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Shane Watson celebrates a wicket - (AP Photo/Gautam Singh)
Rudyard Kipling wrote memorably about ‘the muddied oafs’ of rugby football and the ‘flannelled fools’ of cricket. The cricket part of the description sums up the behaviour of Shane Watson and Sulieman Benn in the Perth Test between Australia and the West Indies.
I have played and watched cricket for more decades than I care to remember in my anecdotage but I don’t recall a more obnoxious display of banshee exultation as that put on by the screaming Watson when he dismissed Chris Gayle in the second innings of the Test.
Watson’s arched body, primeval screaming, and his mad-eyed and contoured face, red and tight from over-the-top braying at the departing figure of the bemused Gayle, was an unforgettable and unacceptable image of the very ugly side of modern cricket.
If Gayle had turned around and whacked Watson across the ankles with his heavy bat I reckon that the applause would have resounded around the world.
It is nonsense that Watson was fined only 15 per cent of his match fee for his idiotic and potentially explosive (in inviting a ferocious re-joiner) behaviour.
At least Sulieman Benn has been suspended for a couple of matches, something that should have happened – at least – to Watson as well.
You had to feel sorry for Mitchell Johnson and Brad Haddin being punished for reacting to Benn’s mad-cap behaviour. It seemed to me that Johnson actually tried to get away from Benn when the West Indian was trying to put him down in a rugby tackle while he was trying to take a run.
Haddin’s gesture of pointing his bat at Benn after this incident seemed to be the epitome of restraint, in my opinion, given the unacceptable provocation Benn was intent of providing to the Australian batsman.
Both Benn and Watson have taken sledging to a level of aggravation where something really awful, perhaps a fist fight, is going to take place on the field when a player is provoked beyond his endurance.
This brings into the discussion the whole sordid business of sledging. Its defenders say that it is part of the game.
This is, of course, nonsense.
Up to the 1970s the only sledging you heard at cricket matches was from the crowd. And this form of sledging, as we know from the immortal Yabba whose bronze statue is placed in the seating at the SCG, was humourous and perceptive.
When Douglas Jardine wiped some flies from his face at the SCG, Yabba called out: ‘Jardine, leave our flies alone!’.
It was Ian Chappell, unfortunately, who brought in the tactic of sledging opponents to Test cricket. I say ‘unfortunately’ because Chappell was a terrific captain and batsman, and aside from the sledging, a dynamic force for good in Test cricket.
When, say, Richie Benaud dismissed a batsman, there was at most a quick clap of his hands and sometimes the quiet handshakes of his players. That was the way up to the modern era. Greg Matthews was one of the pioneers of over-exuberance when getting a wicket.
But now Watson has gone well beyond this. And has been given, at best, a slap on the wrist.
The next time someone behaves in a similar fashion the umpires should immediately ban him from bowling again in the innings, using ‘the spirit of cricket’ injunction as a justification.
As for the incessant sledging that leads towards the unacceptable Benn-like behaviour of physically engaging with an opposing player, the only remedy is to ban it entirely.
Stop the players from talking to each other, and you will stop the sledging and the chances of more Test players behaving like the two flannelled fools of Perth: Shane Watson and Sulieman Benn.