For editor and club cricketer Phil Walker, it’s been a summer of aggro out on the field. But has he just been unlucky? Or is it a sign of wider behavioural problems afflicting the amateur game?
Maybe I’d had a bad week (I had). Maybe I was hungover. Maybe I’m emotionally fragile (no maybe about it). Or maybe it was simply this colourless corner of London’s greenbelt getting under my skin. Whatever. Out there at the crease, it felt more like I was kicking around the fag-end spillover of a provincial nightclub than a cricket match on a sunlit Saturday. And I felt it.
We were winning the game. I was a few not-out. It wasn’t especially tense – they hadn’t got enough, and their failure to do so had left a sour taste in the air. Throughout the course of tea, their No.4 whinged on loudly about his dismissal, which had clearly carried to second slip (I was at first). But this is second XI cricket, where a neutral umpire is a rare treat, and so there’s a vacuum. And, in effect, this bloke was filling it with slurs about an oppo player’s probity. But that’s OK, right? Because it’s all part of the game.
We’d had a little wobble, so I was trying to bat my age and ‘see us home’. When they saw I was on the block, they crowded me. The skipper, some portly defeat in a tattered cap, announced he was “getting right under his nose”. And then it started. The yob cacophony.
I know I should brush it off. Just a bit of banter. Come on fella, it’s just a laugh! And look, when the game’s over it’s a different story! All’s well that ends… with a limp handshake and a swift half before buggering off.
“He’s gotta be the most boring man in Essex!” was the only line in amongst the standard rubbish vaguely worthy of a smile (not least for its dramatic irony), so I offered one. Because it’s only a game, right? And yet, as I studiously prodded the pitch between overs, I couldn’t help thinking that the scavenging around the joke by the rest of his team for the next half an hour had rather undermined the bravura precision with which it was delivered in the first place.
So is the game becoming a little less attractive for the way some of its players and watchers choose to conduct themselves? “Last year there were five games abandoned because there was fighting on the field of play. Now, on the one hand you can say that’s five games from many thousands. On the other, you can say it’s five more than we had five years ago. The idea that you’d have a game abandoned because of fighting was once unheard of. And in each of those games the umpires can’t do anything. They’ve got no onfield authority to send people off. That’s why we at the ACO fully support and endorse the MCC’s proposal to give the onfield umpire full authority to actually deal with this behaviour.”
The MCC’s proposals would give umpires the power to send players off for stepping out of line. “We may lament the times we live in,” writes Scyld Berry in the Telegraph, “and the erosion of respect for authority in society as a whole. But the MCC, as guardian of the game’s spirit and laws, has to do something to arrest the quantifiable increases in physical violence on the field.”
There are obvious procedural problems here. What would have happened in our game, say, if our non-independent umpire had attempted to send off the very bowler who was giving him verbals? And should he, as a stand-in doing his 10-over stint, even be allowed to do so? As ever, the captains must show the way. The hope is that having a deterrent in place would safeguard against it kicking off at all. “I’m a 22-year-old skipper,” says Mann, “and I play cricket with my mates. But if one of my lads is completely out of order on the field, then I’d happily send him off. The integrity of the game is far more important than potentially losing out on a pint from a teammate on a Saturday night.”
Cricket’s always reflected the times. I get that. It’s unrealistic to hope that the game be an island. But those stolen Saturdays spent running after cricket balls and praying for an early finish are precious, and perhaps more precious than ever. One reason for cricket’s enduring grandeur lies in the steaming piles of grimness off the field. So let’s not be reminded of it until Monday morning at least.
