The charm of cricket has always been its illogicality and complexity. Matches last for five days with no result guaranteed. What is legally fair is often ethically unacceptable. What was unacceptable in one generation is commonplace in another. It is a game of nuance and varying shades, making it difficult for those who think in black and white to understand or appreciate.
There are written laws of the game, and then there are the unwritten rules. The latter have greater power and purpose. A bowler over-stepping is no-balled, a player overstepping is blackballed, sometimes by his own teammates. In an era when international players have been caught cheating on the field, it might seem precious, even pretentious to criticise a bowler for running out a non-striker backing up too much.
Yet, if you don’t understand that this is not cricket, then you don’t understand what cricket is.
Ravichandran Ashwin can argue — as many have done before him — that in their IPL clash, Jos Buttler was attempting to gain an unfair advantage by stepping out before the ball was bowled; he can also claim that the law allows him to run out such a batsman.
True, and true. And since he himself was leading, there was no call for the captain to interfere, as skipper Virender Sehwag did, recalling Sri Lanka’s Lahiru Thirimane when Ashwin ran him out similarly during a one-day international. “If that was soft,” Sehwag was quoted as saying then, “that’s the way we are.”
Follow both laws and conventions
When Vinoo Mankad did it in Australia, or Kapil Dev in South Africa, they each warned the batsman first. The law does not require this — yet convention does. And sport has to follow both laws and conventions. There was an element of entrapment about Ashwin’s move; it appeared as if he checked his bowling action and waited that split second till the batsman moved out before whipping off the bails. If bowlers did that, about 90% of all dismissals would be run out in this ‘Mankading’ fashion. Especially in the white ball game.
We confuse morality and convention in sport, thus leading to much sound and fury. The philosopher David Papineau distinguished between the two thus: “Morality is universal, independent of authority, and has to do with genuine welfare, while convention varies across societies, depends on decree, and governs matters of no intrinsic importance.”
Sport is of no intrinsic importance, and seen in perspective, it is quite meaningless. But it is this artificiality that makes us infuse it with the kind of ethics that we do not expect in other areas of human endeavour. This is our way of giving sport meaning.
There are those who feel — and this includes players past and present — that too much is made of such incidents, and that ethics have no role to play in sport. Thus you wait for the umpire’s signal even if you know you have edged the ball to the ‘keeper, or claim a catch despite knowing it wasn’t a clean one. The justification is that this is done in the team interest. That’s is a slippery slope. There are a number of things you can do — injuring a rival player for instance — that can be justified thus.
Trying to bluff the umpire might be a legitimate tactic in some sports, but in cricket it is looked down upon. Yet it is now accepted that batsmen are under no obligation to ‘walk’, and the DRS has taken the moral weight off the catcher’s shoulders.
Most teams are happy to leave such calls to the individual players. To walk or not is a batsman’s choice, bringing with it no ethical opprobrium. Most batsmen are satisfied if the fielder taking a close catch confirms that it was clean.
Unwritten contract
There is an unwritten contract between rival teams: we will not do certain things even if the law allows us to, so long as you follow the same rules. In soccer, when a player is injured, a teammate kicks the ball out of play so their rivals get a throw-in. There is no law which says that the player taking the throw-in must conceded it to the rival team; yet, that is the convention.
Perhaps we can avoid some of the ambiguity of the ‘Mankading’ situation if the law lays down that a batsman must be warned once or twice. Yet, what is gained in clarity is lost in sportsmanship. When conventions become law, it suggests a lack of moral strength. Something is done or not done because the law demands it, not because that is the way the game ought to be played. Players must be given the ethical choice so we can see what they are made of.
There are some things you don’t do on a cricket field, because that is the nature of the game. The laws of the game tell us what we should do; the spirit tells us what we should aspire to.
