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There are degrees of cheating in sport

England's Stuart Broad, centre, celebrates with teammates the wicket of Australia's Brad Haddin on the second day of the fifth cricket test match between England and Australia at The Oval cricket ground in London, Friday, Aug.21, 2009. AP Photo/Kirsty Wigglesworth
Roar Guru
17th July, 2013
16

Brilliant Ashes Test, just captivating. Trent Bridge will live long in the memory and might put to rest the notion that Test cricket is somehow the poor cousin of 20-20.

Interestingly, so much of the talk coming out of the match has been the non-dismissal of Stuart Broad, and the fact that ex-England captain Michael Vaughan expected he would be forever known as a “cheater.”

Cheating in sport? What a can of worms that opens.

For the record, I don’t think Stuart Broad can be accused of cheating when all he did was wait for the umpire to make a decision. One of Australia’s greatest captains, Steve Waugh, would have done exactly the same thing. “I never walk,” he once said. “The umpire is there to do a job.”

No different to the last football World Cup, when England played Germany and had a very clear goal waved away by the officials. The German defence were unlikely to stop and say, “Look, actually, the ball was over the line.” The Germans didn’t cheat, they just played to the whistle and the referee/umpire’s decision, as we were all taught to do as sporting kids growing up.

Or some years ago, when Manchester United goalkeeper Roy Carroll made a terrible blunder and allowed the ball to cross the line in a game against Tottenham Hotspur. He clawed the ball back into play and the game continued and he was not about to put his hand up and admit his gaffe had led to a goal. But is that cheating?

Brad Haddin is no more of a cheat than Stuart Broad, even though he admitted in a press conference after the Ashes Test that he knew he’d hit the ball, which was actually a surprise to me because I still couldn’t see that hot spot, but hey, this time, the umpires conferred and seemingly got it right.

Legend has it that English cricketer William Gilbert Grace once snicked a delivery which lodged in his pad, and he immediately ran to the boundary fence and jumped over it to claim a six. Is that cheating or just wonderful opportunism?

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Australian cricket captain Greg Chappell was labelled a cheat when he instructed brother Trevor to bowl that infamous underarm delivery on the last ball of a thrilling limited overs match against New Zealand in 1981. But it was all within the rules of the game so that can’t be cheating, can it? (As an aside, if bowling a ball underarm was legal, why didn’t Chappell just instruct all his bowlers to bowl every delivery underarm?)

Perhaps the definition of cheating becomes a little murky when we attempt to apply it across different sports in different circumstances.

Thierry Henry and Diego Maradona have both been labelled cheats in handball incidents more than two decades apart.

Henry used his hand to control a through-ball before setting up a goal that knocked Ireland out of 2010 World Cup qualification. Maradona used the hand of “God” to score against England in the 1986 World Cup.

Where their actions differ to Stuart Broad is that they, in the spur of the moment, used a deliberate illegal tactic to gain themselves an advantage. Broad just used a deliberate poker face to gain himself an advantage.

It seems that English fans were more outraged with Maradona’s partial denial of wrongdoing for years than the fact that he’d done it.

So if Broad in the next press conference says, “Of course I hit it,” will that makes us forgive him for something he needn’t be contrite about in the first place?

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Referees and umpires won’t pick up everything and it is ludicrous to suggest that all sports should self-police in the way golf seems to.

Diving in football is not well digested, however, if someone systematically uses the practice, they’ll get a rep for it and it will eventually work against them.

Aussie Rules “taggers” like Tony Liberatore were, in effect, cheating whenever they illegally harried, tripped, elbowed or shirt-pulled an opponent but it never led to Royal Commission-like levels of scrutiny by those observers aghast at their tactics.

Rugby League has its “penalty pullers” who pretend they’re being held down in the play-the ball or were stripped of a ball they just dropped.

Former English league great Mike Stephenson told a story once about how, as a young lad, he was playing in the English league, and with just minutes remaining and the scores level, he effected a tackle on an opponent 20 metres out and right in front of his own posts.

The wily veteran he’d tackled handed him the ball as they were getting to their feet and said, “here, lad, you must want this.” When Stephenson took the ball in shock, the veteran threw up his hands and implored the referee, who immediately penalised Stephenson and the resulting penalty was converted.

Fans of the Socceroos have had their blood boil over in recent times when opponents tried to waste time and stop momentum by feigning dire injuries.

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It might not seem “manly” but the referee does stop the watch and is it that different to a coach making late substitutions in order to wind the clock down?

Coaches are perfectly entitled to make substitutions while players are not entitled to dive and roll around like shot ducks, but there is an arbiter to ensure an advantage is not gained and it is much harder to get away with wasting time than say, a quick-as-a-flash handball or push or hand in the ruck.

Opportunistic or spur-of-the-moment “cheating” happens in sport all the time, as it does in life. How many of us have returned to a parked car to find a ticket under the windscreen because we exceeded the time limit? Just that once, we didn’t get away with wringing a few more minutes out of the meter.

It is the systematic and pre-meditated cheats that sport can do without. Stuart Broad is not one of them.

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