8
What a noble game it is, too!
The young master in Tom Brown’s Schooldays
That’s very sharp practice, W.G.
Billy Murdoch, Australia’s captain
It was the Sunday Telegraph sports desk on the phone. Delhi Police had released the transcript of a conversation between South Africa’s captain Hansie Cronje and an Indian bookmaker which they had allegedly taped.
CRONJE: Ok, and financially the guys want 25. They want 25 each.
CHAWLA: Alright, ok.
CRONJE: So that’s 75 for those three, and what can you pay me? I do not know how much you pay me.
CHAWLA: You say.
CRONJE: If you give me 140 for everybody.
CHAWLA: 140 altogether?
CRONJE: Yeah.
CHAWLA: Ok, that’s fine.
CRONJE: Alright. So we are definitely on.
As soon as this transcript had been read out, I was persuaded it was authentic. Cronje had been caught in the act.
Modern fixing, if it ever had been, was no longer an Asian preserve.
Next morning, Saturday, 8 April 2000, I went to London. It was the first time I spent the whole day in the office.
Not all the other Sunday newspapers were persuaded of the transcript’s authenticity; at least one ridiculed it as a fake. I had an advantage in having done a one-on-one interview with Cronje five years before. Although it had been the strangest and most unsatisfactory interview of my career, it had made me more familiar with his speech patterns, not to say his unusual personality.
He had played a full season for Leicestershire in 1995, when the county was a power in the land. I was already an admirer of Cronje’s cricket. He was establishing himself as one of South Africa’s finest batsmen ever against spin, using his long arms to slog-sweep Shane Warne. But his biggest single contribution to making South Africa a power in the world after apartheid had been as a fielder. It was one of the feats of fielding that I shall always remember, even though I only saw it on television.
When Australia needed only 117 to win the second Test at Sydney in 1993–94, and had reached 75 for seven, Damien Martyn drove a ball through the covers. Cronje, from extra, ran back – or loped and lolloped, arms pumping – then picked up, turned and threw down the stumps at the bowler’s end without spending a second lining up his target. Warne, who had taken 12 cheap wickets in the game, was run out.
Cronje was captaining the side, too. Although the youngest player in the team, he was officially South Africa’s vice-captain, destined for the top since being the boy-hero at Grey College in his native Bloemfontein, and he had coolly taken charge after Kepler Wessels had broken a finger. Confronted with the pressure orchestrated by Cronje, Australia seized up and lost by five runs. This was South Africa’s first tour of Australia for a generation, and they had won in Sydney. I thought that as West Indies were declining, South Africa were all the more welcome back at the top table.
Before the start of a Championship match at Grace Road, when Leicestershire took the field, we agreed to meet at lunchtime. At lunchtime, Cronje said he would do the interview at teatime. Not really long enough, twenty minutes at most, to get inside someone’s head or skin – and then only if he did not answer calls from nature or anybody else.
I talked to the Leicestershire coaching staff in the meanwhile. ‘I’ve never seen anyone train so hard,’ said one of them. ‘He wants it so much.’ At this time – five years before the Qayyum Report into match-fixing in Pakistan, or the report by the Central Bureau of Investigation in India, or his conversation with Chawla – we assumed that ‘it’ meant success.
When Cronje came off at the tea interval, to the interview room, he said he would be back in a minute and went upstairs. Not satisfactory at all. The clock ticked away. We were halfway through tea by the time he came back.
Subsequently, I have wondered what he was up to during that lunch and tea break. He certainly did not spend the time eating: he was lean, fit as a butcher’s. The coach had been spot-on about the intensity of Cronje’s training.
He was not busy socialising either. He was popular at Grace Road, married to the sister of the Leicestershire bowler Gordon Parsons before he arrived there, but the life and soul of the party? No. In the ten-minute interview, Cronje was polite but distant, cold, unapproachable – more so than any other interviewee I have met. ‘Hansie’ did not suit; his baptismal names of Wessel Johannes were more appropriate.
Was he already fixing in 1995? For certain, he had toured India twice, so he would have been open to illegal approaches there. But even if he had not engaged with bookmakers before 1995, his personality by then would have made him a useful contact.
A batsman’s Test record is not a bad lie-detector. It is almost impossible to make a Test century without a clear mind. Cronje hit five Test centuries in his first 38 Test innings, before 1995. In his last 73 innings, when he was at the physical peak for a batsman, he scored one.
Four days after the story had broken in 2000, Cronje admitted his guilt. He confessed later, at the King Commission, to spot-fixing but not match-fixing: he had always tried to win for his country. But if you engage some of your players to underperform, the inevitable consequence is that you reduce your chances of winning. It was an ingenious way to salve his conscience.
I followed Cronje’s trail to places I had never been before. The Taj Palace in New Delhi was already part of the beat: a hotel en route to the airport, remote from the warmth of India, convenient for meeting contacts, or for hiring a large locker behind the reception desk in which wads of cash could be passed on. Room 346, where Cronje had talked on the phone to Chawla, looked sterile when I put my head round the door as it was being cleaned.
Less familiar was the headquarters of Delhi Police where the commissioner announced: ‘From the conversation between Sanjay Chawla and Cronje, it emerges the one-day matches between India and South Africa played recently in India were fixed in exchange for money. We will seek the help of Interpol as a huge international crime has been committed.’
I came to subscribe to the version of events which had the Delhi Police spilling the beans and exposing Cronje because some of them had lost money on the one-day international in Cochin earlier in the 1999–2000 series between India and South Africa. Well, I guess we all have our price; whatever walk of life we are in, to be human is to be tempted. But not all of us, if captain, would have bullied the inexperienced players into spot-fixing, usually the non-white ones.
I would never otherwise have gone to downtown Johannesburg and a shop that sold nuts, cashews and biltong. The owner, Hamid ‘Banjo’ Cassim, had befriended Cronje and acted as his go-between. Or to the bar in Cape Town where I had arranged to meet a senior member of the Scorpions, the South African government agency that investigated organised crime and corruption. He told me Cronje had approximately 20 overseas bank accounts, half of them joint accounts. At the time you needed US$5000 merely to open an account in the Cayman or Virgin Islands.
In the most expensive suburb of Cape Town, I interviewed Mervyn King, who chaired the commission that questioned Cronje and sentenced him to a ban for life. We talked in an amiable atmosphere in his sitting room before King protested, and protested, that there had been no political interference in the winding-up of his commission. The government had not ordered him to stop any more skeletons tumbling out of the cupboard – such as those players with whom Cronje had shared an overseas account – and a national disgrace.
As with all official inquiries, the King Commission opened the lid a little – just enough to catch a few wrongdoers, mostly at the bottom of the food chain – then slammed it shut. The timescale is always a giveaway. We shall investigate from this date until that date, and no more, lest more embarrassment be unearthed. The King Commission had the narrowest of windows, from 1 November 1999 to 17 April 2000, less than six months, apart from a South African tour of India. The lid of Pandora’s Box could never be closed; that of an official inquiry always can.
Cronje’s death, aged 32, was announced during the second Test between England and Sri Lanka at Edgbaston in 2002. He was still wheeler-dealing: even a man of his means was unwilling to pay for ordinary air tickets. He had made a contra-deal so he could fly from his palatial south coast resort to Johannesburg on cargo planes. One of them crashed in stormy weather, at an airfield which had never seen a major accident before, which prompted conspiracy theories.
Sitting in the press box on the opposite side of Edgbaston, I saw Cronje’s face again, behind the window of the visitors’ dressing room. Back in 1999, South Africa had been knocked out of the World Cup when the Edgbaston semi-final – still a strong candidate to be ranked the best one-day international of all time – ended in a tie. Ordinary humans would have expressed their emotions. He just sat there silently, haunted – and haunted by something else, apart from the defeat?
Cronje trained so hard as a form of penance, to expiate what he had done.
Three young men sitting on the boundary’s edge are engaged in earnest conversation – so earnest that their eyes and thoughts sometimes turn away from the game which is reaching its climax in front of them.
One of the trio is Tom Brown, who is playing for Rugby School in this match against MCC. He has already batted twice but, as captain, still has to oversee the school’s fourth-innings run-chase. He will break into this conversation – slightly lowering its high moral tone – to debate whether the batting order should be re-arranged and a hitter promoted.
The second member of this group is the sickly and saintly Arthur, who almost died of illness earlier in his school career and now prays for his enemies. Arthur has yet to bat, if he can drag himself away from the moral high ground.
The third member is a young master, who is not playing in this match. Thomas Hughes, author of Tom Brown’s Schooldays, does not name the master but his function is to be the mouthpiece of the creed Hughes is trying to impress upon the reader. This young master is even less worldly than Arthur, and so academic that he knows nothing of sport, having to be instructed by Tom and Arthur in what they are watching.
The match boils down to Rugby needing 20 or 30 more runs to win in the few minutes remaining before stumps are drawn. MCC’s players have to catch the last train back to London. At this point the young master exclaims:
‘What a noble game it is, too!’
‘Isn’t it? But it’s more than a game. It’s an institution,’ said Tom.
‘Yes,’ said Arthur – ‘the birthright of British boys old and young, as habeas corpus and trial by jury are of British men.’
‘The discipline and reliance on one another which it teaches is so invaluable, I think,’ went on the master, ‘it ought to be such an unselfish game. It merges the individual in the eleven; he doesn’t play that he may win, but that his side may.’
Hughes was writing in the 1850s about his time at Rugby in the 1830s, after the school had undergone regime change. ‘Flogger’ Keate at Eton had set the tone of the British public school, but the new headmaster of Rugby, Dr Thomas Arnold, preached what came to be known as Muscular Christianity: duty and service – with plenty of flogging thrown in. The boy schooled at Rugby could thus be trusted to execute the orders of the imperial government when he found himself in charge of an African colony or a regiment in Rajputana. He would be disciplined, self-reliant and unselfish, just as the Doctor had ordered, subsuming his individuality in the greater cause of ruling the heathen. He would play up and play the game, as Sir Henry Newbolt phrased it, not to win fame and fortune for himself, but hearts and minds for his country.
A finer exemplar of this creed than Sir George Grey could hardly be found. He was the Governor of New Zealand, then of South Africa, where a statue to him was raised in Cape Town in his lifetime and dedicated to ‘a governor who by his high character as a Christian, a statesman, and a gentleman, had endeared himself to all classes of the community, and who by his zealous devotion to the best interests of South Africa and his able and just administration, has secured the approbation and gratitude of all Her Majesty’s subjects in this part of her dominions’. In 1855 Grey founded the school in Bloemfontein named after him. The motto of Grey College is Nihil stabile quod infidum: ‘Nothing is steadfast if not true’. One of their star pupils could be said to have exemplified this ethos, if only in the breach.
The new code of football devised at Rugby, and described by Hughes, was the opposite of cricket. The bullying and fighting – not to mention the toasting of backsides in front of a fire – which went on in the school corridors were forbidden on the cricket field. But, on the rugby field, boys could be boys and vent their pent-up aggression.
In the cricket match, as Rugby chase down their target, Tom Brown decides to promote Jack Raggles, alias ‘the swiper’. He hits one ball for five runs but, lacking the self-discipline of Muscular Christianity, swipes a slower ball skywards, which the bowler himself catches. Young Raggles is unfit, as yet, to serve the cause of empire.
Having caught the ball, the bowler – a member of MCC, who has come to show the boys how the game should be played – ‘playfully pitches it on to the back of the stalwart Jack, who is departing with a rueful countenance’. The belief in cricket as an ethical system is not extinct: some like to think that playing cricket helps us to distinguish between right and wrong. But if an England bowler were now to playfully pitch a ball at the back of a departing batsman, all hell would break loose, illustrating how much cricket’s customs, laws and regulations have changed.
The laws of a sport are designed to ensure that the outcome of a contest is the result of skill and performance, not deceit and manipulation. To this end, cricket’s Laws have grown many times over in size. The original code of 1744 was embroidered on a large handkerchief, equivalent to two pages of paper at the most. By the revised Code of 2011, they had expanded to 52 pages of Wisden, catering for a growing number of situations, closing loopholes, turning grey areas into black and white.
‘The earliest laws of cricket, like their counterparts in baseball, are nowhere near sufficient to play the game from scratch,’ according to Beth Hise, an American academic who researched the origins of the two sports. Cricket’s original Laws of 1744, she observed, ‘simply prescribe a few elements (probably the most disputed) of an otherwise known custom of play’.
It would have been so much simpler if the legislators of 1744 – members of the Pall Mall Club – had given omnipotent powers to the umpire, like the referee in football, hockey or rugby. Instead, we have the apple in the Garden of Eden: a clause that has led to dispute ever since. ‘They are not to order any Man out unless appealed to by any one of ye Players.’ The exact phrasing has altered, but not the vacuum thus created. It led to the expectation – on the part of spectators if not all players – that the batsman would give himself out after an appeal of ‘How’s that?’ if he knew he was out, even if the umpire did not think so.
Subsequently, the inconsistencies and contradictions have accumulated. A batsman is applauded for giving himself out and ‘walking’ when he alone knows that he has edged a ball to the wicketkeeper. Yet he is simultaneously committing a cardinal offence: he is not respecting the umpire’s decision. If Hughes and Newbolt were banging on about anything, it was about respecting the umpire’s decision, as if it were the will of God or the British government.
Another inconsistency, of many: the batsman is expected, by some spectators if not all players, to give himself out if he edges a ball to the wicketkeeper. Yet if the batsman is run out when a couple of feet short of the line, he is not expected to ‘walk’, even though he is perfectly placed to see what has happened and knows he is out.
The Laws instruct the umpires to intervene in all sorts of minor matters, such as when the bowler oversteps: ‘If he delivers ye Ball with his hinder foot over ye bowling Crease, ye Umpire shall call No Ball, though she be struck or ye Player is bowled out, which he shall do without being asked,’ according to the Laws of 1744. The same in the case of wides: the umpire has to call them without being appealed to. In addition, he has to intervene if a fielder impedes a batsman when running between wickets and order ‘a Notch’ to be scored: the first penalty run. (It had been a contact sport originally: under the first code of 1727 a batsman could prevent a fielder taking a catch by getting in his way.) ‘Each Umpire is ye sole judge of all Nips and Catches, Ins and Outs, good or bad runs, at his own Wicket, and his determination shall be absolute,’ decreed the code of 1744.
The umpire’s authority, however, is not absolute. He cannot adjudicate on the major matter of dismissals unless a player has appealed to him.
I deduce that the context of the time was influential. Magna Carta had long since established that the English king could not behave like an absolute monarch and levy taxes whenever he wanted: he was not to be omnipotent like a French king or Russian tsar. Almost a century after Oliver Cromwell’s revolution, by the 1740s, both Parliament and the British people were even keener to rein in George II and stop him spending taxpayers’ money on the wars in Europe he was conducting in his other role as Elector of Hanover.
As I see it, this hierarchical order was replicated on the contemporary cricket field. The umpire was appointed to be king, but a constitutional one, bound by the Laws. Imagine if he had been empowered to raise his finger and dismiss a batsman whenever he liked, without any appeal by the fielding side. It might have been logical if cricket’s founding fathers had granted the umpire this absolute power – cricket’s equivalent of life and death – and banished any chance of controversy over walking. But it would have been in the spirit of totalitarian France before the Revolution, not of Georgian Britain.
Only twice in the first 2000 Test matches was a day’s play lost because of a dispute over unfair play. On both occasions it occurred in a match between England and Pakistan. In the first instance, England not only refused to tour Pakistan for the next 13 years, but the fallout spread from sport into society: after the Faisalabad Affair, some of the friction between indigenous Britons and Pakistani immigrants turned nasty.
Though the England players took the field on the third morning of the second Test in Faisalabad in 1987, Pakistan’s batsmen and the Pakistani umpires did not. The casus belli was that England’s captain, Mike Gatting, had moved a fielder behind the batsman’s back on the previous evening, and the umpire Shakoor Rana had stepped in to prevent him. In itself the charge was emotive: someone did something behind somebody’s back.
The convention in Pakistan then was that a fielder should not be moved behind the batsman’s back without the fielding captain informing the batsman. This used to be the convention in England too. In Forty Years of English Cricket, another stocky Middlesex and England batsman, Harry Lee, gives an illuminating example of a fielder being moved behind the batsman’s back. It happened in a county match in 1920 when both captains were grandees. One was Pelham Warner of Middlesex, to be knighted; the other Lionel Tennyson of Hampshire, to be ennobled:
H.K. Longman was batting against Hampshire, and I was at the other end. The bowler had begun his run up when I saw two fielders move from the slips to the leg side. This practice of moving behind the batsman’s back is a fairly common one, and is, to my mind, grossly unfair, for the batsman naturally aims to place his shots with a strength and direction intended to avoid the field as he has studied it. I called, ‘Look out, Mr Longman,’ and he walked away from his wicket and refused to accept the ball. I was told by the Hampshire captain, the Honourable L.H. Tennyson, and by the umpire that I had no right to attract Mr Longman’s attention, that the move was quite legitimate; in fact, I was made to feel even smaller than Nature has decreed that I should be.
When I returned to the Pavilion, Mr Warner asked what had happened, and I made my report. He assured me that I was quite right in my action. I do not know what happened behind the scenes, but I received a very handsome apology later in the day from Mr Tennyson – and there was thereafter at least one umpire on the first-class list who showed me an almost embarrassing friendliness until the end of his career.
Maybe it was as a direct result of this incident that county captains in England ceased for several decades to move fielders behind the batsman’s back without informing him. One of the journalists present in Faisalabad, Jack Bannister, had bowled for Warwickshire from 1950 to 1968 (and his grandfather, a police detective, had taught him how to memorise). Bannister could not recall any captain moving a fielder behind the batsman’s back without informing him. But soon after he had retired, the Sunday League was introduced in 1969 and limited-overs cricket became common fare. Thereafter, a captain would sometimes change his field several times an over; amid this hustle and bustle, the responsibility for telling the striker about movements behind his back fell to the non-striker, à la Lee. Not so in other parts of the cricket world, such as Pakistan, which took to limited-overs cricket far more slowly. There, it was still considered unsporting to move a fielder without telling the striker. So here we had a clash not only of personalities, between Mike Gatting and Shakoor Rana, but of cultures.
The Pakistani umpires thought they were in the right in this specific instance. Overall, England’s players thought they had been wronged, grievously wronged, in the series to this point. In the previous Test in Lahore, and up to that point in the Faisalabad Test, the umpires had given a succession of decisions which could not be excused as unintentional human error. Gatting had not been alone in being given out lbw when Abdul Qadir’s leg-break had pitched outside his off-stump; and more than one England batsman had been given out caught when his bat had manifestly not come near the ball. Too many decisions had gone in favour of Pakistan for the umpiring to have been at all times impartial.
A former Pakistan batsman of some distinction, Wasim Raja, who died in 2006, told me at the time, in confidence: ‘The [Pakistan] Board puts pressure on its umpires. It says to them that Pakistan have to win a particular match and that if Pakistan don’t, they won’t be umpiring any more Test matches.’ At the end of this series I calculated that 196 visiting batsmen had been given out lbw in Tests in Pakistan, against 101 Pakistan batsmen. After an especially rough tour in 1958–59, Garfield Sobers vowed never to return, and did not.
In addition to this general rule was the current state of affairs in Pakistan: martial law. I concluded that an order had gone out from some higher authority than the board for the umpires to ensure that Pakistan won this Test series. They had lost the semi-final of the 1987 World Cup in Lahore, a shattering disappointment, as the Australians were little more than fit and workmanlike, and had been defeated 3–0 by England in the subsequent one-day series; and it has since emerged that General Zia ul-Haq, the military dictator, gave this order himself. The British High Commission in Islamabad had heard and alerted England’s management of trouble ahead.
On the second day at Faisalabad, after fine batting by Chris Broad and Gatting himself had taken England to a total of 292 that was considered formidable as the pitch was expected to deteriorate, Salim Malik went to pull an off-break. He thought there was a fielder at square-leg, Broad, saving the single; so he hit it in the air into the deep. Malik was almost caught by Broad, who had been moved back to deep square-leg. Malik had not been informed, either by Gatting, in accordance with current Pakistani and old English custom, or by his partner at the non-striker’s end, in accordance with new English custom. Malik complained to the umpire at the bowler’s end, Shakoor Rana.
Come the final over of the second day, Rana was standing at square-leg when he saw Gatting wave to David Capel at backward square-leg, behind Malik’s back, while the bowler was running in. Rana did not hear Gatting warning Malik that he was doing so, as Gatting later said he did. Rana walked in waving his hands and shouting, leaving it to his partner Khizer Hayat to signal ‘dead ball’. England’s captain thought he was in the right, having being wronged so often in the series; Pakistan’s umpire also thought he was in the right, by stopping England from taking an unfair advantage. Their conversation immediately degenerated into shouted abuse and accusations of cheating.
Gatting was accustomed to leaving harsh words and hard feelings on the field. Rana demanded an apology, and informed the press that evening that he would not take the field again until Gatting had apologised. It was not irrelevant that Pakistan had lost five wickets cheaply and, with three days to go on a pitch expected to wear and tear, were liable to lose. Gatting was prepared to apologise to Rana for swearing, provided he did so in return. Then, as the third day passed without any cricket, top-brass diplomats and administrators went to work and forced Gatting to apologise, alone. The game had to go on, irrespective of the spirit of cricket.
The Faisalabad Affair taught me that a cricket match begins with a social contract between all concerned. Primarily this contract is between players and umpires, and between the players of one side and those of the other. But it can go further. The government, for example, is expected not to intervene and dictate the result in advance. Spectators are expected not to invade the pitch and damage it. The scorer is expected to keep the score honestly. The groundsman is expected not to favour the home side excessively, by making the pitch dangerous for batting; the tea lady is expected not to poison the visitors, and so forth.
The players of one side also enter into a social contract with their opponents, whatever the level. The home side expect the visitors to turn up, in time, with eleven players. In return, they will give the visitors acceptable hospitality; a dressing room not much inferior to their own; fluid, if only water, during the game; food of some kind if the game is longer than 20 overs per side; and somewhere, if only the outfield, to warm up and practise. During the game, the players of the two sides might not exchange a word, but everyone expects the norms to be observed: for the batsman to walk after being given out by the umpire; for the fielder to signal four if the ball has gone over the boundary (and television cameras are not present); for the sight-screen to be moved; for opponents to ‘try it on’ perhaps, but not to cheat outright. Afterwards, some social interaction is part of this contract: if not the traditional western custom of having a beer together, then the modern custom, derived from rugby and football, of forming a line outside the pavilion and shaking hands.
Captains enter into an even more detailed form of social contract. The first known set of Laws of 1727, governing the game between the Duke of Richmond and Mr Brodrick, specified that the captains were to have the final decision in the event of dispute; and even though this responsibility had devolved upon the umpires by 1744, the captains were still being held responsible for the conduct of the game when MCC promulgated the Spirit of Cricket in 2000. If the captains exchange team lists before the toss, they expect the names to be of real people, not aliases, and no twin to be replaced during the game by another twin, which has happened. The captains have to agree on local playing conditions, if a tree sits inside the boundary; and on a revised time, if the start is delayed by rain and no official umpires are present. When the home captain tosses, he is expected to use a coin which is not ambiguous; and the visiting captain not to pick it up before his counterpart can see it, as in the India v Pakistan Test at Calcutta in 1979–80. When the two captains shake hands before or after the toss, they signify that they are going to work together to make a game of it, over and above the loyalty to their team. They have established a channel of communication which will remain open until the end of the game.
This social contract extends to the relationship between the players and umpires, assuming they are independent officials, not members of the batting side taking a turn with the white coat. A bowler trusts the umpire to stand where the bowler asks, provided the umpire has a good view, and to stand still; also, to hold his sweater, cap or sun hat while he bowls. He expects the umpire to count up to six correctly.
Khizer Hayat and Shakoor Rana, who had stood in the Faisalabad Test, later officiated a game between the Indian and Pakistani media. Suresh Menon, a respected journalist captaining the Indian team, recalled in Bishan, his biography of Bishan Bedi:
As we were winning the limited-over game, chasing, I noticed that Hayat was giving the bowlers four- and five-ball overs. I was the non-striker when I mentioned this to the umpire: ‘Khizer bhai,’ I said, ‘do you know that you umpires are calling “over” after four balls?’ ‘Yes,’ said Hayat, in a tone that has always remained with me. ‘But what can you do about it?’
A batsman’s relationship with the umpires begins with his request to be given the right guard. Nothing is written in the Laws that the umpire should correctly give the batsman the guard he requests. It is simply expected as part of this social contract.
All players trust the umpires to tell the time honestly and call for an interval at the right moment. They expect the umpires to help if a player gets something in his eye, or if the ball needs its leather trimming or loose stitching cut. Above all, they trust the umpires to administer the Laws and regulations impartially. It is symbolic that when a bowler has mud in his studs, he leans on the umpire while digging it out with a bail.
In return, the umpires expect players, after they appeal for a verdict, to accept it. The exceptions are those cases when the fielding side can appeal to the square-leg umpire after the umpire at the bowler’s end has turned down their appeal; and when a third or television umpire is officiating. These are considerable expectations. Acrimony begins, and accusations of cheating, when they are not met; when the social contract breaks down; and when someone tries to take an unethical advantage.
No guesses are required to identify the first person in international cricket to be accused of violating the spirit of the game. The single Test of 1882 was a low-scoring dogfight at the Oval in a damp late August. After being dismissed for 63, the lowest total of their tour, Australia had bowled England out for 101. In Australia’s second innings, on the cut-up turf, Hugh Massie hit 55 at a run a minute to give the tourists a lead and the prospect of setting a defendable target. Then Billy Murdoch, Australia’s captain, pushed a ball on the leg-side and ran a single with his partner Sammy Jones. Jones grounded his bat, then walked down the pitch to pat down the turf where the ball had pitched.
‘How’s that?’
It was W.G. Grace. He had grabbed the ball and removed the bails. Jones was out of his crease. The umpire, Bob Thoms, had not called ‘Over’. Thoms gave Jones out – run out for 6.
‘That’s very sharp practice, W.G.’
These were Murdoch’s words as remembered by the umpire at the other end, Luke Greenwood, who had travelled down from Lascelles Hall. Greenwood had got on well with Australian teams when he had umpired them, and his sympathy was with them here. ‘Had I been appealed to I should not have given Jones out, for the ball was to all intents and purposes dead, and there had been no intent to make a second run,’ so Greenwood told ‘Old Ebor’.
After Australia had been dismissed in their second innings for 122, Fred Spofforth went into the England dressing room to confront Grace. Spofforth’s speech seems to have contained more vernacular than that of Murdoch, a lawyer. Highly strung, and known as ‘The Demon’, Spofforth returned to his dressing room and announced that Australia could defend a target of 85 on a pitch that was even more cut up than he was: ‘This thing can be done.’ In spite of Grace scoring 32, Australia won by seven runs, and their first Test victory in England prompted newspapers to proclaim the death of English cricket, and launch the myth of the Ashes.
The law about ‘dead ball’ in 1882 was too vague: ‘After the delivery of four balls the Umpire must call “Over,” but not until the ball be finally settled in the Wicketkeeper’s or Bowler’s hand; the ball shall then be considered dead.’ As it stood, therefore, this law prescribed what should happen at the end of an over but not during it. In 1884, MCC amended this law to read: ‘After the ball shall have been finally settled in the wicketkeeper’s or bowler’s hand, it shall be “dead”.’ Another loophole tightened, and less scope in future for Grace’s gamesmanship.
Bodyline caused the Australia v England series of 1932–33 to be the most acrimonious of all Test series, even more so than England’s in Pakistan in 1987–88, if only because it went on longer. As the cricket administrators of Australia and England publicly accused each other of the grave offence of being unsporting, politicians became involved, as they were to be on England’s tour of Pakistan.
Before 1932–33, it was considered unethical for a pace bowler to bowl more than occasionally at the batsman’s body or head, as a test of his courage. Larwood began to bowl several short balls or bouncers in an over to a packed leg-side field. Surviving footage of Bodyline suggests that Larwood had two sorts of bouncer. Len Hutton swore to me that Larwood did not throw, so pure was his action; and Don Bradman showed footage of Larwood on his film-projector at home and swore that he did. I deduce Larwood bowled one sort of bouncer, not very fast or threatening, that looped through to England’s wicketkeeper, Les Ames, who caught it with his fingers pointing down; and he delivered a second sort of bouncer that hurtled through, was caught by Ames at head-height with his gloves pointing up and made Bodyline a threat to life and limb.
As a result of Bodyline, MCC in 1934 issued a ‘special instruction’ – not a law – that ruled ‘direct attack’ to be unfair. It was thereafter up to the umpires to decide whether the bowler was attacking the batsman directly with persistent short-pitched bowling. The convention that bowlers should be sporting and aim at the stumps no longer sufficed.FN54
When Dennis Lillee and Jeff Thomson, Andy Roberts and Michael Holding, gave batsmen – still unhelmeted – their first taste of 90 mph bowling at both ends, umpires were not inclined to intervene. ‘The persistent bowling of short-pitched balls at the batsman is unfair if in the opinion of the umpire at the bowler’s end, it constitutes a systematic attempt at intimidation,’ said the Notes to the Law on Unfair Play in the 1970s. Many batsmen were visibly intimidated; I recall more than one England tailender backing away from Colin Croft in the Antigua Test of 1981. But the ethos of cricket has always erred on the liberal side of laissez-faire rather than the legalistic. Had an umpire done much more than talk to an intimidating bowler, he would have been branded as officious, or autocratic, like a tsar.
In the 1980s, more and more teams contained more and more outright-fast bowlers, until West Indies could field four of the all-time best. By now they were bowling short at batsmen who were wearing helmets and extensive padding, whose lives were not therefore endangered as they had been during Bodyline. But this generation of batsmen was the last to grow up without being exposed to extreme pace as part of their training, because the mechanised bowling machine was not commonplace until the 1990s. Some attempts to fend off these West Indian bouncers made an amusing spectacle for the unsympathetic.
Viv Richards had his mission, to prove the worth of West Indians in general and Afro-Caribbeans especially. Most of the West Indian bowlers did what they did in order to win as quickly as they could within the Laws. The film Fire in Babylon made good drama, but the prosaic truth is that the West Indian fast bowlers, as professionals, were intent on earning the substantial bonuses that came from winning, to enhance basic pay that was unworthy of world champions. Allegations were made that they were racist; yet the most intimidating attack I saw, outside the Kingston Test of 1986, was the one by Courtney Walsh on Devon Malcolm in the first Test of 1993–94. Walsh, of West Indies, went round the wicket and pounded the life out of Malcolm, of England, as well as the Sabina Park pitch. They were of the same race, same colour, and born in the same island of Jamaica.
Aap ke sa he! As-salaam alaikum, Mullahji!
Please come and sit and take some rest. You bless this house with your presence, Mullahji.
Here is some chai, please make yourself comfortable. There! Our friend told me you were the man I had to speak to. He has lost his child and found Allah, the Merciful and Compassionate.
Mullahji, I have decided the time has come. There is a Sura that says: ‘For him that gives charity and guards against evil and believes in goodness, We shall smooth the path of salvation.’ This is the path I want to take, Mullahji, the path of salvation, because maybe the end is coming for me.
I want to tell you my story. Allah the Generous will not judge me harshly and, inshallah, you will not judge me harshly. I have not told anyone these things, but now is the time, so I will tell you the truth as I remember it.
Bismillah ar-Rahman ar-Rahim, I remember the first part of my life very clearly. I was not born in a rich part of this city but in a poor area with no schools, no hospital, no cricket clubs. It was not a badmaash area then – we were a simple people. We did not have guns everywhere, killing, killing.
I had only little education. Instead of school I went to the stadium and bowled at the players when they went for practice. They gave me a T-shirt and after some time I was bowling good spin in the nets and one of the players gave me a bat he did not want. One day they were short, and they took me to a club match in the park. I batted number ten and though I did not play big shots because I was small-small, I did not get out.
To cut the long story, after a few weeks they gave me another game, at the Gymkhana club, and I scored a half-century. The Gymkhana people asked me to join them – no membership fee, no match fee, we give you money for tuk-tuk to come and practise here every evening. Gymkhana was very good for me. I got selected for national under-17 team, then national under-19. When there were some problems with senior players I made my international debut and – to Allah the praise – I did well.
After one-two years in the national team, I got a contract in England with a county. After three seasons, when I came back, I had the money to buy this house where you are sitting, Mullahji. Second thing: I joined a regional bank as international cricketer. I did not have to work in their office; I went to receptions and presentations when I was not playing and did little-little coaching.
Everything was good for me. Soon I got married, to a local girl, except her mother was from Germany – she had come to work here for international company and met local businessman. This was big marriage for a boy with no matriculation.
Then one day I was batting at the Gymkhana when two black cars drove into the ground and stopped behind the pavilion. I forgot about it because I was nearing my century, but after my inning, when I went back to the dressing room and before I had taken my shower, the captain said there was a big man to see me – a VVIP.
When I walked out of the back door of the pavilion, some goondas pushed me into a car, front seat. In the back seat was the son of one of the big ministers. He said he was not happy. He said the regional bank I worked for had gone bust and he had lost a lot of money. He was holding me responsible. He wanted his money back after one month. If he did not get his money back after one month, I have to find new wife.
What to do? Why didn’t these goondas trouble other people who had worked in that bank? How could I tell my wife about this thing? She would have been very scared, run away to her mother in Germany, never come back. So many badmaash peoples now.
Then I remembered. Two seasons before, we had played one-day match at a major international venue, and we had stayed at this big hotel. In the lobby it had a jewellery shop and the owner had seen me and given me a present – Rolex watch, free gift, he said. He gave me his card and said he had very nice restaurant too, and many players had been his guests.
I kept this card. I kept it in my cricket bag, or coffin as we say, Mullahji. Yes, a cricket bag is now a coffin. One day the player next to me in the dressing room saw the card and smiled. ‘You know him? He is very rich man. I didn’t know he was your friend.’
So I rang the number on this card, hoping he might lend me the money so I could pay off that bastard minister’s son with his goondas. I was never going to get the money by playing cricket, not if I won man-of-the-match in the World Cup final. No problem, my friend, he said. How much do you want? Any time, no problem, if you want big loan. Pay me back when you like, my friend.
After two days only, the money arrived by hawala at Gymkhana club early one morning when nobody there – better than coming to this house when my wife is here. Next home game, the goondas came and asked me how things going, and I tell them I can pay the money. Next day I gave them money for bastard minister’s son. He says he is very happy with me, no more problem.
After one month we are going to play home Test match, Mullahji, and the phone rings in my hotel room – this is before everyone has cellphone. It is my friend who has given me the loan. He says the loan is no problem, pay me back as you like, my friend, but he wants to know little-little thing about the Test starting day after tomorrow. Is it flat wicket and will we be playing second spinner?
We have just had team meeting and it’s hush-hush we are going to play second spinner because the wicket has been made to turn. Why should I tell him this thing?
I say sorry my friend, this is very important match, we are behind in this series and must win, I cannot tell you. He puts down the phone. I think he is angry with me, but little bit angry only. Next day I practise with everyone. In the evening we have another team meeting to finalise everything, then when I get back to my room the phone rings again. Are we going to play second spinner or not? And this time, if I do not tell him, he wants his money back straight, right now.
All my money had gone on buying this house. I was not playing county cricket any more because I was playing so much for my country and we did not get big money – two thousand dollar for Test match, one thousand dollar for one-dayer. What to do?
I am sitting in my hotel room, thinking, thinking. I have told this man to ring me back after one hour. Then I remember when I was playing for my county in England, we were doing very well in Sunday League one season and very bad in County Championship. On Sunday morning, our captain talked with the other captain and came back and said: ‘Boys, this is the deal. We are going to win this game today, and they are going to win the match tomorrow.’ In England in those days they played this Sunday League in the middle of a County Championship game. Mad people! Anyway, they make sure we win today, and we make sure they win tomorrow. ‘Anyone disagree?’ the captain asked. I remember one player, young player, put his hand up – that was it. You see, Mullahji, people were doing it in England, with their Spirit of Cricket and all.
Another time, early in my career, I was playing for Rest of the World team in three-match one-day series. Organisers say it had to be 1–1 after two games, then everyone interested and odds very equal, then we make sure home team win the third. During the third game, when Rest of the World were fielding, one of our players came back on the field after drinks break, and said: ‘Hey, boys, there is envelope in dressing room for all of you, two thousand dollar each, just make sure we lose this game.’ We lost it but I did not take the envelope, I swear, Mullahji. Some of my teammates took it, but not me.
So I am sitting, thinking these things. And what about my neighbour here, Mullahji? He has big parties in his house, big politicians, lots of girls, so many presents. Why should cricketers miss out? Politicians spend whole lifetime making money – we have five, ten years only. When this man rang back, I told him we are playing second spinner.
It is difficult to remember the second half of my career so clearly, Mullahji. It became very difficult, trying to win sometimes, trying to lose sometimes, trying to score runs, trying to get out, telling so many lies.
Things became more difficult when another syndicate started fixing in our team. One of us, when we were playing in Sharjah and staying in Dubai, he was trapped by Uzbek or Ukrainian woman, all same-same. She was working for the boss, Mullahji, the big boss, Mullahji. This player have no chance of escaping after he was secretly filmed in his room. His life finished with shame if he doesn’t do what he is told.
Now we all have cells and things very difficult. We have one team, two syndicates, and who knows what is going on. The player who was trapped in Dubai bowls first ball down leg-side to give four wides – and this is the first I’ve heard of it! People walking in and out of dressing rooms, sending messages, who’s bookie, who’s punter, who’s boss, it make my head hurt. Do we all put caps on after drinks break to say the deal is on, or only one player put cap on backwards? Do we have to give away total in 220–240 bracket or 240–260? And sometimes the other team is trying to lose the same time we are trying to lose. When you can’t trust other team to try and win, it is very difficult.
Sometimes it worked beautifully. One bowler, he agree not to bowl me certain ball and I made a lot of runs. Umpire at his end cut into deal, so no chance he give me lbw. Win-win, boss very pleased. Another time we play World Cup game against small country and the deal is extras will be top-scorer. One of them played county cricket and scored some runs, but we still gave enough byes and wides to beat him. My friend so pleased he say you never have to give back the money, it is free gift for life, and one day a new four-wheel-drive is parked outside my house, all tax paid.
Only one problem. Some players get greedy and get found out. That South African captain get caught by Delhi police bugging his phone.
But now I want to change, Mullahji, I want to take the path to salvation. My wife, she has been visiting her mother in Germany for seven years now. I pray the five prayers every day and want to do Haj, if only government give me back passport.
To have no son must be Allah’s punishment for what I have done, Mullahji. But now I have done punishment, so please help me find His mercy. The Sura says: ‘Does he now know that when the dead are thrown out from their graves and men’s hidden thoughts are laid open, Allah on that day will know all that they have done.’ I have opened my thoughts to you, Mullahji, and I ask forgiveness in the name of the Merciful and the Compassionate.
Match-fixing was born in the decadent Regency period in England. It resurfaced there in the 1970s when the county schedule became too packed, and temptation too easy.
Nothing so crude as money was involved, old boy – not most of the time, at any rate. This was England: nothing tacky like cash changed hands. A nudge was as good as a wink when one county played another not only in a Championship match but in a Sunday League game in between. As a season drew to a close, if one county was going well in the Championship and the other in the Sunday League, it was tempting to rest your older players and give a few youngsters a game in the competition you were not going to win.
Was it ethical if a captain made these selections of his own accord, but unethical if he came to such an arrangement after a verbal agreement with the opposing captain? And what if the agreement between them was a tacit understanding, without even a nudge or wink, and simply done in the expectation that the other side would follow suit? The main point is that the players should never have been exposed to such temptation in the first place: to intercalate, and play one match during another, is wrong.
And the law facilitates the fixer. It resembles a number eleven who blocks every ball in an old-fashioned game, without any overs limitation. Block, block, block: every delivery – every attempt at variation – he kills with his dead bat. The libel law in the United Kingdom makes it impossible to name any names unless you have cast-iron evidence such as bank statements or secretly shot footage – and then only if it has been done in the public interest. Only the dead, like the late Cronje, can be mentioned, let alone exposed. Thus the fixers have lived to fight, and deceive, another day, often in the guise of coach or commentator.
Ball-tampering is normally done behind the back of the umpire standing at the bowler’s end. As the bowler returns to his mark, he can pick the seam to make it prouder, or change the condition of the ball without the batsmen or umpires seeing his coin or bottle top, suncream or lip salve, sweets or zipper. He is not allowing the ball to age naturally, therefore he is thought to be taking an unfair advantage. But officialdom’s view has varied from country to country, and period to period, about whether changing the condition of the ball intentionally is ethical or not. In England, bowlers were once permitted to rub a ball into the ground, not so that pace bowlers could reverse-swing it, but so that spinners could grip it.
When two neutral umpires, Darrell Hair of Australia and Billy Doctrove of West Indies, suspected Pakistan’s bowlers of changing the ball’s condition during the Oval Test of 2006, they replaced it with a new one. The Pakistan team, under Inzamam-ul-Haq, felt they had been accused of cheating and refused to play on after the tea interval, conceding the game. For the second time, a day of Test cricket was lost, and Pakistan’s board was billed for compensation of half a million pounds.
Throwing, I would say, has generated more righteous indignation – more heat under the collars and caps of cricketers – than any other single issue, even more than moving a fielder behind a batsman’s back, or ball-tampering, or Mankading.FN55
The failure to keep a straight arm, or rather the act of straightening the arm in delivery, is widely seen to be unethical. Which is strange, because often the pace bowler with a hyper-extended elbow is not trying to take an unfair advantage. Rather than making a conscious choice between right and wrong, he is merely bowling in the style that comes most easily to him. But I believe that a few have gone wide of the crease and speared in the bouncers, knowing that thereby they have increased the likelihood of their delivery being a throw.
Cricket was not originally associated with the concept of straightness. It was not until the late eighteenth century that bats became straight, no longer curved like a hockey stick. Only when bats were straight, and round-arm then over-arm bowling required a straight elbow, did the sport become synonymous with this concept. The honest person thereafter kept ‘a straight bat’. If he was not playing straight, it wasn’t cricket.
So, while a bowler may not be aware of bending his elbow to an unacceptable extent, as soon as his opponents think he does, the whispered accusations of cheating begin. Bending an elbow is perceived to be taking an unfair advantage because it can add extra speed or extra spin to the ball. As Ranjitsinhji observed: ‘Mere physical or brute strength ought not to gain an advantage over the real subtleties of the art of bowling.’
Ranji had raised uproar in Australia when he accused the South Australian Ernest Jones of throwing on England’s 1897–98 tour. Jones was also accused by an umpire and became the first to be no-balled in a Test for throwing. Matters were brought to this head by James Phillips, who was a century ahead of his time in being a professional umpire all year round. Alternating between seasons in the northern and southern hemisphere, he fearlessly no-balled several bowlers in England and Australia. Some were banned or phased out, and the issue of throwing did not resurface as a major issue until the 1950s.
Whereas the majority of bowlers suspected of throwing used to be pace bowlers, now they are more likely to be spinners: spinners of various kinds except leg-break and chinaman bowlers. The first cause célèbre involving a spinner centred on Tony Lock in the 1950s. He had started as a normal left-arm orthodox spinner, until Surrey practised one winter in an indoor school with a low ceiling and he altered his action. Lock was no-balled in a Test match in 1953–54 in the West Indies, and would surely not have got away with throwing as long as he did if he had not enjoyed MCC’s backing. But again he knew not what he did. Ted Dexter told me that during England’s 1958–59 tour of New Zealand, Lock was filmed by a cine-camera while bowling.FN56 At a party at the house of the former New Zealand captain Geoff Rabone, this film was shown, and Lock was stunned, mortified. He went home and worked to restore his action to what it had been before the indoor school.
The received wisdom is that the International Cricket Council changed its regulations to allow Muttiah Muralitharan of Sri Lanka to continue bowling. When I first saw him in the one-off Test in Colombo in 1993, I thought he threw; and was told that on Sri Lanka’s tour of England in 1991 the first-class umpires had given the tourists an unofficial warning that he should not play in the one-off Test at Lord’s. After the Australian off-spinner Bruce Yardley became Sri Lanka’s coach, Muralitharan became much less chest-on, more side-on in delivery; and I thought his wrist and fingers put almost all the energy into the ball, to the point where his elbow was almost irrelevant. When the ICC allowed bowlers to have a hyper-extension of their elbow up to 15 degrees of flexion, Muralitharan’s off-break appeared to me to be just about within the law.
The doosra – or ‘the other one’, as opposed to the off-break – complicated matters again, by demanding far more of a bend in the elbow than the off-break. Maybe it is not a coincidence that Lahore, by my reading at any rate, has been the birthplace both of the doosra and of reverse swing of the now-accepted kind.FN57 On England’s last tour of Pakistan in 2005–06, I was told that a cousin of Majid Khan used to bowl a doosra in the Bagh-i-Jinnah long before Saqlain Mushtaq was hailed as the pioneer. Spinner and swinger were reacting to the same circumstance: pitches so conducive to batting, like concrete, that a bowler had to devise a new way to deceive his opponent.
For all the definitions in the Laws and the ICC regulations, throwing is partly in the eye of the beholder. If a bowler is in our team, his action is not so questionable as that of an opponent, even though their actions are identical; there seems to have been this subjective element ever since R.E. Mody. Our opinion can depend on the literal perspective too: an action that seems fine from one end of the ground can look ‘diabolical’ from the other.
‘Come,’ says Muttiah Muralitharan, asking for a volunteer. We are sitting in the reception room of his villa – a fairly modest one, not suspiciously expensive – on the outskirts of Colombo.
The world record-holder for Test wickets goes to his sideboard and kneels. But he is not asking for mercy from the assembled journalists, for once. He is giving us the readings from his last testing by the ICC on his right elbow.
Palm upwards, the record-holder extends his right arm along the sideboard. It is not straight. According to Murali, his elbow rises at an angle of 27 degrees above the horizontal – even when the volunteer pushes down on Murali’s right forearm as hard as he can.
Murali’s right elbow simply does not straighten. Nor does his left elbow, which rises 24 degrees above the horizontal, so he says, credibly. It is a condition, he says, which he inherited from his grandfather.
Thus a lot of cricket history is explained. In releasing one of his fizzing off-breaks, Murali’s elbow went from an angle of 27 degrees to 38 degrees. According to the new lasers which can make precise measurements, his elbow bent 10.5 degrees in delivery, well within the 15 degrees now permitted.
Some more biology. It was Murali’s bent arm – his naturally, unavoidably bent arm – that allowed his wrist and fingers to spin the ball like a top. ‘When you really straighten your arm, according to science, the movement of the wrist is less,’ Murali said. ‘When you’re bent, it’s more. So I have an advantage with a bent arm!’ Some advantage: he finished with 800 Test wickets, a record that will never be surpassed, given the popularity and commercial success of Twenty20.
Another son of Jamnagar stirred controversy in Australia exactly half a century after Ranjitsinhji. When Vinoo Mankad was bowling his left-arm spin for the touring Indians against an Australian XI in 1947–48, he warned the non-striker Bill Brown not to leave his crease before he had bowled. The second time Brown did it, Mankad ran him out. Public opinion, and Brown himself, thought this action justified: the non-striker was taking unfair advantage, after he had been warned.
In the subsequent Test at Sydney, when Brown backed up again as the non-striker, Mankad ran him out again – without a warning. Majority opinion this time was against Mankad. Disproportionality seems to me to be the key here: the punishment of Mankading is not proportionate to the crime. The crime is to get a head start in running between wickets (for the sake of the striker and the team, without any direct benefit for the non-striker); the punishment is for the non-striker to be run out. Natural justice says that someone should not lose his life for a minor offence, especially if he has not been warned.
Of the two finest examples of ethical action in English cricket in my time, the first was the boycotting of South Africa. MCC, still in charge of the professional game at the end of the 1960s, would have been all too happy to continue playing apartheid South Africa; the conscience of two of its younger members, Michael Brearley and the then Bishop of Woolwich, David Sheppard, was not at first shared by the vast majority. Basil D’Oliveira, however, was the man for this moment.
The second example came in the World Cup of 2003 in South Africa – or rather in South Africa, Kenya and Zimbabwe. If it had been held in South Africa alone, there would have been no such moral dilemma. It boiled down to the England team being left to decide, by themselves, whether or not they should play their match against Zimbabwe in Harare. At first it was a security issue: could England withdraw from the fixture on these grounds, just as New Zealand withdrew from their match in Nairobi, thus conceding the points to the home team?
But once England’s security concerns had been more or less satisfied, and the players realised they would be perfectly safe if they visited Harare, it became an ethical issue – one the players were left to answer on their own. The England and Wales Cricket Board, and even more so the British government, were in a far more informed position to pass this judgement. But, depending on your point of view, they either liberally left grown men to make their minds up, or washed their hands.
England’s players, stuck in this impasse and a downtown hotel in Cape Town, went through several days of increasing anguish. Andy Flower and Henry Olonga had just alerted the cricket world by wearing black armbands during Zimbabwe’s first match in the World Cup. England’s players were then given a presentation, by a Channel Four producer, on the country ruled by Robert Mugabe: the repression, the malnutrition, the arrests, the torture. Several dozen spectators who had attended the World Cup match in Bulawayo had been detained and beaten by police; so how much more likely was it that violence would be perpetrated on a greater scale in Harare, where Zanu-PF did as Mugabe liked? The venue for the Zimbabwe v England match, the Harare Sports Club, was next door to the president’s residence.
Here was the chance of a lifetime for most of England’s cricketers to achieve something memorable in a global tournament. Those who had survived the Ashes tour – directly before the World Cup – had been toughened, if tired. If they beat Zimbabwe, they were going to qualify for the Super Six stage, with the semi-finals in sight. Refusing to play Zimbabwe, whatever the grounds, would likely lead to an early exit from the World Cup – and few of the players would be around for the next one four years later.
In the end, England’s players decided not to go to Harare, by a majority verdict, and mainly on ethical grounds. Nasser Hussain, the captain, went through something close to hell before coming out the other side. As I was ghosting him at the time, I knew the anguish was not feigned. ‘We couldn’t have lived with ourselves if we had played that game and spectators or people outside the ground had been arrested and beaten up,’ Hussain said.
Fruitless, perhaps. Yet it was one of England’s finest performances.
It is very rare now for the Spirit of Cricket to be applied on the field. In more than 400 Tests I have seen, the only time it has happened was at Trent Bridge in 2011, when Ian Bell was invited to resume his innings after being run out off the last ball before tea. And it was as a result of pressure being exerted upon India’s captain, M.S. Dhoni, by India’s board president, Narayanaswami Srinivasan, in a phone call during the interval. The political need to maintain good relations between the two boards and countries was the deciding factor as much as sportsmanship.
The Spirit of Cricket has been applied off the field. After Australia had announced their team before the Edgbaston Test in 2009, their wicketkeeper Brad Haddin hurt a finger in practice. They asked England to allow Australia to replace Haddin with their reserve wicketkeeper, Graham Manou, and Andrew Strauss agreed. According to the Laws, he had the right to refuse. It was common sense, Strauss said, that a specialist should keep wicket and none of the other members of the Australian XI could do so. In the next Test at Headingley, England’s generosity was repaid when Australia’s captain Ricky Ponting allowed Matt Prior extra time to recover from a back spasm before the revised start.
Otherwise, the Spirit of Cricket is applied in little more than gestures. A fielder who bends down and ties a batsman’s bootlace for him is considered sporting, or rather he would be called unsporting if he was seen to refuse. In-coming batsmen are no longer applauded, except in a Sunday friendly on the village green or if a great player is retiring, after the fashion of an actor or musician going on stage; but the Spirit of Cricket dictates that fielders, though not the bowler, should applaud his century and clap him off the field at the close of a day. The Spirit of Cricket dictates that the fielders shall wait for the batsmen to leave the field first at an interval, except if they are lagging too far behind, in which case they should wave the fielders off first. If a batsman drops his bat while running between wickets, a fielder will be considered a good sport if he picks it up and returns it. Similarly, if a ball comes to rest in or near the crease, the batsman is considered polite if he picks it up and passes it to a fielder. That was until the Australian team around the turn of the millennium told the batsman not to bloody touch it.
These are not actions, however, that affect the outcome of the match. The result is the same whether or not a fielder picks up the bat that the batsman has dropped. If Arthur, Tom and the young master were to be reincarnated in their blazers and boaters, they would be pleased to see the fielder pick the bat up for the batsman: they might see it as a vestige of Muscular Christianity, of doing unto others what we would have done unto ourselves. But it is no more than a gesture.
Cricket is more likely now to teach the young player practicalities than ethics. It can teach the eight-year-old to fasten his laces or pads properly so he does not trip over. It can teach him how to switch his concentration on and off while fielding. He will learn how to be alert, whether anticipating the need to back up a loose throw in the field, or keeping an eye on his captain between deliveries, or when looking for a quick single while batting. He will learn how to concentrate on one ball at a time, even if this is ever less useful in a world of multi-tasking.
The Laws, overall, have done their job. If a youngster from the North-West Frontier – perhaps where Tom Brown was sent to serve as a district officer – takes up cricket, he may have a lot to learn about the Laws, if he so wishes, but not much about the Spirit of Cricket. On the field of play, he will seldom have to make a judgement based on good and evil, right and wrong.
The young master at Rugby, the disciple of Dr Arnold, would be disappointed. But then the war on terror, starting in the early twenty-first century, led to the erosion of individual liberties in Britain. So habeas corpus and trial by jury are not what they used to be either.
I know my place. The boarding pass reminds me. My seat on the plane is usually 64B or 76C. Apart from my solitary century, the nearest I get to a hundred is when I fly.
From the back, however, I can see who comes and goes – ‘who’s in, who’s out’, as King Lear said. In Beyond a Boundary, C.L.R. James said the Ancient Greeks divided people into those who act on the stage, those who sit in the audience and applaud, and those who sit in the wings and write about those who act on the stage. He did not cite his Classical source, but I agree: mankind is divided almost exactly into those three categories.
But I should have got out of my seat at the back of the plane – or in the wings of the theatre – and acted upon the stage in the question of Sri Lanka.
Should it have been in 1984, during Sri Lanka’s inaugural Test in England, when Tamil demonstrators ran on to the ground at Lord’s to demonstrate against the civil war? Some people laughed: who are these funny chaps waving flags and banners sporting the name of ‘Eelam’? Plays for Kent, doesn’t he? Alan Ealham! Haw, haw.
At least I did not do that. But I was guilty of the sin of omission. I did not take the trouble then to find out about the Tamil minority, and how events set in train by the British divided the country. The educated Tamil elite ran the bureaucracy, using the English language; on Ceylon’s Independence in 1948 the Sinhalese majority began pushing the pendulum back their way by making Sinhala the language of government and education, squeezing Tamils out.
Tamil culture is highly advanced, and very conservative, so that the caste system had endured in their northern and eastern areas of Sri Lanka. A member of a low-caste fishing community, Velupillai Prabhakaran, assassinated rival leaders, before taking control of all the Tamil protest movements in the name of his organisation, the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam.
It may be difficult to sympathise with people in a country that is just a name on the map. But I visited Sri Lanka for the first time in 1993. Should I have protested then on behalf of press freedom in Sri Lanka? The army was forbidding journalists to go to the north and east to see what was happening – for ‘their safety’. Or perhaps for the safety of the Sri Lankan army’s reputation.
I could agree, at a push, with the reasoning that the only way to end the civil war was for the Sri Lankan army to win it by military means. Prabhakaran was too much of a psychopath ever to submit, ever to do what was best for the people he nominally represented. In the event, I closed my eyes and ears, until an official in the British High Commission in Colombo told me the lie behind the official statistics.
About 70,000 people, according to the Sri Lankan government, had died during the civil war as it approached its end after 30 years. This number, however, excluded all those who had disappeared and were presumed dead, or who lay in mass graves unearthed. Only corpses were officially counted. This made a very different equation. Seventy thousand dead over 30 years was a terrible tragedy, but it was a civil war, and it was ‘only’ two thousand or so people killed per year. Whereas, in reality, that number had to be multiplied several times over.
Or was the best time to protest after the Sri Lankan army won, killing not only Prabhakaran, but many unarmed and innocent Tamil civilians in the process? As the months passed, it became apparent that the government of Mahinda Rajapaksa, no matter what it said, was not using the peace wisely. Tamil civilians were held in concentration camps; army abuses denied; journalists and United Nations officials still forbidden from investigating in war-torn areas; everything sanitised. And foreign governments carried on happily negotiating with the Sri Lankan government for all the minerals with which the island is enriched, including uranium.
Cricket was the only possible lever. The government would have been shaken if the cricket world had boycotted Sri Lanka when the country was about to stage a major tournament. Nothing might have made the government change its repressive ways, but cricket could have come closer than anything to forcing it to do so. And, as a member of the cricket media, I could have tried to kick-start the process.
Had the cricket community threatened a boycott of the World Cup in Sri Lanka in 2011, or of the World Twenty20 finals in 2012, the government might have been forced to allow a proper Truth and Reconciliation commission, instead of the official whitewash, to investigate military abuses; to allow Tamils a meaningful role, not only in economic regeneration, but in political life; and to pay some compensation to the families of those who ‘disappeared’, including dozens of brave Sri Lankan journalists.
Instead, too many Tamil resentments were buried in the bloody earth. Unlike the corpses, they may rise again, if not initially in Sri Lanka, then in Tamil communities in India, Canada, Australia or Britain.
Mea maxima culpa.