Drop Dr. Jeckyll

Previously, I discussed the root of cricket’s problems. What is to be done?

Have more triangular contests, even for tests. Rotate the strike, don’t let chauvinism settle into a rhythm by bowling at the same batsman.

Throw as much technology at it as possible – hawkeye, snicko, the works. The solutions many cricketers and commentators keep proposing betray the yearning for a receding nobility – bring in high quality home umpires, take the fielder’s word on catches! What people fear isn’t human error but human bias. There is no point in trying to “get it right” in the God’s eye sense. What breeds resentment is the gap between the decision and the replay induced perception. Remove it.

But above all, cricketers must be relieved of the duty of being cultural ambassadors and moral examples. Peg on them your nation’s pride, but not its honor. Let them be ill mannered jocks and discipline them like errant kids. Allow all chatter and remonstrations. In soccer, red cards and suspensions are commonplace, and while often contentious in a technical sense, are rarely taken as a national slight.

If one team is playing in the old “spirit of the game” it is one team too many. It just isn’t cricket any more, but in many ways, this liberation from upper class stuffiness is a good thing, a refreshing and democratic change.

Bhangra at the Opera House: Part II

I ended my last post with a question – why do cricket disputes often assume such enormous proportions, escalating into national or cultural showdowns? Today, I will try to answer it.

Some factors suggest themselves immediately. The logistics and time-frame, especially of test cricket, make it uniquely suitable for a slow cooking of simmering resentments. In soccer, even a flurry of ugly tackles and flashing cards doesn’t offer the players’ minds enough time to reflect and bristle – before you know, the match is over. In cricket, a dodgy decision on the first morning could lead to a crass comment on the third afternoon precipitating all out war on the fifth evening. Cricket’s numerous interludes also supply opportunities for mingling and interaction, and consequently mischief. For a relatively cerebral species, body contact doesn’t generate as much friction as the contact of minds.

Cricket is also unique in that it is mostly played in a bilateral format. Two teams and two nations hunker down, sometimes for months, in a clash of skills, wills, ambitions and nationalisms. Wounds fester, misunderstandings multiply, and cultural stereotypes get etched more deeply. Again, in soccer, no sooner have you worked up some lather over Maradona’s sly use of the wrong limb, your indignation is distracted by a new provocation – maybe a marauding Schumacher or a head butting Zidane.

In a motley crew of nations, particular encounters will inevitably be fraught with the memory of past wars and indignities, but the shuffling schedule muddles up which one to focus on – Falklands, Gulf or WWII? Cricket’s charmed little circle is stitched together by a single political theme – British colonialism. Wherever it is played, ghosts of the East India Company, the penal colonies and the sugarcane plantations always linger near the ropes.

Economists and biologists keep reminding us that repeated interaction is the key to social cooperation. Say that to the Israelis and Palestinians! Repetition harnesses the evolved instinct of reciprocity, but also pits it against equally headstrong impulses – tribalism and retribution. The only other sport I can think of which has created prolonged competitive pairings is World championship chess. It is famous for its brutal enmities and blood feuds.

Beyond these structural factors, I think there is a more interesting reason that lends cricket its peculiar volatility at the highest level. Ironically, the culprit is its most celebrated baggage, that of gentlemanly conduct, whose imminent demise has surely been lamented for at least half a century. There is no other professional sport in which participants are loftily expected to sign their own death warrants, or applaud those who may have just destroyed their reputations, careers and dreams.

Cricket’s unreal code of conduct isn’t an invention of ethical giants – the feudal aristocracy who patronized it is not renowned for saintliness – but arises from the elite’s desire to distinguish itself from the peasants through refined behavior and noblesse oblige. It wasn’t a question of morals but manners, and the failure to walk after producing a snick must have been a lot like stabbing at the turkey with the wrong fork. A big part of cricket’s ethos, whether in the construction of the honor code or its gradual crumbling, always had a great deal to do with identity and collective pride.

Two factors make the gentleman’s game an unsustainable anachronism today. First is the vastly increased stakes, not only in prizes, endorsements and adulation, but also in nationalist aspirations and historical score settling – payoffs which the early men in white never knew. More importantly, it just doesn’t sit well with the ongoing de-gentrification of the game and the societies which play it.

At the international level, cricket is caught up in the changing fortune of nations. The shift of its power center from the crusty halls of the MCC to a burgeoning economic giant – the new India of glitzy malls and conspicuous consumption – is now a fait accompli. Within nations too, the social base of cricket has undergone tectonic shifts, from Oxbridge sophisticates to Bradford immigrants, from goody-two-shoes middle class lads to rustic youth from provincial towns or the outback. The emotional drive of cricket’s new clientele is not the showcasing of its delicate class mannerisms, but assertion of a new power and self esteem.

At the heart of modern cricket, therefore, lies a contradiction. It is a rambunctious peasants’ game trapped in an aristocratic body (in a sense, the game may be returning to its real roots). Its sundry frictions are magnified by this confusion. Cricketers are supposed to bear the burden of not only the status aspirations of their supporters, but also carry out cultural ambassadorship and diplomacy.

In the final part, I offer my solution to this Jeckyll-Hyde dilemma: drop Dr. Jeckyll.