I feel for Sachitra Senanayake

by Girish Menon

When the English mob and commentators unleashed their self righteous 'spirit of cricket' indignation on Sachitra Senanayake I felt the need to find out more about this unheard of cricketer who has caused a minor tempest in England's favourite brew container.

So, I looked up his career stats to find out that Sachitra is 29 and had already played 1 Test, 34 ODIs and 17 T20Is. I also learnt that prior to his 'Mankadding' of Buttler, in earlier ODIs of the current series he had been reported for a faulty action and asked to report to Perth for a bio-mechanical examination about the degree of flex in his action.

I happened to listen to Test Match Special (TMS) at the time of Sachitra's Mankadding incident and at the time the commentators were insistent that Sachitra had not warned Buttler earlier before running him out.  The commentators also alleged that English bowlers, unlike Sachitra and Murali before him, were unable to bowl the doosra since it would be ironed out by coaches at the junior stages itself.

Personally, I feel any bowling action which does not threaten the life of a batsman should be permitted. This will balance the equation between bat and ball and make for interesting cricket.  

In his book Lila, Robert Pirsig describes the English reaction when the first stuffed platypus was shipped there. At first, the traditionalists were aghast that nature had betrayed their classification. Also, they denied that platypi could lay eggs and then suckle their young. The traditionalists also tried to ban the platypus out of existence since it did not meet their classification code. It was only much later that the traditionalists accommodated  the platypus in the field of biology. 

At 29, Sachitra may feel like the stuffed platypus on its arrival in England. After investing so much time and effort in developing his skill, he is now being told that if he does not obtain a clearance from an Australian he will not be allowed to ply his trade.  England may or may not have had a role in the reporting of Senanayake, but surely this could have been done discreetly at the end of the series so that the Sri Lankan team would not be compromised in the middle of the tour. Isn't this a case of giving the home team an unfair advantage?

Yet, when Sachitra legitimately runs out Buttler after warning him twice against cheating, the umpires had the audacity to ask the Sri Lankan captain whether he wished to withdraw the appeal. The crowds aroused by a partisan TMS commentariat then boo the Sri Lankans and Sachitra in particular.

So, Sachitra you are not alone. I empathise with your situation. I also hope that you have an alternative career mapped out for I am not aware of any cricketer who has retained his wicket taking skills after his action has been re-modelled. So power to you.

The power of good team culture

Teams that encourage individualism along with a sense of belonging to the larger group are likelier to succeed

Ed Smith in Cricinfo

Does team spirit exist? To its critics it is "an illusion glimpsed only in victory", as the footballer Steve Archibald famously argued. To outright cynics, it is worse than that: a convenient excuse for captains and managers to justify getting rid of good players on spurious grounds.

The problem is partly one of language. Many uses of "team spirit" are misleading, even meaningless. If team spirit is defined as untroubled laughter and bonhomie, then I'm afraid all teams - even the most spirited ones - suffer huge fluctuations in mood and temper. A team, like a family, cannot be elated all the time.

Another flawed use of the phrase congratulates players on their "team-spiritedness" for kindly but showy irrelevances. This is also a mistake. One day soon a football defence will concede a goal at a corner because they are too busy congratulating each other for heading away the last corner - and, in attending to "team spirit", forgetting to do their jobs.

I'm all for encouragement and support, but I am suspicious of the cricketing fad for tapping team-mates on the back when they "stop" a ball trickling along the infield at 3mph, or the now mandatory dressing-room standing ovation and overhead clapping that greets every on-field milestone. All this has little to with the "supported" player and a lot to do with the "supporting" one. Look at me, he is saying, what a good team man I am! It is usually just mannered behaviour. When a dressing-room standing ovation is awarded to even the most routine hundred, it logically follows that a new celebration is required to mark the really special centuries - perhaps a shirts-off, punching-the-air, post-goal pile-up on the balcony? This, however, will only be a temporary solution until it, too, becomes routine.

Nor can team spirit conjure short-term miracles. In that sense of the phrase, team spirit is indeed overrated. Ask any great captain how much team spirit helps when the opposition is 500 for 2 and his bowling attack is on its knees. Answer: not much use at all. As with great captaincy, we expect too much of team spirit. It is not about pulling rabbits out of hats.

But rather than throw out the idea of team spirit, we should take more care to define it properly. Instead of giddiness, it is about respect. In place of superficial and irrelevant kindness, it is about tough love. Rather than a short-term panacea, it is a long-term strategy.

A better term is culture. If we started using "team culture" instead of "team spirit", then a lot of misunderstandings would be avoided.

	Good culture does not uphold the silly pretence that elite sportsmen have no self-interest at stake. Within a very strong team culture, it is possible to talk openly about the inevitable transition from one generation to the next

Let me give you an example of bad team culture. In county cricket, players mostly travel around the country in individual cars rather than a single team bus, two or three team-mates in each car. One other piece of background information is that after about ten years playing for one team, county pros are awarded a "benefit year" - an archaic system sponsored by the clubs - that entitles them to raise extra money, over and above their salaries, through private fundraising. It is very time-consuming and tiring - a benefit year is almost like having another job - but it can be lucrative.

One day, I picked up a colleague before the first match of the season. We were both senior players and got on pretty well. "How are you?" I asked, as he got into the car. "To be honest, I could do with an injury so I can miss some cricket and work on my benefit year." If only two of us had been in the car, the comment would have been selfish but harmless. Sitting in the back seat, however, was an 18-year-old who had only played a handful of county matches. So the cynical comment undermined the younger player's healthy excitement about the match and the new season. It sent the message: my own bank balance is more important than the team winning. Sadly, this was the culture the senior player had inherited from his mentors, and they from theirs. The money-first culture was passed on from one generation to the next.

If you don't believe in team culture, try imagining an All Black rugby player saying that comment within earshot of a young player, or envisage a similar scene within Steve Waugh's Australian team. I can't imagine it.

So what does a good culture look like? Sport relies on necessary personal ambition and individualism. But that can exist alongside a sense of tradition and institutional respect. The result is a kind of individualism-plus.

Good culture does not uphold the silly pretence that elite sportsmen have no self-interest at stake. Indeed, within a very strong team culture, it is possible to talk openly - even affectionately - about the inevitable transition from one generation to the next.

Here is a story about three similar players - now aged 43, 34 and 29 - who had overlapping careers at the same football club. Twenty-five years ago, a midfield player emerged who ran the game with his precise, attacking passing. Fifteen years ago, a junior came along who was even better - and the two men played alongside each other, sharing insights and tactical wisdom. Five years after that, a third playmaker, a tiny teenager, pitched up to train with the team. The oldest midfielder watched the new boy. "You've seen that?" he said to the middle "brother". "You'll push me towards the exit, but that guy will send us both into retirement!"

Only, he didn't, not completely. The older player turned to coaching, where he harnessed the brilliance of the other two. The team? Barcelona. Their names? Pep Guardiola, Xavi Hernandez and Andres Iniesta.

The culture of Barcelona begins at La Masia, their youth academy. When the football writer Simon Kuper visited La Masia, the director explained how it remained home to the players even when they were superstars: "Messi and Iniesta drop by to eat. They come to us with their problems, as they would to their mother and father. We know their glories, we know their miseries."

In sport, business or education, culture is always central to long-term institutional excellence. But it is subtle and often scarcely visible: a sense of belonging, trust and continuity; knowledge being shared and challenged; competitiveness developing alongside mutual respect; the reinforcement of fun as well as toughness.

Good culture in a school does not mean that every pupil is deliriously happy every minute of the day. But it does mean that bullying is rare and respect develops across different activities. Good culture is always partly self-regulating. In the 18th century, the precursors of the London Stock Exchange were the informal exchanges in coffee shops. They developed their own systems of rules and enforcement. Those who didn't settle their accounts were "named and shamed" by their peers and labelled "lame duck". It is the same with teams. In a strong team culture, senior players should feel empowered to challenge colleagues who are undermining the group ethic.

Here is the difficult part. Culture is hard to build, easy to undermine. It often begins with difficult, unpopular decisions. The power of good culture will often be mocked. But it is real, all right. That's how Barcelona develop so many of their own stars, and how the All Blacks - despite New Zealand's tiny talent pool - always stay at the top.

Sledging in cricket - Pump up the volume

It's time to turn the stump mikes all the way up, and leave them that way

Rob Steen

December 4, 2013

	The next time two players discuss the weather in detail, we'd love to hear what they're saying © BCCI  Enlarge

Taking issue with a pair of sage judges of humankind like George Orwell and Mike Brearley might not be the wisest intellectual venture, but into the valley of the ridiculed here I come.

In his 1945 essay "The Sporting Spirit", Orwell decried the competitive arts as "war minus the shooting" (international sport, that is, not sport per se; his incandescent response to a UK football tour by Moscow Dynamo is so habitually misquoted). Given the quotidian deluge of pain inflicted in its name, not to mention the occasional death, "war minus the looting" might be nearer the mark. Or better yet, as the latest renewal of Ashes mania appears bent on reaffirming, "war plus the loathing".

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Doesn't Sledging Hurt Anyone?

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More recently, this very week, Brearley wrote a typically astute article for the Times, lamenting the intolerably abrasive atmosphere of the Brisbane Test, observing that there was "a narrow line" between acceptable and unacceptable behaviour. This struck me as being overly generous.

What distinguishes sport from every other branch of the entertainment industry is its relationship with its audience, enforcing as it does an acute awareness of its constant (and constantly annoying) dancing partner - sportsmanship. Nobody talks about actorship or poetship or dancership; musicianship and authorship relate, respectively, to craft and rights, not conduct. But what do we actually mean by sportsmanship? It certainly tells us something about its complexities that no feminist I know has ever demanded that we refer to sportspersonship, let alone sportswomanship.

It seems reasonable to define this slippery virtue, broadly, as the willingness, even determination, to a) win fairly, honestly and modestly, and b) lose gallantly, graciously and, almost needless to add, unintentionally. Liable as they are to be copied in playgrounds, backyards and parks, any antic that even smacks of cheating or disrespect sets the most erroneous of bad examples, primarily to the impressionable young millions who invest so much of their emotion in, and glean so much of their joy from, the curious world of ballgames.

Sure, the older and wiser we get, the more we understand the unique nature of athletic battle and its impact on even the coolest of tempers. On the other hand, sports watchers of all ages are resolutely intolerant of relatively trifling misdemeanours such as time-wasting, feigned injury or even a withheld handshake. And woe betide those perceived to be cowardly, whether in the form of a tackle shirked, a risk untaken or an opponent tongue-lashed. And rightly so.

That's why, even as we grow ever more inured to violent images, and admiring of murderous on-screen drug lords and mobsters, sledging still disturbs disproportionately - because it tells us the perpetrator has given up trying to prevail through skill. There's banter and there's sledging, of course, and it is to the spite-rich, wit-free latter that one takes exception. To many, the Brisbane Test was sickening, not because of the savagery of the bowling but the vile viciousness of the verbals. One of the odder things about the three-for-the-price-of-one product cricket has become is that the least frantic variety is the likeliest to arouse indefensible behaviour.

Before we get to the remedy, a dose of perspective seems in order. Amid the same Gabba gabfest that saw Messrs Anderson and Clarke reiterate how far cricketers are prepared to go - and always have been - in quest of an edge, the media ridicule meted out to Jonathan Trott was equally if not more offensive. How sobering, moreover, to open a magazine that weekend and snuggle up with cuddly Mike Tyson.

Interviewed, helpfully, by a woman with whom he clearly felt more comfortable not being Mr Macho, here was a champion whose brutality inside and outside the ring is now matched by a self-flagellating honesty that somehow arouses compassion if not pity. Call it a salutary reminder of sport's capacity to simultaneously thrill and disgust. Call it the hidden price of admission. Still, when it comes to ranking the meanest, baddest-assed sportsmen of them all, Iron Mike the Ear-Cruncher was a spayed pussycat next to Ty Cobb.

When Charlie Davis, that endlessly creative Australian statistician, devised a formula to calculate sporting greatness, he focused on one solo endeavour, golf, and four team games - baseball, basketball, cricket and soccer. Using average and standard deviation (σ), the top three emerged as Don Bradman (4.4 σ above the norm); Pelé, whose goals-per-game superiority over other net-bulgers was 3.7 σ; and Cobb, the early 20th century diamond dazzler whose batting average soared 3.6 σ above the baseball mean. But while the Australian and the Brazilian played sport, the American, like Tyson, warred it.

	Denied the release of physical contact, it was inevitable that a cricketer should coin as dastardly a term as "mental disintegration"

"A red-blooded sport for red-blooded men" was how the perpetually snarly Detroit Tiger described his calling. Professional baseball, he insisted, was "something like a war". In acknowledging that the summit of his own profession was "pretty much a war", Alastair Cook at least had the grace to sound a teeny bit bashful.

Cobb was the ultimate ballplayer-warrior: think Steve Waugh, now multiply by a smidge under infinity. Here was a fellow who brazenly and showily sharpened the spikes on his boots, intimidating opponents and making fielders think twice about blocking his ferocious spurts down the baseline. In 1912, he assaulted a one-armed spectator who'd had the temerity to call him a "half-nigger". An enthusiastic racist, he packed a gun wherever he went; he was also reported to have pistol-whipped a man to death. And yes, he was also a mightily accomplished sledger.

The publicity tagline for Ron Shelton's admirably unmanipulative biopic Cobb was perfect: "The Man You Love To Hate". While no cricketer I can think of has ever warranted such a billing, personally speaking, the one who came closest was Matthew Hayden, whose incessant references to his devout Christianity were contradicted so expertly and shamelessly by those crude and cruel on-field tirades.

Sledging is as fertile a field for baseballers as it is for cricketers, because they, too, go about their labours at a leisurely pace; Tom Boswell, the revered Washington Post baseball correspondent, once described his job as "pondering inaction". Sledging seems so unnecessary. After all, another of the many characteristics the two games share is the extent to which they stack the odds. At any given moment, either nine or 11 men are ganging up on one, the avowed aim to negate, nullify and, ideally, exterminate.

Whereas baseball encourages physical contact and even indulges brawls, its more sedate brother from another mother is a subtler beast, albeit no gentler. What it most assuredly is not, has never been, is a game for gentlemen. Officially, that word itself denotes English peerage's lowest rank - below 80-odd others, even Master in Lunacy. When one's place in the pecking order is so insignificant, it is nothing if not pragmatic to be respectful, courteous, well-mannered and occasionally even honourable.

Denied the release of physical contact, it was inevitable that a cricketer should coin as dastardly a term as "mental disintegration". Whether it's Fred Trueman bullying a cowering Cambridge undergraduate, Dennis Lillee and Javed Miandad exchanging goads, Glenn McGrath spewing bile at Ramnaresh Sarwan or Merv Hughes foul-mouthing Graeme Hick, when it comes to rubbishing the game's reputation for civility the exhibits are largely verbal.

Trash-talking is all very well for boxers and those muscular clowns who have made WWE our least credible form of athletic competition. Is it naïve to expect ballplayers to rise above the sort of gratuitous personal abuse that would be stamped on in any other socially conscious workplace? Yes. Are we surprised that Darren Lehmann all but laughed off the suggestion of a "sledging summit"? Definitely not. Transgressors should therefore be pilloried as loudly as possible.

The name of the game must be shame. Shame the sledgers. Shame the needlers and the ranters. Shame the cowards. And the best way to achieve this noble end is not only to keep those stump mics on permanent duty but pump up the volume. Censorship is as pointless as it is dishonest. Why should the guilty be protected? Why shouldn't the audience, spectators as well as viewers, hear every sling and arrow of outrageous verbiage, preferably in Led Zeppelin-esque, Dolby-clarified, Marshall-amplified, 5.1 Surround Sound? They are part of the show. If turning the dial all the way up to 11 encourages wit, splendid. If it exposes nastiness and callousness, even better.

According to international protocol, of course, this ought to be a non-starter rather than a no-brainer. Still, judging by SABC's freewheeling deployment of the stump mic during last week's ODI against Pakistan in Port Elizabeth, let alone the 2006 Durban and Cape Town Tests, which saw Tony Greig and Mike Hussey take bilious exception to such eavesdropping, this doesn't seem to bother the state broadcaster unduly. Regrettably, I cannot report precisely what choice words the fielders selected after Quinton de Kock had given Junaid Khan a gentle shove for invading his space; my command of Urdu, shamefully, is on a par with Shane Warne's acumen in the shrinking-violet department.

Such is the precarious mutual dependence between sport and its most industrious sponsor, the reality is that behaviour will only be improved by stealth. Someday soon, a stump mic will be "accidentally" cranked up, not merely at a heated moment but for an entire day. Technical gremlins will be blamed. Innocence will be asserted. Apologies will be tendered. But the damage, with luck, will have been done. If there really is such a thing as the spirit of cricket - or even The Spirit of Cricket - I can't think of a better way to define what it isn't.

Religion for Atheists

Alain de Botton for Atheism 2.0

Cheating: It's in our blood

Nicholas Hogg in Cricinfo

We are built to cheat. Our DNA demands that we take the opportunities that increase our chance of survival. In Stanley Kubrick's adaptation of Arthur C Clarke's 2001: A Space Odyssey, it is the bone-wielding apes who viciously club the unarmed apes. No lingering guilt about what is fair inhibits their bloody victory. But these are primates fighting over territory in a tooth-and-claw scrabble without values to impinge their survival instincts, distant cousins of refined cricketers imbued with a sense of moral duty to a sport that has long been elevated above other recreation as a bastion of fair play.

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On Walking - Advice for a Fifteen Year Old

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However, it is the codified rules, empirical rather than moral, that ultimately define a sport. In football you cannot touch the ball with your hands, in rugby football you can. Bereft of guidelines a sporting contest debases back to the savannah. Medieval, unruly versions of the beautiful game involved neighbouring villages fighting to move a ball from one field to another. These riotous matches, with surging mobs hacking, wrestling and lurching back and forth across muddied fields - much like a Five Nations clash from the 1980s - were banned in 1314 by an Edward II Royal Decree that declared "hustling over large balls" as an act "from which many evils may arrive."

Cricket, conversely, has often been taught in an effort to instil morality and sportsmanship. The phrase "It's just not cricket" has been popularised to describe underhand behaviour in wider society. The MCC, the owner of the Laws of Cricket since the 18th century, included a Preamble on this "Spirit of Cricket" in its updated 2000 code: "Cricket is a game that owes much of its unique appeal to the fact that it should be played not only within its Laws but also within the Spirit of the Game. Any action which is seen to abuse this Spirit causes injury to the game itself."

Occasionally players do contravene this near-mystical ethic of cricketing spirit. In 1981, six runs were needed from the last ball of the third World Series Cup final between Australia and New Zealand, and Australian captain Greg Chappell instructed his brother Trevor to bowl underarm. New Zealand's No. 10 Brian McKechnie blocked the grubber and then hurled his bat away in disgust. Outrage followed, and the Australian Cricket Board acknowledged that Chappell's action "was within the laws of the game" but as the MCC would formally state, "that it was totally contrary to the spirit in which cricket has been, and should be, played".

The unwritten code of fair play had been broken, and a week later the law was changed to ban underarm bowling. Like religion, the Spirit of Cricket is a concept universally understood but not universally practised.

In the first Ashes Test at Trent bridge, Stuart Broad edged Ashton Agar to first slip and stood his ground when he knew full well he was out. Sensing that he might escape justice, his face was that of a boy wiping away the crumbs of a stolen cookie - never has he looked more like the nefarious Malfoy from Harry Potter than when he realised his stay of execution.

It is the same player, whether on the village green or Test match arena, stuttering "I really wasn't sure if I'd hit it" who demonstrates an ancient skill - not only to others but also to oneself.

"In a competition for mates, a well-developed capacity for self-deception is an advantage," writes philosopher John Gray in Straw Dogs. "The same is true in politics, and many other contexts."

Including, one would argue, when at the crease.

"If they believe the lie," says Victor Gombos, a psychologist at California State University, "it's easier to be convincing." That golden duck turned into a century is sweeter still if the guilty man can free himself of the crime.

The walk-or-not-to-walk conundrum is a direct test of moral fortitude against genetics - a measure of character extended to home umpires in club games when they, as well as the appealing fielders, are well aware that the ball held aloft in the keeper's glove did indeed feather their team-mate's bat - and a prime example of how lying, whether to oneself or to others, is a pre-programmed ability.

Cheating will advance too. Silicone tape and Murray Mints. Sunscreen made of beeswax. Each mutation of advantage will result in a tweak of governance

"Almost all children lie," notes the director of the Institute of Child Study at Toronto University, Dr Kang Lee. In 2010, after studying 1200 children Lee claimed that lying "is a sign they have reached a new developmental milestone" and evidence of a fast-developing brain. He was quick to negate the link between juvenile deception and graduation into adult fraudsters - and, we presume, dishonest cricketers.

Whether Broad not walking constitutes a lie is debatable. No one asked him if he had hit the ball. And, as many great batsmen have done before him, he is entitled to wait on the umpire's decision. But a cheat? If so, he is certainly not the first, or the last.

In a 2013 survey conducted for the MCC and the Cricket Foundation, one in 20 children questioned admitted they were proud to have achieved victory dishonestly. With 22 players involved in a cricket match, that correlates to at least one dedicated cheater per game. This will to sporting power, to win at all costs, was highlighted in Dr Robert Goldman's 1984 survey that claimed over 50% of athletes would take an undetectable drug that assured them five years of glory.

Darwinism teaches that a quest for truth is often contrary to our survival. The truth is that Broad edged the ball to first slip, and the deception prolonged his life. Here, the "victory" gene, as I shall briefly rename Dawkins "selfish" original, is in conflict with what is considered fair play. Morality is built on the shifting sands of time, place and culture, and in natural selection the human mind pursues evolutionary success, not values.

Therefore as we evolve, the rules, and how they are applied, must adapt too. Sporting laws that fail to keep players in check will die off like dodos. Cricket changes because we are inventive mammals with the capacity for creativity - cheating.

The DRS will improve. Hot Spot and Snicko will see and hear with Orwellian focus. The Ministry of Truth will reign over every high-definition microsecond of every televised game, and on-field umpires - such as Tony Hill on the third morning at Chester-le-Street, when the big-screen replays confirmed his error and the players were halfway off the pitch before he raised his finger to an empty wicket - will be no more than conduits for decisions made by circuit boards.

And cheating will advance too. Silicone tape and Murray Mints. Sunscreen made of beeswax. Each mutation of advantage will result in a tweak of governance. While the coming youth play warped forms of our beloved game, and we casually forget this is a sport born on grassy meadows with curving bats and gates of sticks instead of stumps - an evolving game - our fading generation will hark back to a time when cricket was cricket, and a batsman could stand his ground whether he had hit the ball or not.