Cricket discovers impermanence of its moral pedestal
One of the problems with a nation being sniffy about the rest of the world’s foibles is that when one of theirs makes a mistake, the rest of the world has a field day.
It is rather like the teacher’s pet being caught smoking during break. Everyone feels temporarily better about themselves because a supposed paragon of virtue has been exposed. Suddenly they are revealed to be humanly frail — just like the rest —– and we gloat long and hard.
The Australian cricket team’s ball-tampering in the third Test at Newlands last weekend was an episode of skulduggery so ham-fisted that it had the habitues of Castle Corner snorting into their Castle Lites.
Cameron Bancroft, one of the youngest members of the Aussie side and therefore vulnerable to all sorts of manipulation from innersanctum heavies, was caught on camera appearing to roughen the ball with soil grains from the pitch that adhered to sticky tape.
In the 19th century world of cricket such things aren’t done, certainly not in a sport that has been unusually precious about policing its moral boundaries for 150 years.
In the long and ignominious history of ball-tampering, Bancroft’s method seems to be a pretty pathetic way of scuffing the surface of a cricket ball. Whatever happened to the time-honoured means of using a bottle-top to tear the ball’s surface? Or the practice of sharpening a thumb nail to help pick the seam?
Bancroft could surely have done a better job by popping down to a hardware shop for a sheet of South African produced sandpaper. That might have given him an opportunity to argue that he was doing his bit to foster bilateral trade between two mighty nations. Tampering with the ball under instruction from his skipper, Steve Smith, Bancroft was searching for what has become cricket’s Holy Grail. A phenomenon called reverse swing.
Men are given to grandstanding about reverse swing around the braai and might even put their beers down briefly to explain its aerodynamic intricacies. It is all bunk. No one knows nearly as much about reverse swing as they pretend. It is similar to several other deep mysteries of the universe, like why socks go missing in the wash and why President Donald Trump insists on wearing ties that make him look like a used-car salesman.
A new Pakistani-stitched cricket ball — with its lacquer finish and pronounced seam — will swing naturally, aided by atmospheric conditions, cloud and even tides. But as the ball wears it softens and loses its shine, tending to swing less.
Bowled fast, a swinging ball is a dangerous and therefore potentially wicket-taking one at any stage of an innings.
Swing is therefore worth inducing, which is what Bancroft was doing on Saturday. Duke Ellington, not renowned as a great lover of the game, had it pretty much spoton when he sang: “It don’t mean a thing (if it ain’t got that swing)”.
The occult arts of reverse swing arrive when there is an attempt to get an older ball to swing in an unusual way. Sometimes this can happen naturally (and there are permissible ways of achieving this, like wetting one side of the ball) but sometimes reverse swing appears mysteriously and without explanation.
This usually gets television commentators hot and bothered. “It’s reversing!” they exclaim breathlessly as though they’re admiring a lunar eclipse. Or they say “It’s reversing as early as the 28th over,” in an awe-struck tone.
The back story to the big Newlands kerfuffle was that in the previous two Tests, Aussie bowlers Pat Cummins and Mitchell Starc were very successful with a reverseswinging older ball.
In the first Test at Kingsmead, the Australians asked for the ball to be changed and the umpires agreed to do so, leading to behind-the-hand speculation about them being more effective in tampering with the ball they’d just been given than with the one they’d just had.
Questions are now being asked. England cricketer Stuart Broad is asking about the Australians’ propensity to achieve reverse swing in the least propitious circumstances.
The implication is clear: the Aussies have been fiddling with the ball for far longer than anyone realised. And there is now incriminating footage thanks to an on-the-ball cameraman and producer.
There is a back story behind the back story, and it concerns cricket’s stuffy approach to morality. An entire moral lexicon gets handed down from generation to generation in this vocabulary. They are told about “fair play” and are taught to respond to lapses in morality with “it’s not cricket”.
Cricketers are ideally meant to be self-policing during matches. They are expected to “walk” (give themselves out) without the intervention of an umpire if they’ve given a difficult-to-see chance to a fielder nearby. Ideally, the runout of a nonstriker is meant to be preceded by a warning. The game is full of moral boobytraps to which there is only one correct answer.
But in this morally relativistic age, one man’s wrongdoing is another man’s opportunity. Morality is not eternal or absolute, it is culturally defined, slippery and blurred around the edges.
Nowhere is this more apparent than in football. The world’s professional footballers are, by and large, craven pragmatists. They dive for penalties. They feign injuries in an attempt to have opposition players sanctioned heavily. They protest when they are ruled off-side. No ruse or scam is apparently too low.
Cricket, with its history and moral baggage, is seen to operate on a higher moral plane than soccer. Perhaps this difference is imagined rather than real, in supporters’ heads rather than on the ground.
So maybe the problem is viewing cricket through an antiquated moral lens.
The game is now, with its Indian Premier League emeralds and rubies, all about money. Less than a year ago, these very Australian players were trapped in an unedifying lockout over money with Cricket Australia.
The game now is about green, agents and tattooing a wife or girlfriend’s name across the knuckles. It is about behaving as badly as possible while getting away with it.
Members of this Australian cricket team were talking about “crossing a line” in relation to sledging earlier in the Test series with a sophistry that would have dazzled Greek philosophers. Which tends to suggest that cricket is getting more and more like football.
The mistake is thinking that it was ever different.
Cricket supporters are now squarely in the universe of meme fodder. For David Warner read Luis Suarez.