A hoary old debate was revisited last weekend: to walk or not to walk.
On Saturday, Australia's Ricky Ponting edged Pakistan's off-spinner Mohammad Hafeez behind to wicketkeeper Kamran Akmal and was given not out. He stood his ground, and was only removed when Pakistan requested a review of the decision.
On Sunday, India's Sachin Tendulkar edged the West Indies' Ravi Rampaul behind and immediately tucked his bat under his arm to head for the pavilion, even though umpire Steve Davis was ruling him not out.
Tendulkar walked, Ponting didn’t. Tendulkar is the paragon of virtue, Ponting isn’t. Well, that seems the simplest inference anyway, especially as Ponting admitted afterwards: “There were no doubts about the nick. I knew I hit it, but as always I wait for the umpire to give me out. That’s the way I’ve always played the game.”
But cricket’s ethics are complicated. The trouble is that I’ve seen Tendulkar stand many times before. He is not a confirmed walker. He is not like the Australian Adam Gilchrist, whose decision to walk in the 2003 World Cup semi-final against Sri Lanka supposedly began a career of rectitude.
Gilchrist had actually been walking long before that, even if he had not been entirely clear of his motives. As a 17 year-old playing for Richmond (in London that is) he had written home to his parents after being dismissed for 93 in a Sunday non-league match: “For some reason I just walked without looking at the umpire,” he wrote, “In the dressing room later on, the umpire asked ‘Did you hit that?’ Ahhhh! Oh well, at least I was honest!?!???”
And it is not as if Gilchrist was especially popular among his team-mates. After he returned to the dressing room against Sri Lanka, there was a stunned silence. “The rule of these big moments in life is always that you don’t know how big it is until you see others react. And it wasn’t good,” he later wrote.
And opponents had their say too. After there had been a heated altercation between Gilchrist and Ne Zealand's Craig McMillan in 2004/05, the Kiwi skipper Stephen Fleming said pointedly: “We’re not all on a righteous crusade like Gilly.”
I was a walker, save one second-team match against Lancashire when I’d been so torn to pieces verbally and internally that I vowed never to repeat such an action. But I was not serving for the morality police. I never forced my opinions upon others. And I am not so misty-eyed as to think that everyone will walk. There was a time when that did happen to a certain extent, a time when the morals of, say, the amateur golfer Bob Jones were alive and well.
The United States Golf Association has an award for sportsmanship named after Jones. Playing in the 1925 US Open, Jones found himself in the rough just off the fairway. As he set to play his shot, his iron gently touched the ball. No-one saw a thing, but Jones summoned the marshals and called a two-stroke penalty upon himself. He lost the tournament by a stroke. When lauded for his sportsmanship afterwards he replied: “You may as well praise a man for not robbing a bank.”
Most modern professional sportspeople simply do not think like that. By standing, batsmen think they are merely asking umpires to do the job they are paid to do. But what confuses me is the distinction between that, which is not considered cheating by many, and, say, claiming a catch on the half-volley, which is definitely considered cheating by all. Just remember the frenzied reaction in the Ashes this winter to Philip Hughes claiming to have caught Alastair Cook at short leg when the ball clearly bounced. Double standards are at work, surely.
To some, technology has further muddied those waters. It can certainly seem that way when a brilliant caught-and-bowled by New Zealand’s Nathan McCullum off Sri Lanka’s Mahela Jayawardene is ruled not out when it was clearly out. But that is just a poor decision by the third umpire.
I am an advocate of the Decision Review System. I am also of the hope that, as technology improves (remember that HotSpot is not being used in the current World Cup), honesty might improve with it. Eventually batsmen might realise that, like Ponting was on Saturday, they will be shown up.
At the moment there is still a chance they will get away with it. And that is a chance most professionals will eagerly take.
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