The English Don’t Get to Decide What’s Cricket and What’s Not

Earlier this week, a game of cricket turned into a diplomatic incident. England is involved in a five-match series with the touring Australian team. The second of these matches concluded on Sunday with an Australian victory assisted by the controversial dismissal—or “out,” as it would be in baseball—of an English batsman. Most informed commentators agreed with the game’s umpires that the dismissal was legal, but many onlookers felt it was unfair.

“Cheat! Cheat! Cheat! Cheat!” chanted the crowds on the bleachers at Lord’s cricket ground, in London. Even the proper, puce-faced gents in the exclusive Marylebone Cricket Club pavilion jeered the winning team off the field. Setting aside the technical details of a game frequently dismissed as either boring, baffling, or both, this was a strange spectacle of its professed guardians—for whom unsporting behavior is definitionally “not cricket”—acting in a most unsporting fashion themselves.

Instead of sheepishness about their own loss of self-control, England’s supporters opted for aggrieved indignation. On Monday, British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak weighed in—agreeing, through his spokesperson, that he considered the Australian conduct contrary to “the spirit of cricket.” Before long, this drew a riposte from Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese, who advised his counterpart to “stay in your crease”—cricket-speak, roughly translated, for “stay in your lane.” With the two teams scheduled to meet in three more matches this month, the prospects for continuing rancor seem high.

The winner of the contest will receive a trophy in the form of an urn known as the Ashes, which bears an inscription referencing an earlier defeat inflicted by Australia: In Affectionate Remembrance of English Cricket which died at the Oval on 29th August, 1882. That provides some measure of the historical duration of this rivalry, but the self-deprecating humor discernible in that origin story has often been absent in the decades since.

This latest diplomatic spat is mild compared with the full-blown crisis that occurred 90 years ago, when an outclassed England kept Australia at bay by adopting a new tactic of deliberately pitching the ball at the batsmen—not illegal in cricket, but quite scandalously unsporting.

That so-called Bodyline Tour has a special infamy, not least because it flatly contradicts English cricket lore: the narrative that other chaps may behave badly, but we know better than to stoop to such ungentlemanly ways. That is what Sunak was referring to when he spoke of “the spirit of cricket”—a mystical grab bag of ideas about fair play, gentility, and decency.

All well and good, but a degree of humbug must be acknowledged. This self-flattering ideal of Englishness is indivisible from that other Great Game, the “civilizing mission” of the Victorian-era British empire. One striking aspect of the internalized power of this cricket ideology is its invocation by a British prime minister who was born to East African immigrants of Indian Hindu origin. For many postwar decades, as the mother country grudgingly gave its former subjects varying degrees of independence and freedom, the unwritten règle de jeu of cricket came under severe stress from what might be called the game’s postcolonial politics. Match series between England and the national teams of its former colonial subjects became gladiatorial contests or guerrilla insurgencies, fought with bats fashioned from willow and balls made of leather.

I recall from my boyhood period of cricket fanaticism a 1976 game at Old Trafford, in Manchester, between England and the West Indies, when the English batsman Brian Close took a particular pounding from the West Indian fast bowlers. I was very impressed at the time that, as ball after ball cracked his ribs, Close displayed the sort of phlegmatic, stiff-upper-lip stoicism that I took to be the epitome of English virtue. But in another way, I think I intuited even then—years before I knew anything about how Britain had been getting its sugar for the past four centuries—that perhaps England well deserved this Bodyline Redux.

With Australia, the postcolonial dynamic is somewhat different. Despite a few feints at republican reform, Australia still retains the British monarch as its head of state. The alliance is cemented in other ways: With special visa privileges, a spell of working in the U.K. has been a rite of passage for generations of young Australians, and in return, sun-seeking Britons continue to immigrate. Australia also has influence over the U.K. as a strategic partner of the U.S. in the Indo-Pacific region, as an exemplar of get-tough immigration policy, and through Rupert Murdoch’s newspapers.

But beneath this cousinly relationship lurks ancient resentment. Australians still call Britons “limeys,” a disparaging term derived from British sailors’ habit of sucking limes on long voyages to ward off scurvy. (They also call us “poms,” which is certainly intended to sound insulting, but no one can remember why.) Wrapped up in these pejoratives is the fact that many Australians’ ancestors themselves arrived on boats, and not voluntarily. These were the victims of “transportation,” when Britain exported what it regarded as the criminal classes of its industrial cities, together with thousands of starving Irish people, and left the ragged mob to fend for itself in an inhospitable prison colony, plagued by malaria and rife with poisonous snakes and spiders.

To this day, a whiff of class hatred hangs over the Ashes series. The English tend to regard the Australian players as rude mechanicals, not true gentlemen, and the Aussies disdain the Brits for their soft ways and superior airs.

That animus is particularly apparent in the practice known as “sledging”—sledgehammering your opponent with verbal insults. At its worst, this involves mere vulgarity. At its best, wit beats out trash-talking. On one occasion, in 1990, the Pakistani batsman Javed Miandad subjected the famously bewhiskered, somewhat heavyset Australian Merv Hughes to a string of abuse, telling him that he’d do better as a bus driver than as a bowler. After Hughes then had Miandad caught out, the Aussie clapped back: “Ticket, please.”

As that incident suggested, Australians may have pioneered this psychological warfare, but sledging has now long been a common, if unsavory part of the game—used by virtually all international teams. In fact, the very same English player whose dismissal provoked such outrage this week had earlier in the match attempted to unsettle an Australian batsman with a jibe about his footwork making him a candidate for a ballroom-dancing show. As repartee goes, it was about as flat as the rest of England’s performance: less sledge than sludge.

At first sight, this story of England’s Ashes disgrace could be a parable of national decline, which might seem to meet the moment of a poorer, meaner post-Brexit Britain. But nostalgia for a more chivalrous time is a false refuge. The Bodyline Tour alone is Exhibit A that the English have long been content to resort to unsporting methods when they suit.

In truth, the English notion that certain behavior is “not cricket” was always, I suspect, bankrupt—a useful means of masking failure, incompetence, and disappointment with unearned moral superiority. Fair play and decency are fine values to aspire to, but there’s nothing essentially English about them.