As they get older do members of every generation look back to the past and believe that everything was preferable back then? Steven Pinker argues the world is constantly improving, and I am persuaded by many of his arguments and examples. [i] However, in the world of sport, I am not convinced. A recent event during a cricket match in South Africa has sparked these thoughts on why I believe it was better years ago. Rose-tinted spectacles? Maybe.
I learnt at an early age I was not destined to excel in sport. Since I couldn’t even perform a forward roll, it wasn’t a surprise. The sports master at my primary school quickly identified my limitations. The first in a succession of others, he observed I couldn’t kick a soccer ball in the right direction; I couldn’t hit a cricket ball with a bat; and I couldn’t catch a rugby ball in flight. As far as possible, the collective view over the years could be summarised in one word “library”. I was quite happy to be banished to the world of books on the Wednesday afternoons dedicated to athletics, team sports and other horrors.
However, while the rules were easy going in my first few years, I found my senior (grammar) school felt it was required to make sure I took part in a sport. I don’t remember who found the solution, but a perfect role was identified. I would keep the scorebook for the school’s cricket matches. Now, I realise that you may not be aware what a complex task this is: it required concentration, an eye for detail, and an ability to pull out statistics and other information immediately. There might be a similar complex scoring requirement in baseball. Ideal. Not only did it mean I was taking part in sport, but I delighted in my task. [ii]
It was the beginning of a love affair with the game.[iii] For me, then and now, cricket was much more than a game; it was an experience.
The matches for which I kept score were all over in a day, but ‘real’ games, played between counties in the UK, were spread over three days. I didn’t get to see cricket at that level until I went to university. The Cambridge team played against county teams, as well as the annual University Match against Oxford. Cricket is a summer game (with the result that matches were often drawn as “rain interrupted play”!). As I had no classes in the summer, as soon as my children were at the University Nursery School, I was free, and I would sometimes slip away to Fenners [iv] and watch part of a game.
Those were glorious days. A game spread over three days is quite unlike most sporting events. It is a drama, quiet and intense passages interrupted by moments of elation and disappointment, the atmosphere of the match shifting as time passes. To an outsider, I guess cricket seems slow and uneventful; to an aficionado it is as gripping as a novel or a play, and just as unexpected as the game unfolds. I was able to watch one day of a three-day game from time to time, and I think I was able to get through all three on a couple of occasions. International matches are longer, over a possible five-day span. While I have never been to more than one day of an international game, I would still like to sit through a whole five-day match one day.
For a long time, the game was seen as one for gentlemen. It was played well within the rules, and while winning was the objective, it was really about fair play, which led to the familiar phrase “it’s just not cricket”, to describe something unjust or just plain wrong done to someone or something. In the game of cricket, modesty and playing by the rules was paramount. Outstanding batting might evoke a smattering of applause from the spectators, with a diffident nod from the batsman. Outstanding bowling was quietly noted, and a fine bowler might be clapped leaving the field.
Though never stated, at the top level of the game, players came from the ‘better classes’. Indeed, for the first one hundred years, the captains of the English team included Lords, Knights and other ‘Honourables’, and several joined the aristocracy as a result of their endeavours. In the late 1970s, the last of that long line was Michael (Mike) Brearley, educated at a private school and then St John’s College, Cambridge. He was an outstanding captain, taking over in 1977 and leading England for 31 tests (games against other countries), and winning 18 matches, losing just four, and the other nine being drawn (England usually lost in those days, so his was an excellent record). He was skilled in drawing the best from his players in his team and was lucky to have some great players at the peak of their careers.
However, before his time and when I was enjoying an occasional day at Fenners, change was beginning to affect the game. The idea for a one-day, limited 50-over cricket tournament was first explored in the early 1950s, but it wasn’t until 1962 the first one-day match took place between two English county teams. It was the beginning of a slippery slope, and the first One-Day International (ODI) match was played in Melbourne in 1971. There were other innovations, notably the disconcerting sight of coloured clothing and cricket balls no longer in the dull red of the past. Already an old grump, I was unhappy, though I did go to some one-day games once I was in Australia. Those changes were accompanied by a move from underpaid gentlemen cricketers to professionals, with significantly higher player salaries and innovations such as televised live broadcasts and night games.
That might be enough nostalgia! As I see it, over the past forty years, fair play has been set aside for the pursuit of advantage. No longer is it the case “the games the thing’ [v], but everything is devoted to winning. Young sportsmen soon learn you could get an edge by pushing against the rules, and even sliding over them. That skill was learnt in the playground at school and continued on into the highest levels of any competition. You quickly decide success come from pushing the boundaries, and, if you can get away with it, you cheat.
Cricket is full of incidents and stories that illustrate that attitude. Back in 1979, when change was in the air, Mike Brearley was captain during an international test in Perth. The Australian bowler Dennis Lillee used an aluminium bat rather than one from the traditional willow. Causing controversy on and off the field, it proved to be a sales stunt, much to Lillee’s benefit. That was an augury for much greater change. Soon after Brearley retired, the next but one captain of England was Ian Botham. He did not go to a private school, and did not go to university, ending his education at the age of sixteen, and working for the ground staff at one of the cricket grounds. Over time he moved into playing, and eventually became regarded as one of the game’s great all-rounders (excelling in batting and bowling). However, it was his exuberance and aggression that marked him out, and he heralded the beginning of cricketers as media stars.
Cricket never looked back. Dennis Lillee and Jeff Thomson achieved media superstardom as fast bowlers for Australia: “Ashes to Ashes, dust to dust, if Thomson don’t get ya, Lillee must.” Next was Shane Warne, another Australia, who revolutionised spin bowling in the 1990s. Cricketers were constantly in the media, but most of these and other stars were as famous for their (many) indiscretions off the field as they were for their achievements on the field.
There were other changes. One was the growth of ‘sledging’, the practice whereby some players seek to gain an advantage by insulting or verbally intimidating an opposing player, trying to break the opponent’s concentration, leading them to make mistakes or underperform. Debate continues to this day as to whether this is poor sportsmanship or good-humoured banter.
Sometimes it was clearly funny: West Indian batsman Viv Richards punished bowlers that dared to sledge him. In a county game Greg Thomas attempted to sledge him after he had played and missed several balls in a row. He informed Richards: “It’s red, round and weighs about five ounces, in case you were wondering.” Richards hammered the next delivery out of the cricket grounds and into a nearby river. Turning to the bowler, he commented: “Greg, you know what it looks like, now go and find it.”
More often today, humour has been replaced with cruelty and racist or other demeaning remarks. For the umpires on the field and the rule setters overseeing the game, this is a source of constant re-evaluation. The process is clear: what used to be viewed as abuse slowly moves into the realm of ‘acceptable’. Remarks on the field certainly ensure media coverage: effective sledging is greeted by spectators’ commenting “nice one!”
And then there is ball tampering. Ball tampering is when a team member illegally alters the condition of the ball, intending to alter its aerodynamics. Examples of tampering would include a fielder applying a substance, such as lip balm or sweetened saliva, to shine one side of the ball or picking the seam of the ball. Also, it is common for bowlers to rub the ball against their clothing to dry or polish it, as is often seen in cricket matches. When bowled correctly, that helps the bowler to get the ball to move from one side to the other through the air. Today illegal tampering has to be more than that, such as roughening one side of the ball by use of an abrasive or cutting surface (such as boot spikes or bottle caps or sandpaper).
And there’s the rub (excuse the pun). Fifty years ago, sledging was rare, although players might gently make fun. Polishing a ball on clothing was accepted. As winning became more important, so sledging became more prevalent, more serious, and the authorities were constantly pushed to decide what was ‘legal’ and what was not. Ball tampering became an issue, and successive reviews allowed more and more ways in which a ball could be improved. What was illegal before became accepted, and the motivation to push further against the rules increased. To use a woeful metaphor, the goal posts keep moving!
Ball tempering became newsworthy recently when an Australian player was charged with tampering. Videos emerged that showed him rubbing the ball, and later concealing a yellow object during day three of a test match against South Africa. Later investigation revealed he was using sandpaper. As a result of an inquiry, two players, the Captain and Vice-Captain were charged with bringing the game into disrepute and banned from the Australian cricket team for twelve months, the third, who had actually tampered with the ball, received a nine-month ban.[vi]
They brought the Australian team and its players into disrepute? I’d like to think so. However, cynics and one-eyed supporters are keen to point out the mistake they made was to get caught. “Everyone does it”. Do they? I would like to think not, but the game has changed. My indolent days at Fenners are part of a world long gone? Probably. The evidence is there that in most sports, doing what you can to win takes precedence.
Steven Pinker might be correct in his assessment of the general progress of society. But when it comes to competing, it seems less positive. Surely, still, if you cheat “it’s just not cricket”.
Appendix
The game of cricket.
For English people, cricket is part of the national culture. The game is played between two teams of eleven people. The pitch is an area 22 yards long, and about 10 feet wide. At the centre of either end are the wickets, three upright poles (the stumps) which are 27 inches high, topped with two small pieces of wood, the bails, each covering two of the stumps. The pitch is surrounded by the ground, enclosed in a marked boundary, the ‘infield’ roughly oval in shape, and outfield closer to a circle, some 70 to 90 metres from end to end.
When play is under way, one team is batting, with a batsman at each end of the pitch. A bowler delivers the ball (and there are all sorts of rules about the overarm rotation required to deliver a ball), aiming to hit the wicket. If that happens, the batsman is out. Equally, if the batsman hits the ball and it is caught before bouncing, he or she is out. Once ten batsmen have been dismissed, that side’s innings is completed. Bowlers bowl from alternate ends, six deliveries at a time. Runs are scored by the batsman hitting the ball and the two batsmen running between the two wickets, one run for each transfer. If the ball reaches the boundary, four runs are awarded. If the ball clears the boundary with hitting the ground before hand, six runs are awarded. Most games comprise two innings for both teams (there is only one innings each for one-day and shorter games – none of which variants are ‘real’ cricket to grumps like me!).
[i] See a recent review of his latest book < https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2018/02/steven-pinker-argues-the-world-is-a-safer-healthier-place-in-his-new-book-enlightenment-now.html.
[ii] Although there was one dreadful afternoon when the team was one short for a few minutes, and I was told to be a fielder. Unbelievably, a player in the opposing team hit a ball straight at me. I caught it, to everyone’s astonishment, as well as breaking the nail off my finger!
[iii] If you want to find out more about this curious past-time, there is an appendix at the end!
[iv] The hallowed university cricket ground, just off Mill Road, halfway between my first home in Cambridge and King’s College
[v] “The most important thing in the Olympic Games is not winning but taking part; the essential thing in life is not conquering but fighting well.” So said Pierre de Coubertin (primarily responsible for the revival of the Olympic Games in 1894).
[vi] If this hasn’t already bored you to tears, you can read more here: <https://www.theguardian.com/sport/2018/mar/27/cricket-australia-coach-darren-lehmann-remain-job-smith-warner-bancroft-exiled-ball-tampering.
