Of jerks, louts and a gentleman's game

Sriram Ranganathan

What is the limit of acceptability for "unacceptable behaviour" in modern day cricket?

Shane Warne's crude comments to Stuart Carlisle a few weeks back made me look at the fact that sledging as a weapon in cricket, or for that matter, in any sport, may have started with a very different motive than it finally is acknowledged to be.

Playing tough cricket is a by-word today, with the Aussies and the South Africans being seen as the prime examples of the successful implementation of this policy. But when Warne calls someone an "fu**ing ar** cu**", is it what sledging was meant to be when the first guy sledged or when the word was added to cricket jargon? Sledging could be described roughly as verbal abuse and today is as much a part of the game as batting or bowling but the question before us is what are the limits, if any?

Sledging is the weapon used by "tough" teams to unsettle their opponents mentally, a part of "mind games" that is today such a big part of any sport.

Logic is that if a player is idiotic enough to hand over a wicket or bowl a loose ball due to a rush of blood caused by this sledging, he deserves it and more.

It is difficult to argue with this logic. After all, what is the fun in watching a match where no one seems to be thinking out the opposition, whatever ways possible? Suppose having his strike bowler incapacitated due to some reason depletes a captain and running out of options, he opts for a softie bowler bowling long hops among others with a fielder in place to take any mis-hit chances.

Mind games? If the batsman doesn't hit the softie out of the attack, won't the others snigger? Anyway, here is a chance to make some quick runs. A gamble, but aren't mind games all about gambling on the opponent's mind being weak enough to capitulate to suggestions?

What also makes this logic hold water is the argument about the game being played by professionals, finely tuned and well honed individuals in a cut throat arena with the survival being only of the fittest. The Aussies are proving it time and again.

This season the Aussies have had such an amazing run that the second team in anyone's ranking would deserve bronze and not the silver medal. A lot of this success is due to the cocky and arrogant body language of the Australian players and the way their minds work, ceaselessly reminding themselves that they are so much better than the people they are facing. The opponents are not just players, but despicable pieces of crap that must be flushed down the nearest toilet. Many people feel that having thus mentally programmed themselves to win, the physical portion of the victory is only routine.

What brings a black mark to this line of reasoning is the method of achieving this mental victory over the opponents, the supposed method of showing toughness. Filthy language and boorish behavior seems to have taken on the definition of mental toughness. Phrases like bas****, as****e, mother fu**er, the amazingly constructed "fu**ing ar** cu**" that must have taken an awesome amount of imagination to make up, and many other star-filled words, are being bandied about on the cricket field on the pretext of the people using such language being hardened professionals seeking victory in battle.

Men, who see victory as the ultimate goal and who, in the heat of things, let their frustration get the better of them, or in some cases vent their frustration this way, thus cooling down their minds for the further battles ahead. Men who make others lose their cool, thus brightening their chance of winning due to the other person's resulting brashness or temper.

Lillee's suggestion regarding removal of microphones at close proximity to the players and Warne's own admission of the incident was telling in one way. They didn't consider that some great wrong had been done. The player on the receiving end of Warne's filth was Zimbabwean Carlisle, who also was of the opinion that it was all part and parcel of the game. Not knowing too much about the kind of language that is acceptable in that country, I cannot comment whether any and every one in Zimbabwe would be so tolerant or whether Carlisle as an individual is that tolerant.

On the other hand people like the Indians and the Pakistanis come from a much more orthodox and strict society with plenty of do's and don'ts. Some might call such thinking as coming from a backward or close-minded society but to those people, being a mentally tough person, I say "@*$#%**@". I hope you all admire me for it.

I myself have lived in the north of India till a year back, having completed my education in Delhi schools and colleges and experienced the culture of various society at that place. Having developed some habits and mannerisms in my years up north, I sometimes say things and do things, that, in the South of India where I today work, are not acceptable. It took some shocked faces to make me realize that what is okay up north is not okay down South. While a person such as SCG or SRT from the North (East-West) of India might respond in kind if called a "mo**** fu**ing bas****" by good old McGrath or a cheery Ponting, who actually don't mean it personally, a person like RD or JS from the South might simply take offence and term such language intolerable. This is just within one country, what then when you consider the world?

There are arguments about players being professionals and competition being cutthroat and counter arguments about rights, wrongs, upbringing and society. The problem is to decide who is correct and to what extent? Let's drop the issue for the moment whether some of the same Indians and the Pakistanis we talked about also sledge similarly. More importantly, is there a choice for those who don't accept this facet of the game or is it a case of "This is cricket; love it or leave it!"

Does a person, who refuses to swear at someone or be sworn at by some other person for no conceivable reason, have the right to say, "I don't accept this, and I refuse to keep quiet" or do today's methodologies dictate that he must put up with this humiliation day in and day out if he wants to be a part of cricket?

Another thing I want to ask others and myself is as to why this issue is coming up just recently? Didn't the teams of yesteryear play tough cricket?

Weren't they as committed to winning as today's cricketers? The West Indian team under Clive Lloyd is still remembered as arguably the best ever, a tag the current Australian team is keen to take away from them. Did they sledge and if not then where did they get that extra edge? If they did sledge, was it of the "C'mon Macco, take his damn head off" kind of sledging or was it the garbage we hear today where players' family lineage suffers more insults than the players do themselves?

Sunil Gavaskar scored 34 tons in Test cricket and also more than 10,000 runs. Allan Border scored more than 11,000 Test runs in his career. Gavaskar's language, not including Hindi or Marathi, while sledging would probably have been 20 per cent as colorful as Border's, assuming for a moment that both gentlemen did indeed indulge in sledging.

So which one of them is tougher? Sachin Tendulkar shocked one and all during the ICC Knockout Cup in Kenya by snarling back an easily-lip-readable obscenity at McGrath. Did his toughness increase on account of that? India won and Sachin was largely instrumental by unleashing an all-out attack on the Australian bowlers but did that obscenity form a necessary part of that attack that set the tempo for the Indian win.

Mind games are acceptable to everyone. Tough people win, whiners don't. It is a jungle out there. No one disputes all these facts. The question to ask is whether the abusive, expletive-filled part of it is really necessary.

Does McGrath get that awesome line and length every time because he calls every batsman an unmentionable name? Is it necessary for Warne to call someone a "fu**ing ar** cu**" in order to get the inspiration to bowl the ball of the century? Do the Waugh brothers, Ricky Ponting and Michael Slater score those runs at crucial moments because they have a Masters in the language of filth? Or do all these players perform in a way that shows them to be champions because they are, in fact, champions?

Everything has a limit. Adjustment is the name of the game today, with batsmen having to adjust to playing on the front foot one ball and the back foot the next, and bowlers having to bowl to a right hand batsman one ball and possibly a left hand bat the next. Isn't adjusting to the cultures of the various people playing the sport and respecting them part of the adjustment required to be a really great player? Or does it all end with scoring a ton or taking five wickets?

Each player is an individual with a right to be respected, whether he scores a duck or a ton or whether he takes one wicket or five. Respect may come in many forms and the Australians have many ways of showing their respect to players, their recent tribute to Courtney Walsh by forming a path for him to pass through in probably his last innings in Australia being testament enough. However the Australians, as others not so much focussed upon in this article, have to understand that no one objects to something right. Doing something right is the prerogative of the person doing it. Doing wrong however, and some of us do call swearing and boorish behaviour wrong, is not totally the prerogative of the doer.

A person is there who has to face the wrong and no doer has the right to decide the suitability of an action like that. If the receiver decides he is comfortable with the action, such as what Carlisle did, Warne is more than welcome to call him more names, each filthier and more imaginative than the previous. Not so when the receiver says No. The choice has to be there.

Coming back to the approaching Australian series, Australia is facing the hard task of beating India in India, something as difficult as beating Australia in Australia. Despite their recent run, the Aussies must surely have some feelings of concern. Sure they won 15 Tests in a row, 3 against India whom they again face this time at home at what some call the final frontier, but you know something? All the wins were at home for Australia. Nitpicking some more, one realizes that their umpires are instrumental in their winning all the time by helpfully becoming blind to their own batsmen's' LBWs and snicks as in the case of the match-deciding let off of Justin Langer against Pakistan.

To complete the cycle of incompetence, or the human touch, as some Aussie commentators prefer to call it, the Aussie umpires regularly see mirages of inner and outer edges in the opposition's innings as in... err... so many cases. Hell, they even went one up on the rest of the cricketing world and invented the SBW (shoulder before wicket) mode of dismissal in case of Sachin Tendulkar about a year back. Sure, LBW does not stipulate that the ball has to hit the leg, merely assuming that it would be the leg that would be hit. But a man, admittedly short, crouching down to a delivery by a fast bowler of McGrath's pace on a decently bouncing Aussie pitch?

Calling the Australian dream run an illusion because of it being achieved at home might be a mind game. Attributing their success equally to their home umpires and predicting their failure in the current series because of the absence of those helpful umpires might be a mind game. Tamil Nadu spinner Balaji Rao, opining that the Indian batsmen would eat Warne for breakfast, might be a mind game. Focussing on the bowling strength of the Australians in light of Lee's injury might be a mind game. Wicket-keepers of either team discussing with slip fielders regarding possible bouncers by their fast men landing on the batsman's helmet or sniggering at the inefficiency/incapability of the present batsman, taking care that the batsman can hear all the discussed views clearly, could be termed mind games.

However, when Tendulkar stoops down to the level of a street rowdy (an educated street rowdy since he swore in English, that too American English), when Ponting gets down to describing Srinath's interactions with his family members in graphic detail because of a bouncer tonking his helmet and when Warne uses language describing various parts of the human anatomy that are best left un-described in public, the time has come to call a full stop.

Play tough, play hard and emerge winners. Cricket was once known as a gentleman's game. Even though the game is today very different from what it was some years back, some fundamentals never change. Decency is one of those fundamentals. The day the levels for this fundamental changes, it just won't be cricket anymore.

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