“Say it ain’t so Joe” the little kid may have said to baseball legend Shoeless Joe Jackson. Or Ray Liotta, depending on whether he had seen the movie Field of Dreams or not.
What we do know is it has been repeated multiple times in a million schmaltzy Baseball books and films.
I am beginning to know how the kid felt. I am experiencing the same dream shattering unease about cricket and the direction that its supposed guardians want to take it. Two imminent changes are at the root cause of my angst.
These are namely the scheduling of an Ashes Test match under lights and the MCC’s proposal to introduce football and rugby style red cards into the game. Today let’s focus on my doubts about red cards.
There is time enough to bore you another day with my Victorian concerns about playing under lights. Ah’ cricket under gas lamps, maybe that is a compromise that could work altogether well for me.
The clamour for red cards has been out there for a while now. Why no yellows or a neutral and pacifying beige? Perhaps, a fetching shade of cerise would prove to be less aggressive than the warlike red. Only the MCC’s World Cricket Committee can answer that one.
The committee intends that a red card will be shown in response to “Threatening an umpire, physically assaulting another player, umpire, official or spectator; or any other act of violence”. There is no doubt that this is a well meant initiative.
There is also no doubt that the famed Botham whisperer Mike Brearley is an intelligent and wise judge of the game as well as of human nature and behaviour. The problem is I just cannot see how it would work in practice.
When, as expected, the amendment to the Laws comes into effect in October 2017, many will see this change as a positive step. This is despite the game rubbing along quite nicely without any such deterrent for 229 years.
It could realistically be judged that cricket is finally joining other 21st century sports in providing a proper deterrent to positively control conduct. However, this is exactly the problem with the proposal.
Once controls and punishments are enshrined into the games law the battle for good behavioural standards is already lost. The sensible and central principal that the game is played by grown-ups, that the team captains control these grown-ups, under their charge, and that they in turn are answerable to the umpires, is gone.
Rather than a careful safeguarding for the future it is instead an admittance of defeat. The raising of a metaphoric white flag which signals that it is only with the threat of banishment from the field that players can maintain the minimum standards of conduct.
The placement of draconian controls to prevent risks that do not or only minimally exist is a neat 21st century trick. It is the favourite pastime of many an auditor, compliance manager and politician all the world over.
Cricket is not a contact spot. Not between player and player at least. Although, anyone that has played the game knows that a ball propelled into your person, let’s keep it clean, at close range has the propensity to hurt a lot, especially so if you were ever subjected to wearing the old 1950’s style spiked batting gloves or worse still the pink box, containing more holes than an emmental.
The risk of a loose tackle or an injudicious punch in a ruck does not exist in cricket. Professional cricketers do not come to blows on the field or engage in football style pushing and shoving matches.
It simply doesn’t happen in any meaningful sense. However imposing a red card system suggests that it could or it might and that is the real game changer. In attempting to protect the games standards we have inadvertently lowered them. We have accepted that punching officials and opposing players could happen and therefore measures need to be taken to protect against it.
Many will point to the amateur game where this sadly can happen and in fairness is the arena where the red card deterrent is felt by the MCC to be most required. Let’s not fool ourselves that the amateur game is all tea urns, sponge cake and crust removed sandwiches.
In my years of club cricket I experienced lots of trash talk, posturing and boneheaded machismo; some of this even from the other team! But crucially not any actual fighting.
Of course lots of cricket is played across the world so it would be foolish to assume that it isn’t happening somewhere. The MCC stats make some grim reading in this area and clearly support this view. But the threat of a red card dismissal will ultimately change nothing. The general weakness in the amateur game is the reliance of players often to also act as umpires.
This is a routine catalyst for accusations of sharp practice and bias towards one’s own team. Where neutral umpires are present behavioural standards generally improve but are still not always perfect.
The reality persists though that the new law would effectively have to be enforced by a player-acting-as-umpire or by a neutral volunteer umpire. I see that being fraught with very real difficulty.
If a player is so uncontrollable that he has punched someone or is realistically threatening to punch someone – not the empty Hollywood handbags at dawn stuff that we have discounted above- then they will need to be removed from the field. If so… then, by whom?
Probably not the umpire who is presumably collecting his teeth from the wicket to use as ball counters. More realistically it will be the same captain and teammate s that in the past we relied upon to self-enforce standards anyway.
The red card, based on the MCC’s explanation, is meant to be used only in response to the most severe physical transgressions. It will therefore do nothing to protect umpires or players against what is the very real bane of the amateur and to an extent professional game.
This being the petty moaning and carping about umpiring decisions and the prevalence of aggressively overzealous and mostly unfunny sledging.
The truth is that the lawmakers can do very little to change this. The true power and responsibility resides in the hands of every player that takes the field or coaches a youth team.
They have the ability to set the standard and to act decisively against those that routinely transgress. Which, is not to say, that there is no place for banter and even a bit of niggle in the game. It would be much the poorer without it.
They say that life imitates art. Equally modern sport reflects modern life. It would be ridiculous to expect players to sign up to a code of behaviour from another century. It is not feasible to ask that. It is though feasible to expect players to take onto the field and uphold the basic standards of everyday life.
Cricket is a game played by only 13 people at any one time. Surely in the narrow realms of the cricket field 13 individuals are capable of policing themselves within the confines of the current Laws of Cricket, without extra and unenforceable sanctions?
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