Ok, you probably won’t find the spirit of cricket the next time you visit the MCC Museum. But you’ve certainly been hearing about it since last week when England batter-wicketkeeper Jonny Bairstow’s ‘stroll’ down the crease to discuss affairs with his captain Ben Stokes resulted in him being run out by a direct throw from Aussie wicketkeeper Alex Carey.
Now, Bairstow may have thought the umpires had called the end of the over, which meant that the ball was ‘dead’. Or he just assumed that the Australians would not run him out.
On the other hand, Carey had already told his captain, Pat Cummins, that Bairstow had been wandering out of his crease and he would take a shy next time. When he did hit the stumps and the Australians appealed, the only thing to check was whether Bairstow had any part of himself or his bat within the crease. He did not.
The England team was incensed. They felt that Bairstow had no intention of going for a run, so it was unfair. The Aussies stood their ground, saying they played within the rules and had a right to try and get him out.
If you check the rules of the Marylebone Cricket Club (MCC), which still govern the rules of cricket, you’ll find this in their preamble. ‘Respect your captain, team-mates, opponents and the authority of the umpires. Play hard and play fair.’ So far, so good. It doesn’t say anywhere that it is the keeper or fielder’s job to divine the intentions of the batter before trying to run him or her out. So, why is there such a furore about this? The original game in England had two definite classes of cricketers: ‘players’ and ‘gentlemen’. Players were professionals who made a living from the game. Gentlemen were the aristocrats who played for the love of the sport (read: they had enough money not to have to work for a living). ‘Players vs Gentlemen’ was played as an annual fixture from 1806 to 1963, after which MCC finally decreed that all players were professionals. And, of course, the whole ethos driven by that divide was that for ‘true gentlemen’ playing it the right way was way more important than winning. The Cambridge Dictionary defines ‘not cricket’ as something ‘not fair, honest or moral.’ But when is it ‘not cricket’?
One example often touted is the act of running out a non-striker backing up too far down. A recent example was during the IPL when Jos Buttler was run out by R Ashwin after repeatedly wandering out of his crease. Buttler and the entire Rajasthan Royals felt it was a breach of fair play. But Ashwin argued that if the batter was getting an unfair advantage reducing the distance to run to the other end, the bowler had an equal right to dismiss him if he went out of his crease.
One of the problems of the Aussies defending Cummins’ decision is that they have not exactly been consistent. Steve Smith and Glenn Maxwell repeatedly spoke out against Ashwin’s run out of Buttler, but were happy to back the Australian line on Carey’s dismissal of Bairstow. And when England coach Brendon McCullum expressed his disgust at the run out, many reminded him when Muttiah Muralitharan had stepped out of his crease to congratulate Kumar Sangakkara for a century and was promptly run out by McCullum.
In other words, most pull out the ‘spirit of cricket’ card only when their team seems to be on the wrong side of the result.
