Sledging: let’s go pro

Fiona Barber suggests some more sporting alternatives to the popular pastime of abusing the opposition.

Sledging1: The activity of travelling across snow on a sledge.

Sledging2: The insulting of an opposing player in order to upset his or her concentration.

Either way, things head downhill rapidly. And in the case of David Warner, vice-captain of the Australian cricket team, and the latter, they descend into hypocrisy.

You will have seen the news clip: an incandescent Warner losing the plot over something South African player Quinton de Kock said in a stairwell during a break in the first cricket test in Durban. Seems he’d made a “vile and disgusting” remark about Warner’s wife and the ready-to-detonate husband had to be restrained by teammates.

Warner cried foul, alleging de Kock had crossed a line. Back in the real world, some of us wondered just how one of the high priests of persecution thought he had a leg (stump) to stand on. The words pot and black, reap and sow, sprung to mind.

Andrew Webster of the Sydney Morning Herald saw it this way: Although he argued that Warner and the Australians should only be afforded “a toenail of the high moral ground”, Webster said he would have reacted the same way. There was a line, he argued, and it started and ended with family members.

Hang on, does that mean that everything else – someone’s troubled psychiatric history or personal issues for instance – are fair game? Rip into it cobber, just don’t mention the missus? I’d argue that the line should start and end at humankind.

I could witter on all day about this, but instead of hand wringing, perhaps we should be trying to use sledging for good.

Here are three suggestions:

Sledge funds

Forget one-off match-fee fines, what we need is a gynormous sledge box. For every single transgression, the sledger pays big bucks to an appropriate charity or campaign – racist taunts result in cash to diversity awareness projects; sledges that attack an opponent’s self-worth result in the player donating to a mental health charity, and so on. So if you are a foul-mouthed, racist, mysygonist, homophobic tosser, that’s very bad news for your wallet. A nice bit of social engineering never hurt anyone.

Sledging as a competitive sport

Take the trash talk out of stadiums and put it onto the stage. I’d pay good money to see a fair dinkum sledgefest between consenting adults. This would have the bonus effect of freeing up the sportspeople for, er, sports. You could include some of the true greats of this dark art – Shane Warne, Merv Hughes and George “four more years” Gregan. (Do women ever sledge? Certainly didn’t happen in my D-grade social netball team.)

Renewable energy generation

You probably only need David Warner for this one. Have him wear some sort of energy storage system that feeds into the national grid. His verbals could probably power Bondi.