By gum Marnus, do not spoil your moment
Labuschagne has seized his Ashes chance but still needs chewing out, writes Marcus Armytage
Had he done it in the street instead of the outfield, he would be liable to a £75 fine
In a sporting context, no contest this summer has been more stimulating than the early exchanges between Marnus Labuschagne, the Australia batsman on as a concussion replacement for Steve Smith, and Jofra Archer, who felled him second ball at Lord’s before the Australian went on to top-score with 59 runs.
In sport, as in politics, you have to be careful what you wish for. If England were pleased to remove Smith from the Ashes for a game and an innings, all it actually did was alert Australia’s selectors to the fact that Smith’s mini-me should no longer be running out spare pairs of gloves to lesser batsmen.
We all admire someone who makes the most of a glimmer of a chance and,
of course, Marnus is only a decimal point and a registrar’s spelling error away from Marcus and, goodness knows, we are woefully short of world-class sportsmen called Marcus these days.
But, to coin a popular phrase in The Daily Telegraph letters page, “Is it just me?” I have a small but easily rectified problem with Labuschagne; chewing gum. I refer not to the habit per se but, rather, the manner in which he disposes of it.
When a Test wicket falls these days, three things seem to happen almost simultaneously; the umpire’s finger goes up, middle stump is still cartwheeling towards the sight screen when the batsman challenges the umpire’s decision by making a “T” sign with his arms, and a man from Sky with a “steadicam” scurries on to the square to precede the dismissed batsman back to the pavilion catching his facial emotions.
They do it in horse racing, too, but the difference is they follow the winner back, not the loser. And unless it is Ryan Moore who has just won the race but still manages to look like a batsman out for a third consecutive golden duck, it is usually all smiles.
When Labuschagne is out – generally having scored somewhere between 50 and 100 runs – his last act of Aussie defiance is to spit out his gum.
But because the man with the steadicam is focused purely on the head shot, Sky viewers are left in limbo as to what happens to Labuschagne’s gum. Does he catch it in his helmet or whack it one-handed with his bat?
The answer is the latter and, according to well-informed sources, in his present form he middles it into the outfield. One day, if we ever manage to get him out when there is a bit more adhesive quality left in the gum, one hopes it sticks to his bat.
But had he done it in Manchester’s Market Street instead of the Old Trafford outfield, he would have been liable for a £75 fine and incurred the wrath of the Chewing Gum Action Group, a government quango that, believe it or not, actually exists.
My hope is he goes back out at dusk to pick it up like a squirrel returning to its nuts, but one imagines that it will either remain there until it decomposes – it is reckoned to take
500 years for gum to biodegrade – or gets stuck, at some stage, to an under-groundsman’s boot or a tine on his scarifier.
I must say, I thought chewing gum’s glory days in sport were long gone.
There was a time when no footballer was without gum, indeed had some played as relentlessly as they chewed there would not have been enough Fifa World Footballer of the Year awards to go around.
But though chewing gum has its practicalities – generating saliva, which prevents the mouth drying up, and occupying the mind – it seems to have fallen from fashion and you do not find it on the modern sport nutritionist’s list of acceptable dos or don’ts – it just does not rate a mention.
We are fighting a rising tide of litter in the oceans, hedgerows and even sports grounds and, well, it is not that much different from lobbing a Mcdonald’s meal deal container out of the car on to the verge.
Now that my favourite batsman is a role model, by all means, when given out, linger a second or two, retrieve the gum’s original wrapper from your pocket, wrap it and bin it later. So, so much cooler.