Sachithra Senanayake gestures to the umpire after mankading Jos Buttler

Periodic kerfuffles over Mankading serve to remind us that our sport has a Spirit

© Getty Images

Comment

More moral than thou

Cricketers do not have more integrity than other sportsmen; it's just that cricket makes more of a parade of it

Simon Barnes

All sports are played by two sets of laws: those that are written and adjudicated by the officials, and those that are not written and are agreed on by the players. Cricket has always prided itself on the strength and meaning of that second set. Unlike every other sport in the calendar, the second set is commemorated in an annual lecture. It's called the Spirit of Cricket, and it was set up in memory of Colin Cowdrey in 2001; Richie Benaud, Sunil Gavaskar, Desmond Tutu, and most recently Sir Ian Botham have all had a crack at it.

It's a somewhat uneasy business: after all, you wouldn't need a lecture if you were completely confident in the spirit of the game. Partly it's a desire to ensure that this elusive spirit doesn't entirely dissipate, and partly it's a matter of pride: thank God we're not as other sports are, sports that don't have a spirit.

But in fact, most sports have that kind of pride. It's rare to attend any gathering devoted to a single sport without being told why this sport, and this sport alone, embodies all the best things in humanity and how the virtues that come up in its pursuit eclipse any claim to virtue ever put up by any other sport.

Cricket is only exceptional in the strength of its belief in its own righteousness. CLR James, the Trinidadian Marxist and author of the great Beyond a Boundary, wrote that he would lie and cheat without remorse to steal time from school and employment to play cricket - but once he was playing he would never contemplate a single dishonest or unsporting action, walking when he got a touch, accepting incorrect decisions with the required air of calm nobility, and relentlessly putting his own interests a distant second to those of the team.

In Victorian England such virtues were considered essential in preparing people to nurture and extend the British Empire. Cricket, above all other games, was believed to inculcate the right stuff. This principle is made explicit in one of cricket's most famous poems: the one by Henry Newbolt that begins, "There's a breathless hush in the Close to-night".

It opens with a cricket match and the exhortation to forget personal glory and concentrate on greater matters: "'Play up! play up! and play the game!'" It moves on to a fight in the desert when the Gatling's jammed and the colonel's dead, in which the very same exhortation rallies the troops. In the third verse moral conclusions are drawn: this is a slogan we must all "Bear through life like a torch in flame".

Quite a lot of moral baggage, then, for a game of bat and ball. Though there's another seldom-mentioned virtue of compulsory games at an all-male boarding school: they were supposed to render the boys too exhausted for masturbation or late-night bed-hopping. The headmaster in Kipling's Stalky & Co. explains his success: "Shameful to admit, but I loved you all. The rest was only sending you to bed dead tired."

Rugby union is the only serious rival to cricket as a sport of self-proclaimed virtue. Its moral code is based on violence and reconciliation: the idea is that 30 men can indulge in an 80-minute-long brawl and then walk away the best of friends, the bruises given and received an equal source of pride: a process considered to build the finest and manliest of characters.

This all survives rather tenuously in the professional era. Rugby players are infinitely fitter, stronger and better drilled than they used to be, and there are infinitely vaster rewards for success. The capacity for physical damage is much greater, and debilitating injuries are frequent. It is becoming a game on the far edge of possibility: I sometimes wonder if it is not the code of honour but the game itself that has become an anachronism.

Perfect cynicism is a very rare state for humans. We need to feel that we have some moral code that we adhere to, however loosely

Both cricket and rugby union are very keen on distancing themselves from football. This is not so much a moral as a social division. Football is the sport of the common people: throughout history the middle-class sports have sneered at it. At my school, where alas we played rugby when we couldn't get out of it, the headmaster refused to allow the boys who had excelled at a certain socio-geographical project to sign the school honours book. This was because the project "encouraged an interest in association football". Can't have that, can we?

There is much to dislike in modern football, most notably its planet-swamping sense of self-importance - but that doesn't mean that all virtues have been swallowed up in the quest for victory and money. In 1999, Arsenal beat Sheffield United in an FA Cup match thanks to a goal scored when an opposing player was injured, and some of the Arsenal players were unaware of this. It was perfectly legal but it looked and felt rather unsporting. So Arsenal offered a replay and were accepted. Arsenal won 2-1.

A year later West Ham were playing Everton when the Everton goalkeeper Paul Gerrard went down injured. The ball was crossed to the West Ham forward, Paolo Di Canio. Di Canio declined to shoot: instead he caught the ball, refusing to try and score in unfair circumstances, even though a goal would have been perfectly legal.

Perfect cynicism is a very rare state for humans. We need to feel that we have some moral code that we adhere to, however loosely: and that's true even of convicted criminals. That doesn't necessarily mean that all athletes keep to all the laws of their chosen game: but it most certainly means that they are inclined to keep to the unwritten, unspoken code of conduct that all players accept.

My old friend Eddy Pratt used to say: "I cheated all the time in football. I cheated a little bit here and there in cricket. But I would die rather than cheat in golf." This reflects not on the relative virtue of those games, nor on the contention that moral virtues increase as the ball diminishes in size, but on the culture of the sport and the likelihood of getting caught. The faster the game, the easier it is to get away with cheating. Naturally - inevitably - snooker players call fouls on themselves when they impart an almost imperceptible touch to the cue ball, or when they gently brush a ball with the waistcoat.

The culture of any sport can change more or less before our eyes. Tennis used to be notorious for rows between players and officials, almost always about line calls. A few, like John McEnroe, found inspiration in injustice, but most found that railing against the unfairness of the world had a counterproductive effect on their skills.

Sledging might be ugly but it does not excite the frenzied reactions that actions which are within the laws of the game but somehow transgress against its moral code do

Sledging might be ugly but it does not excite the frenzied reactions that actions which are within the laws of the game but somehow transgress against its moral code do © Getty Images

But in came Hawk-Eye. It may or may not be 100% accurate, yet it supplies a non-subjective and unarguable answer to the question being asked, and it has wiped out almost all the arguments at a stroke. Does that make tennis the most virtuous of all sports? Not exactly: observe the top players dictating the pace of a match by subtle and cumulative delays between points and at changeovers, or female players establishing dominance by screaming.

Cricket is still full of all kinds of dubious matters. Batsmen will no longer walk, making it more of a batsman's game than ever. Sledging - as said before in this space - is a shameful business. Players will push the laws to the limits, and beyond, every time they get the opportunity.

But there are strange and illogical issues that excite moral horror. Last summer in England, in a one-dayer against Sri Lanka, England batsman Jos Buttler was run out when backing up. He had already been warned. He was deliberately stealing an advantage. By all logic he had brought his dismissal on himself.

Yet the business caused an outcry. That sort of thing is Just Not Done: the spirit of cricket demands that batsmen have the right to pinch a yard or two in search of quick runs. This seems to me a nonsense in any sporting sense, but it is completely consistent with a single irrefragable truth: that every sport has a moral code that differs from the actual laws - and also with the fact that cricket gets more excited about moral issues than any other sport.

Part of this is pretentious and deplorable; part of this is illogical and ridiculous; and part of it comes from a genuine and profound truth that no sport - no human activity - can be undertaken without some kind of moral core, however elusive. Cricket is no more moral than other sports: it just makes more of a parade of moral issues. Cricket is deeply convinced that very important moral principles are embedded in the game: it's just that it can never work out what they are.

And perhaps that is what we mean when we talk about the spirit of cricket.

Simon Barnes is a former chief sportswriter of the Times and the author of more than 20 books

 

RELATED ARTICLES