ICC must step in, it’s getting too ‘obnoxious’

Some of the cricket this summer in Australia has been riveting. Yet I would be very happy if the series is forgotten, put in a leaky time capsule and buried deep somewhere.

Some of the cricket this summer in Australia has been riveting. Yet I would be very happy if the series is forgotten, put in a leaky time capsule and buried deep somewhere. It has spewed venom, anger, even hatred. Cricket was meant to be a bridge between nations, lead to an understanding of countries and cultures. Instead it is emerging as a divisive force, driving wedges between two sets of people who have a common love for sport. Do we need hatred to sell sport? Do we have to swear at each other to survive? If dividing simple people who love sport is the path we are driving on, if hatred is the result of following the sport that is religion to us, then let us stop playing. Let us put a one year moratorium on cricket till everyone grows up.

Two statements have left me pained and made me relook at the reason I follow this sport around like a pilgrim would. Matthew Hayden has called Harbhajan Singh an ‘obnoxious weed’ and Mahendra Singh Dhoni has said, about sledging, that “youngsters need to learn all these things…it is an ‘art’.” Neither statement does the game credit and it is particularly sad that those involved are people I admire.

Hayden would be in the shortlist of people I would like to invite home. I have found him pleasant and polite though I am told his rivals on the field have a different image. But he has now called a competitor, and a colleague in a larger world, an obnoxious weed. You cannot say that because it is disrespectful and because it tells others that it is okay to say so. Increasingly a contest is bringing out the Voldermort in people when cricket desperately needs a Dumbledore.

And yet, unwittingly, Hayden may have done us a favour for he has surely taken the game closer to the “zero-tolerance” on sledging that the ICC so happily endorsed last week. It can no longer remain on the agenda, it can no longer require another meeting to endorse. It must be done today. Cricket is on the path to hatred and the ICC needs to pull it back now. No sledging, no personal abuse, no crude gesturing, no innuendo. We have lost that option and deservedly so.

Hopefully then, Dhoni’s youngsters will not have to learn this “art”. Money and fame have already emerged as distractions. Those are the by-products of performance, not its drivers. The need to sledge cannot become another distraction. Instead, Dhoni and other captains can lead a fight to consign sledging and personal abuse to history. Golf and tennis seem to be getting by fine and there is no reason why cricket cannot either.

I have also heard the word “tiddlywinks” being bandied around. Former cricketers and some administrators have said “cricket is not tiddlywinks”. If playing cricket requires that players abuse each other, make references to parentage and otherwise insult each other, my suggestions is to bring tiddlywinks on. A lot of former cricketers, and many current ones, live in a bubble and either do not know or do not care about what the public thinks. The news for them is that they count for very little. The only people who matter in our game are those that watch on television, those that pay to enter stadiums, sponsors who allow all of us to make a living, the administrators who run it and the players who play it. And that is why it is time the paying and watching public spoke out for what it wants. Does it want a series where the challenge is between bat and ball, an unrelenting, tough challenge between bat and ball, or one where players are abusing each other and where the media is taking sides and accentuating the abuse? Speak out because you must get what you want. If the audience doesn’t like a performance, there is no performance.

In fact, one of the nicest things to have happened to me this summer was the opportunity to meet a lot of simple, sports loving Australians who have been appalled by what has happened. They are bored and angry about all that has been happening and I am sure cricket lovers in India feel the same way. It is time we demanded our game back and the first step is for the ICC to ban all abuse and sledging. Now. And for good.

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It is time to sit back and admire the progress that Ishant Sharma has made and applaud Adam Gilchrist’s contribution. That is why we watch sport and read about it. Not for all the other nonsense we have been subjected to these last couple of months.