CHEATING IS NOW THE GAMEPLAN
The fall-out from Aussie ball-tampering rumbles on:
Liars talk of blurred lines and stretching rules to the limit
THE whoosh of a tennis ball travelling at 100mph is replaced by a brief silence. Andy Murray’s voice fills an empty arena. He is preparing for the Davis Cup in the Emirates Arena, Glasgow, and he needs a drink.
He steps over to the sidelines and is handed a bottle by one of his trusted team in an arena stripped of spectators, save for myself and a colleague.
Dripping in perspiration, he takes time to examine the bottle, ensuring the seal is not broken. Accidents can happen, strange events can occur. Murray needs hydration but not from a source that may be contaminated. He cannot cheat, even unwittingly.
In a busy supermarket, another athlete sits, recalling his past.
‘I took my stance because I wanted no future regret,’ says Graeme Obree, world champion cyclist. ‘Taking drugs would have compromised my sense of achievement.’ He did not take the ‘preparation’ offered by a cycling team. He walked away.
The busy mother finds moment’s rest on the sofa.
‘I couldn’t look people in the eye,’ says Lee McConnell, athlete and broadcaster, when asked if she ever considered taking drugs.
Her voice cracks and her eyes fill with tears at the thought of such action. She remained clean but unrewarded fully for her efforts in terms of medals.
There are, then, outliers in a world of sport again assailed by scandal. But there are liars, too. It is not difficult to divine the more crowded category.
Sportsmen and sportswomen routinely cheat. Not all of them. But most. Some do it just a little bit, others do it all the time.
They do it to win, they do it because it is accepted by many of their peer group and they do it just because it can be done.
The concept and existence of cheating is as old as sport itself.
Once it was why we had referees. Now it is why we have laboratories processing blood and urine and officials scrutinising video.
The human psyche has a need to be the best. The ego has a distaste for being rated inferior.
These elements can conspire to produce cheats, particularly when a natural need to win is supplemented by that nutrient known as wads of cash.
The ball tampering by the Australians has been described as not quite cricket. It is, of course, profoundly and exactly cricket.
Michael Atherton, the former England captain, condemned it at length yesterday. In 1994, he was fined for applying dirt to a ball during a Test match.
This latest offence was different, more odious, he wrote. Blah, blah. And blah. Those of us who have spent far too much of our lives in and around sport know it was more of the same. The cricket scandal will consume so much newsprint that the Amazon will require a comb-over to disguise the consequent bald patch caused by supplying more trees to provide more paper to accommodate more opinion.
Yet there are only two basic questions. The first is: why do the athletes do it? This can be answered briskly. The mindset of an athlete is attracted to winning the way a heat-seeking missile is focused on a working engine.
Left unchecked by personal conscience or morality, it can stray into actions that are against the laws of their chosen sport.
There is a decision they must all make. It can crudely be summarised thus: ‘What am I prepared to do to win?’
The extent of the cheating — diving on a football park to injecting EPO in a caravan — may vary but it is merely an answer to that basic question. Of course, many decide to stay within the laws, eschew the syringe, leave the ball to be damaged by a bat, or own up immediately to an offence. But many do not.
However, the eternal, human frailty to cheat has been exacerbated calamitously in modern times as methods become more sophisticated and principles more malleable.
The most obscene development has been the misuse of laws brought in to protect the athlete.
Therapeutic-use exemptions over medications have been systematically deployed in highly questionable circumstances.
The valuable, necessary, perhaps life-saving head-injury assessment law has been, at best, misused or, at worst, taken as an opportunity to give one’s team the advantage in sidestepping substitution rules.
Blood injury concerns prompted regulations that have been exploited. In rugby, Dean Richards, winner and legend, was banned after conspiring as a coach to produce a fake blood injury to enhance the chances of a Harlequins’ victory in a cup match.
This is all systemic and premeditated. This is not the heat of the moment cheating of claiming a throw-in when one knows it should be given to the other side or bringing down an attacker in desperation when he is through on goal.
This is cheating as a strategy, as central to the gameplan, imbued in team as much as in individual.
This is cheating that starts as ‘not really cheating’. That is, the liars first lie to themselves.
They talk of blurred lines and stretching rules to the limits.
But they know why head injury assessments, TUEs and blood rules were brought in. They use them to win when they know they are there to protect.
The second, and perhaps more pertinent question, is what is the spectator to make of all this? Should there be a collective shrug of the shoulder with an acceptance that sport is merely the world at play and culture is marked, even shaped, by cheating across business and politics?
The danger for sport — and one that is being realised and strengthened with every passing day and every non-passing of a drugs test — is that the fan is not only troubled by what he or she witnesses but finds certain achievements unbelievable.
The brilliance, even genius of the Aussie ball-tampering was the way it was conducted in front of a television audience.
It was irrefutable evidence of the arrogance of those who believe they can get away with anything. The penitence is about being caught, not about committing the offence. But the darkness for sport as a business is obvious. What if the consumer says: ‘First, I just can’t be doing with all this “ends justify means the means” rubbish.
‘Second, I don’t believe it. I don’t believe this can be achieved without drugs or skulduggery.’
There is conflicting evidence on the impact of these questions on the individual supporter. On the one hand, it is generally accepted that football fans are as enraged at an opposition player’s dive as they are quietly satisfied by the dubious, winning penalty prompted by the questionable fall of one of their own.
But there is no doubt that athletics has been grievously wounded by an unending series of
doping scandals. The credibility of cycling, too, has been fatally punctured by the syringe.
Are other, perhaps bigger, sports vulnerable to such scandals?
This is in the realms of speculation. But there is, however, a nagging reality. Cheating is not restricted to the elite.
A mate told me this week that he is becomingly increasingly disillusioned by playing cricket in a league populated by aged players and boys just coming through from school.
‘Nobody walks,’ he says. ‘You have to knock at least two stumps down before anyone will even consider themselves out.’
It is perhaps delusional to believe that professional sport should be above this casual, routine cheating perpetrated by many members of the human race. It is why, after all, tens of millions are pumped into innovation, both medical testing and video analysis, that seeks to mitigate cheating even as it admits it cannot eradicate it.
It leaves the fan in a spot where outraged sensibility and heightened incredulity are regular companions. It leaves us, too, with the question: ‘How and why can we still love it?’
This is increasingly more difficult to answer without provoking a cynical laugh or a dismissive wave. I do not quite know how to construct such an answer or form such a case.
But I would be calling such as Murray, Obree, McConnell and the assembled ranks of honest triers and doers as witnesses.