Time to end profanity, verbals, scraps

Rohit Mahajan

Tribune News Service

Chandigarh, March 19

Three days ago, a Sri Lankan player pushed a Bangladesh player on the cricket field. It was just a shove, which may not matter much in a sport such as football, but in cricket it can have interesting ramifications, as was seen in the Tri-series final between India and Bangladesh.

Last night, the Sri Lankan crowd in Colombo was more Indian than Indians — that’s the power of hatred. The crowd didn’t find any new love for India, it’s just that they had become very angry at Bangladesh. Two days earlier, Bangladesh had beaten Sri Lanka in an ill-tempered match. After an argument on the field, a Bangladesh player was angrily shoved by a Sri Lankan player. The Bangladesh captain asked his batsmen to come off the field in protest; the two batsmen stayed in and one of them, Mahmudullah, won it for his team with a six off the second-last ball of the match.

The shove was the second incident in less than two weeks in which a physical fight could have broken out between international cricketers. 

The first case involved two cricketers from Australia and South Africa, David Warner and Quinton de Kock. Warner seemed ready to physically attack de Kock as they climbed the stairs to the dressing rooms on the fourth day of the second Test. Warner had to be physically restrained from going after de Kock.

Bullying on the field

Ian Chappell today conceded that the Australian cricket team acts as a bully on the field. “Australia have been at the centre of many of these storms and their constant on-field badgering of batsmen is tantamount to bullying,” he said, referring to arguments, altercations and near-fight situations in cricket, in the context of the Warner-de Kock scrap.

Australia is a team that sets the standards of excellence of play in cricket; it’s also a team that sets very poor examples of behaviour. Chappell suggests that if the “gentler” teams start behaving like the Australians, it could lead to “something physical” — just the way the “gentler” Sri Lankans and Bangladeshis came close to “something physical”.

The Australians have been at it for years — Ian Chappell himself was involved in a fight in a bar with Ian Botham. Javed Miandad nearly hit Dennis Lillee with a bat after Lillee kicked him; Warner got into a physical fight with Joe Root, Glenn McGrath into an ugly verbal fight with Ramnaresh Sarwan. Cricket’s trash talk, laced with the worst profanities and insults against family or nation, is light-heartedly referred to as chirping or verbals — Chappell has rightly called it bullying. Such bullying is at the centre of Australian cricket culture — just read Ricky Ponting’s book and you’d realise that even he as a schoolboy wasn’t spared by the grown-up men he played with.

Australia’s culture of profanity has spread; the next logical step is physical fights. Profanity and abuse must stop. To stamp out bad behaviour, ICC has introduced red cards in cricket. It’s time the red cards were used against badly-behaved players such as Warner.