the crowd (I can vouch for that, having heard far too much of it at Australian grounds the past few summers). Interestingly, though, Boucher promised verbal retaliation in the return leg - and that is just what the Australians want, a wound-up opponent.
The game has got a little nastier in recent seasons and it is up to captains and umpires to impose some quality control on the antics. But it is easy to get things out of proportion. Stretching the Laws is not the same as breaking them. It would be a sad day if the gamesmanship disappeared from cricket. It has always been a part of what can be the most testing cerebral fight. Not that I will be pulling that no-ball stunt against the Sunday Times this season, of course.
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