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Business News/ Mint-lounge / Features/  Pacifiers for Warner, Diapers for Kohli
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Pacifiers for Warner, Diapers for Kohli

Does cricket as a street brawl constitute progress for the game? Is aggression the only way to show intent?

Australia’s David Warner and India’s Rohit Sharma argue during a match. Photo: David Gray/ ReutersPremium
Australia’s David Warner and India’s Rohit Sharma argue during a match. Photo: David Gray/ Reuters

The Aussies are &^%$ showing the Indians. The Indians are not ^%*& backing down. One distracts, the other demeans, they all belittle. It’s all so very &^%$ manly. This is toughness, you %$#* got it?

During the Australian Open tennis match in Melbourne, I drop my granddaughter at daycare and any moment expect to see David Warner there with a pacifier in his mouth. And Virat Kohli in diapers next to Jimmy Anderson. No one doubts their talent with bat and ball, but perhaps it is precisely because of this talent—and none have the excuse of being teenagers—that with it must arrive responsibility. It’s their game to play, but also to protect.

So here’s my single wish for the World Cup. Not an underdog upset, a new nation winning, a hat-trick, a couch-standing run chase. But just a single gesture from one player to another, going beyond winning and losing, to display the quality that every player swears by but most find hard to live by. Respect.

For the game, themselves, the opposition, the crowd.

Loudly and crassly, and without much intervention, cricket has strayed from civility. Decency, once becoming and essential to sporting cultures, is almost considered sissy-ish. Quietly congratulating a batsman on a hard-earned century is viewed as weakness. You bowled hard, he played better, you struggle on, but no. Ignored amidst real war is the truth that for all its celebrity this is only sport. Cricket forgets, but not other sports. It is why we crave a moment akin to what Tim Smyczek offered us at the Australian Open.

With Rafael Nadal serving at 6-5, 30-0 in the fifth set, a fan hollered during his first serve. It was a fault. To intervene was not Smyczek’s job; but to intervene was his human decision. Two serves, he told the umpire; let Rafa replay the point.

It was an extraordinary moment, beautiful and memorable, yet Smyczek seemed embarrassed by the attention when a colleague and I tracked him down at Melbourne airport the next morning. Yet even he accepted that sportsmanship as a wider virtue is dying and told us: “I guess it’s maybe a good thing it’s getting some attention. If that inspires younger players to do something like that, even just a little bit, that’s definitely a positive thing."

Australia’s Andrew Symonds exchanges words with India’s Harbhajan Singh. Photo: Hamish Blair/ Getty Images
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Australia’s Andrew Symonds exchanges words with India’s Harbhajan Singh. Photo: Hamish Blair/ Getty Images

Let’s avoid that tired cliche “we know where the line is", because while they swear on any holy book they know where the ^%$# it is, they’ve always got a reason to cross it, because, well, it had to be crossed, because someone else crossed it first, because the match is tight, because everyone does it.

Let’s not even attempt that dialogue which is better found in kindergarten sandpits, the one that goes “they started it". Or as my eloquent Australian friend, the journalist Greg Baum, incisively wrote, they pick a fight and then insist they won’t back down. Let’s protect ourselves from that useless line, “what happens on the field stays on the field", because this is an excuse for anything happening on the field and nothing seems to stay on the field anyway.

Stare away, fellows. Challenge a batsman. But everything can’t be a scowl and a cavalcade of curses and spitting confrontations. Hurling the ball at a batsman after a delivery is unnecessary provocation, a sort of cricketing road rage that promises an unhappily violent conclusion. The “send-off" is even more vile, easily among sport’s most craven acts, for it is the equivalent of kicking a fallen opponent: You got his wicket, now what more do you want?

If India, for instance, embrace this unseemly behaviour, are they in effect saying Sachin Tendulkar and Rahul Dravid and V.V.S. Laxman were pious folk who didn’t care enough, didn’t understand that aggression isn’t intent or stroke or unflinching skill but, in fact, conflict and profanity? If they did understand, would their records have been better? If they did comprehend that antagonism is a weapon, would their team, which won Test series in England, in the West Indies and nearly Australia, be better than this one, which wins what exactly and where? Sometimes, listening to Ravi Shastri, it would seem that desire has just been invented, and that somehow it equates with posturing.

This cup matters because this cup is still cricket’s most coveted and tangible prize. Test cricket has no world championship, Twenty20 has no history. This is the game’s collective advertisement and this game deserves images more evocative than it is getting. There is something ineffably sad in reading a paragraph on a website which states: “ESPNcricinfo understands that players from more than one international team have been told in recent times by team leadership figures that ‘I don’t care if someone gets fined’ in their efforts to push opposition players out of their comfort zone, making a mockery of the usual punishment for abusive language and other offences."

Cricket is being let down and cricket is being disrespected. To shrug, to call it overreaction, is what football said about diving, and now every striker is a potential Greg Louganis. Cultures get infected and insiduously alter if no one is vigilant, and right now no one is in cricket: not boards, not teams, not captains, not commentators, not media, not coaches, not administrators. The yellow and red cards, as Martin Crowe rightly suggested, are but a reaction to a collective sloth regarding discipline and decency. It is a necessary drawing of coloured lines instead of those clichéd invisible ones few teams can evidently see.

Spirit is only an idea, an ideal. It requires preservation, it needs to be displayed, it demands reinforcement. It needs men, not boys. Tennis illustrates this well, for amidst a planet of rapidly changing tastes, its leading players have set a refined example on court and in the press room, establishing a high standard by which the chasing pack is measured.

They are doing what every current player must: They are protecting their game and taking ownership of it. They do not hand off responsibility, they do not play, get paid and leave, they know it starts with them. If this was cricket, of course, we would be insisting that Novak Djokovic give Nadal a nudge and a ^&*^ spray at changeovers.

Everyone wants to win this cricket cup, but everyone needs reminding that with a national colour pulled on, there must also be worn a set of values. If they don’t appreciate this, we must demand it. Cricket has to stand for something, else it is just a bat-and-ball bar fight and a full-day street brawl. Respect for the opponent in the midst of combat is hard, but it’s supposed to be hard.

This cup is crying for a gesture. This cup is the perfect time for people in cricket to give a *&^% about what happens in cricket and to cricket.

Rohit Brijnath is a columnist with The Straits Times, Singapore.

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Published: 31 Jan 2015, 01:27 AM IST
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