David Warner’s crimes against cricket’s humanity
Courtesy matters. Courtesy is the acknowledgment of another’s right to be.
Dear Mr Warner, Australian cricketer, Weep on. Your tears do not move me. Though I have a heart so soft I have pillow-makers asking me my secret, and though I cannot watch even the opening credits of a Lassie movie, I can watch you break down at a press conference and not feel a thing. Except a sense of justice.
Let me tell you why you are weeping, Mr Warner. It is because you were caught. If you had not been caught, if the television cameras had never picked up your crime, would we have seen you weep? Would we have seen you come before a press conference to grovel and acknowledge fault and beg forgiveness? Would we hell. We would have continued to see nothing but the unpleasant Mr Warner we have always seen, the cocksure little bully, the baiter and sledger, the nasty infant, the fosterer of ill-feeling.
You aren’t weeping, Mr Warner, because you’ve looked in the mirror and beheld a sinner. You’re weeping because you’ve blown it. You realise that the glamour and the fame and the milliondollar contracts have gone. They’ve gone as surely as the dew that fell this autumn morning, and it’s entirely your fault. That’s what’s making you cry. You’re feeling sorry for yourself.
You say that you will do everything possible to win back people’s respect. Well, you can’t win back my respect, Mr Warner. And the reason you can’t win it back is that you never had it. You only ever had the opposite of my respect. From the very first time I saw you play cricket, Mr Warner, I despised you.
That’s what you still don’t understand, Mr Warner. You think the ball-tampering is the beginning and the end of this business. But I, for one, am not the least exercised about the ball tampering. Ball tampering is just a grubby little bit of cheating. It’s what you happened to get caught for, like Al Capone’s tax evasion. It’s indicative, but it isn’t the main event. The main event is the crimes you have committed against the game of cricket, the part you played in stealing a good thing from the world.
Ihave loved cricket since I was a child. To me and millions like me it has brought great pleasure. And a part of that pleasure has sprung from that tired old phrase, the spirit of the game. In essence it means the insistence that cricket is indeed just a game, even at the highest level. It is not a real conflict. It is a pretence at conflict, a form of play. It doesn’t matter. We do it only for the pleasure that is in it.
The antithesis of that spirit is sledging. To sledge is to abuse your opponent, to assail him verbally. The aim of sledging is to rile a man in the hope he’ll make a mistake. And I despise it. It turns a pleasurable game into a hatefest, a bitter, testosteronic battle. Sledging is born of the belief that winning is everything and how you win doesn’t matter. And Australians invented it.
The effect on the modern game has been disastrous. It is now commonplace to see club cricketers and even schoolboy cricketers in all parts of the world abusing their opponents, just like the supposed greats of Australian cricket.
You didn’t have to carry on the tradition of Australian sledging, Mr Warner.
Some of your team-mates don’t. But you went at it with glee. You’re the verbal attack dog of the current Australian team. And it seems never to have occurred to you that it is cheating. Worse, it is discourteous. And courtesy matters. Courtesy is the acknowledgment of another’s right to be. It is the respect of one adult for another, Mr Warner, the respect that you crave, but that you have never given, either to your opponents or to the game itself.
If at any time in your career you had called a press conference to acknowledge how badly you’d behaved on the cricket field and the dire example you had set and to vow that even if it cost you your place in the team you would never sledge again, if only so that you could look your two little daughters in the eye, then I’d have forgiven you everything and applauded you till the heavens rang. But it never crossed your mind. And it’s too late now.
You are a fine batsman, Mr Warner, one of the best in the world. But you are a worse cricketer than the lowliest 3rd XI player who plays the game for pleasure and who lets his opponent do the same. Weep on.
Yours most sincerely
Joe