Of all the statues that now ring the Melbourne Cricket Ground, the most readily identifiable features Dennis Lillee. More than twenty years after he last bowled in big cricket, his predatory leap and mephistophelian mien remain somehow unmistakeable. What a bowler. What a character. But, of course, he wouldn’t take half the wickets today he did in his own era. Why? Not because he would be any less the nemesis of batsmen, but because he would spend most of his time suspended under the ICC’s Code of Conduct.
In the Boxing Day Test against Pakistan thirty-three years ago, Lillee rained bouncers on the unhelmeted openers. Scolded by the umpire, he mimed an under-arm delivery. When an official warning for intimidatory bowling was then issued, he picked up a balloon blowing across the arena and shaped to bowl it. Told soon after to bowl his overs more expeditiously, he defiantly did the opposite. Members booed him when he was slow changing position in the field; the outer cheered him to the echo in response. And the cheers steadily drowned the boos as, from the deadest of pitches, he uprooted ten wickets for 135.
Today, such behaviour would have broken at least half-a-dozen ICC statutes—there’s probably one concerning balloon abuse. In this most recent Test, for example, teenage tearaway Mohammad Aamer was chided by an umpire for blowing a kiss at Australia’s Shane Watson, alluding to the latter’s alleged ‘softness’. Just as well he didn’t send flowers.
Cricket, of course, has always agonised over what constitutes acceptable aggression, having been freighted with moral expectations during the Victorian age, then exported to the far-flung colonies as a civilising influence. Nor is it a bad thing that cricket should retain vestiges of that politesse. A game of defence as well as attack, it should involve restraint as well as aggression. But when Test cricket is held to be of waning relevance to this hurry-scurry, harum-scarum age, questions are worth asking. How many games are actually less demonstrative and more censorious than thirty-three years ago? And are we judging red-blooded young men playing a demanding, often frustrating and endlessly scrutinised game too puritanically?
Nor are these merely questions of authority. Consider the December 2009 ‘incident’ in Perth, where three committed and competitive cricketers—Sulieman Benn, Brad Haddin and Mitchell Johnson—became entangled. Some mild inadvertent contact was made, followed by some milder advertent contact—the kind of push back one might indulge in if clumsily nudged on a crowded bus. The result was effectively two days in parallel: a day at the ground in which 500 deliveries were bowled, and a day on Channel Nine in which one delivery was replayed about 500 times—although, to be fair, the commentators, most of whom owe their eminence to having been similarly red-blooded cricketers, refrained from pronouncing too judgementally.
The print media were not so circumspect. Journalists, many of whom had just finished damning the West Indians for their casualness and penning obituaries for predictable and monotonous Test cricket, dwelled minutely and sententiously on five seconds of a five-day contest evincing the opposite. Here, we were told, was a ‘physical clash’ involving ‘pushing and shoving’ from a ‘cantankerous’ West Indian with a ‘history’—the degenerate fiend had been penalised for insubordination on a youth tour almost eight years earlier. The game itself—excitingly skilful, intriguingly poised—was almost completely overshadowed by the ‘news’.
For by now, ‘big, bad Benn’ had copped a two-match suspension from ICC referee Chris Broad—in his time, ironically, a pretty truculent cricketer, whose son Stuart appears to be taking after him. Quaintest of all, in fact, were Broad’s explanatory comments on Benn (‘It just all looked bad on TV’) and Haddin (‘I think he realises it didn’t look good on television’). Yes, the incident looked so terrible on TV that Nine replayed it incessantly. In an age of reality television, YouTube and other phenomena of mass exhibitionism, cricket must be the only pursuit in the world where participants are under orders to tone it down when cameras are around.
In any event, this attitude is emblematic not of consideration for the audience but of contempt, containing as it does an assumption that the average cricket watcher is incapable of independent judgement and slavishly imitates everything seen on television. The children! Think of the children! Give me a break. Did viewers conclude that Shane Watson’s operatic send-off of Chris Gayle in Perth was recommended behaviour? Or did they more sensibly decide that Watson, frankly, is just a bit of a tit?
Mind you, sympathies here should lie with the players, who must by now be seriously confused. Competing strains of cricket rhetoric have emerged: the first insists that the players must be entertainers, putting on a show to excite and engage their audience; the second holds that the players must be moral paragons, exhibiting no evidence of such everyday emotions as disappointment, anger, shock or indignation lest they somehow damage the televisual product. These are nearly impossible to reconcile, unless one holds a vision of cricket/entertainment involving automata executing perfect cover drives between advertisements all day.
Here, then, is a case of lost perspective—not cricket’s only one. Because there lurks a belief that the heavens will fall if a single batsman is given out mistakenly, for example, millions of dollars are being spent on a referral system that might improve the accuracy of decision-making by a few per cent if it doesn’t render the game farcical first. Behaviour is, however, an area where more robust and grown-up attitudes might go a long way. I was at the MCG thirty-three years ago when Dennis Lillee behaved so petulantly then bowled so brilliantly, and it left a trace neither on me, nor my cricket—if only.