R-E-S-P-E-C-T: Find out what it means, Benny

3 months ago 19

The English say, and do, the most curious things.

Consider this: The Laws of Cricket are eminently straightforward, even if the language is jagged at times. In order for a Test match to end before its allotted finishing time, the captains of both teams must agree for that to occur. Otherwise, the match doesn’t conclude until the calculated overs are bowled, or the weather conditions intervene to frustrate further play.

Otherwise, as per Law 16.1, a Test match ends when a side scores a total number of runs in excess of that scored in the two completed innings by the opposing side. Law 16 also specifies various other ways a match ends in a draw or tie. But none of this is overly complex, and that part of the rules runs for about two pages of text.

Yet this week, England’s captain Ben Stokes was doing his own level best to prematurely end the fourth Test at Old Trafford any way he could.

Having been convinced of the inevitability of a drawn result, Stokes approached his Indian counterpart Shubman Gill late during the final day’s day with an offer of an entente to bring proceedings to an early close.

Ball games … what is the spirit of cricket?

Gill swiftly rejected the notion of shaking hands and returning to the dressing sheds. Undoubtedly because the two Indian batsmen at the crease – Washington Sundar and Ravindra Jadeja – were each approaching centuries.

Their combined efforts at the crease to that point had been something to behold. India at one stage had been 2-0, chasing a first-innings deficit of 311. Sundar and Jadeja had salvaged something from the abyss. It should hardly have astonished Stokes to learn that the opportunity for each batter to bring up a century wasn’t one Gill would readily eschew.

For while cricket is a team sport, it is the most individualistic of team sports in that it is an accumulation of individual performances and not the cohesive interaction of a team – as in football – that determines the winner.

What transpired was particularly unpleasant. England’s batters being brought on to bowl like an under-10s team to serve up anything but Test standard bowling. To this was added vituperative sledging, albeit hardly of the venomous kind.

Ben Stokes (left) and Ravindra Jadeja exchange words at the end of the fourth Test.

England’s fielders ambled after balls struck through the cordon, running like puppets with broken strings. Only muted acknowledgment was given when each Indian batter brought up three figures. The match ended almost immediately after that.

Fairly assessed, it was sooky and petulant conduct, driven by Stokes’ incandescence at not getting his own way.

This, to all intents and purposes, is of course the same England team that cried with poisonous fury after the Lord’s Test of the 2023 Ashes series, once Jonny Bairstow was stumped by Australian wicketkeeper Alex Carey having absent-mindedly meandered from his crease. You almost get the sense of a theme …

By any sensible analysis of what is legislated for under the Laws of Cricket, Bairstow was fairly dismissed that day. Equally, Gill’s decision to not agree to prematurely end the Test match at Old Trafford was entirely within the rules of the game. The England team’s posturing and remonstrations were misguided, unedifying and wrong.

Jonny Bairstow was controversially run out.

In almost any other sport – golf is the true exception which comes to mind – you would readily cop Stokes’ and his teammates’ behaviour. In any football code, Stokes’ conduct would be seen as positively de rigueur. Yet cricket is supposedly different. For not only is it governed by the laws of the game, but also the esoteric spirit of cricket, which ties the laws together with a veritable golden thread.

What the Laws of Cricket say is that although the laws themselves have governed the playing of the game for nearly three centuries, cricket owes much of its particular appeal and enjoyment to the fact that it should also be played within the right “spirit”. But if indeed it exists, what constitutes cricket’s spirit is hard to identify.

The preamble to the Laws of Cricket are directed to this concept of the spirit of the game. The opening paragraphs state that the notion of respect is central to the spirit of cricket. It is expressly written that central to the spirit of this noble sport is to play hard and fair; to show respect for your opponents; to show self-discipline even in the face of adversity; to congratulate the opposition on their successes; and to establish an overall positive atmosphere.

Could the case be prosecuted that the England team’s actions in the fourth Test were consistent with this idea of the spirit of cricket?

It would seem not. The England team’s feigned incredulousness at India’s decision to play on despite the likely impossibility of a match result, and everything that occurred thereafter, certainly has a spirit interwoven. But a slightly malicious one.

The swearing of England’s fielders, picked up by the stump microphones, and the incredulity displayed by Stokes and Harry Brook especially, bears scant correlation to the notion of the good spirit of anything at all.

A mountain of pressure can reveal character; however this was not a situation where pressure existed. This was a Test match meandering towards oblivion. Stokes’ ungracious reaction to his team being required to play on revealed much, but not much of it positive.

All of this leaves this columnist unconvinced that the spirit of cricket exists otherwise than in a form of words written within the rules of the sport.

In 2013, the Australian Test umpire Simon Taufel delivered the Marylebone Cricket Club’s Cowdrey Spirit of Cricket lecture at a black tie dinner at Lord’s, during which he argued that the spirit of cricket means that the values of the game take priority over personal gain or advancement.

If that’s an accurate summation, you have to question whether it still exists at all.