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Somehow the game of cricket has conjured up the image of being a noble, inspired, generous and scrupulously honest sport. The phrase ‘it’s not cricket’ is used to highlight these qualities in the light of behaviour that is, let us say, unsavoury.
But the fact of the matter is that cricket, even played by the paragons of the game, encourages behaviour and exults in it that is ‘just not cricket’.
Stories of W.G.Grace thwarting the umpires and his opponents, when he was papably out, have been told for decades and with relish by cricketers and people with a passion for cricket as the undoubted greatest game of all.
There is W.G. Grace being bowled and replacing the balls with an aside to the umpire,’windy ain’t it.’ And the umpire supposedly replying, ‘well I ain’t, you’re out!’
Even The Don was not a walker. In the first Ashes Test after the War in 1946 he snicked a ball to gully, on 28, was caught and refused to walk. He was given not out by the Australian umpire.
Walter Hammond, England’s captain, came up to Bradman and had some words with him over his lack of sportsmanship.
But then Bradman could well have been thinking about the infamous Bodyline tactics devised by Douglas Jardine to reduce his average from nearly 100 to a more mortal 56.
The point about all this is that the furore about whether batsmen or a batsman has been using a silicon covering of the bat to disguise or hide the sign of any contact between bat and the ball is less cheating than using a method of preventing being dismissed.
Batsmen when they are struck on the pads often shift their front leg outside the stumps and leave it there seemingly defying the umpire to rule them out. This is trickery but no less devious in intent, anyway, from the silicon covering of the bat (presuming that this actually works).
And Kevin Pietersen, the presumed villain in the current cheating saga, has made the point that he was saved from a LBW decision by HOT SPOT showing a faint touch of the ball on to his bat before it cannoned into his pads.
A silicon covering would have, supposedly, denied him the protection of having made the little snick.
The point about cricket is that it is a heavily regulated game. The laws are supposed to cover every eventuality.
But as a great rugby coach once explained to me, games that are heavily regulated also allow players and coaches to come up with plays that are covered by the laws.
His insight that anything that was not covered by the laws was allowable enabled him to come up with the ‘up the jumper ploy’, with a player stuffing the rugby ball up his jumper from a free kick and his teammates, with their hands up their jumpers, running as decoys as the player with the ball cantered to the try line.
Some would call this cheating. I’d call it gamesmanship.
And I would put the silicon covering, if it is being used and works, in the same category.
It is the same sort of gamesmanship that saw Australia play a left-arm pace bowler with the express intention of creating foot marks in the pitch for the team’s spinner to exploit, or not exploit as it happens.
It is the same sort of gamesmanship that in the era before the video umpire saw the Australian slip fieldsmen go up together in a fake, synchronised roaring appeal for a caught behind that did not happen.
Cricket is a game, at its highest levels, between two teams and their exploitation of the laws of the game. It is the umpires job, on and off the field, to try and deliver a sort of rough justice amid all this genteel mayhem.
A couple of decisions for LBW from deliveries snicked on to the pads but not picked up on HOT SPOT will put a quick end to the silicon nonsense, I reckon.
Glenn Mitchell’s Fourth Test preview