Time to mend cricket's sullied spirit

AUSTRALIA - On cricket's Adelaide Oval, overlooked by a cathedral, in the shadow of mourning, a game holy to many has commenced today. Australia vs India.

Please, fellows, feel free to bowl a bouncer. But don't feel compelled to follow it with invective. Cricket, brimming with idle machismo, has become too insolent for its own good.

As Eli Wallach says in The Good, the Bad and the Ugly after slaying a gunman who is too busy threatening him: "When you have to shoot, shoot ... don't talk."

Spirit is the prevailing cricketing word of the times. It was the centrepiece of Australian captain Michael Clarke's moving eulogy at Phil Hughes' funeral.

It is the subject of fine essays by New Zealand's Martin Crowe and England's Mark Nicholas, who urge a more respectful game. Let all take heed. Cricket without manners is an inferior game.

Spirit is a lovely word, used in various ways, but is always hard to define. It is said of Hughes that he was a "free spirit", which perhaps translates as a carefree, buoyant fellow.

We associate the word with teams who bond tightly, as if "team spirit" suggests that together they have one soul.

But a game's spirit is primarily a belief system, a mostly unwritten code of ethics. This spirit elevates a sport from brilliant to meaningful. It is not a law necessarily, it is an ideal.

You can follow the rules of game and yet disfigure its spirit. It is a distinction cricket has not always comprehended in recent times.

Spirit is a tone you give a sport and a value you attach to a game. Spirit cannot only be a theory, it has to be practised. Primarily by national teams, for they are the custodians of the game.

If kids see abuse, they will follow; if they see disrespect, they will think it cool.

All sports aspire to be different, to retain a distinct culture, but it takes hard work. Tennis is competitively brutal, yet it has held tightly onto courtesy only because its top players in this generation have striven to preserve it.

Cricket has been negligent.

Humour has long fled cricket, replaced by a coarser banter. Bluster is confused for bravery. Rudeness is portrayed as aggressiveness. Respect is interpreted as weakness.

"This is not the uncouth WWF," wrote Crowe pertinently. Cricket, it seems, has forgotten its place.

Like most sports, cricket is infested with tiresome cliche. We played hard but fair, for instance, has become the escape clause for everything - a Google search found it spoken by Australian, English and Indian cricketers, by golfers, by rugby folk, by footballers.

The phrase seems to put a premium on "hard", which anyway is always open to interpretation. It is interesting that no one reverses the line to instead say, fair but hard.

Cricket captains often insist they do not cross the line of good taste, but who defines this invisible line? And do nations from varying geographies, East and West, have the same line?

Cricket has lost some of its moral moorings. Cricket boards - where richness breeds righteousness - bully each other and parts of the media write patriotic prose.

Nationalism always lends itself to ugliness. Instead of being itself, cricket is following the sporting pack where the language from outside and within is flush with testosterone.

Harder, cries the critic. Hit him, howls the mob. Concussed? Man up and play. Retreating from a bouncer? You're soft.

Cricket is a game constructed for conversation. Amidst the fury of tennis, men bisected by a net, there is no chance for chatter. Here, under the lonely sun, a batsman can be surrounded by his rivals, within whispering distance, for hours.

No one is espousing a sanitised game, but there's a difference between psychological jab and cruel jeer, between repartee and ridicule.

We have to believe that skill is not the only standard that cricket aspires to.

This game can be hectic, fierce, unyielding, yet gracious, civil, generous. These aren't qualities in conflict but in fact elevate a sport when they co-exist. A core responsibility of every generation is to leave behind a game better than it was. In skill, but also in spirit.

Football this week united to celebrate the spirit of British and German soldiers who played the game during an unofficial ceasefire on the Western Front in 1914.

Of course, a truce is only a suspension of hostilities for a specific period and cricket - which is trying to find its own symbolic way to honour Hughes - must go further.

It needs to commit to spirit. To protect it by constantly displaying it. To start with, teams must visit each other's dressing rooms after play. To remind themselves, after a sweaty day, that it is only sport.

Perhaps they may want to discuss the legendary West Indies team of the 1970s-80s. Who demolished teams with a stylish, silent, staring fury. They didn't talk much, they just performed. Eli Wallach would have loved them.

This article was first published on December 9, 2014.
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