Why Australia and India won’t sledge each other in Border-Gavaskar Test series

Once a series defined by the bad blood between the two teams, you’ll barely hear a bad word exchanged between Australia and India this summer. DANIEL CHERNY explains why.

The proliferation of franchise cricket leagues has helped bring about the death of sledging, according to Steve Smith.

While the former Australian captain says the odd bit of light-hearted banter remains on the field, it is a far cry from the days of Steve Waugh’s Aussie teams engaging in “mental disintegration” with vulnerable foes, nor the aggression of Smith’s side in the lead-up to the Cape Town ball tampering plot.

Smith said that star Indian wicketkeeper Rishabh Pant remained chirpy, but that he offered more mild irritation than anything particularly inflammatory.

“(He’s) more annoying, just because he has quite a high-pitched voice. It’s just good bit of banter,” Smith told this masthead.

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Rishabh Pant’s chirp is more annoying because of his ‘high-pitched voice’, according to Steve Smith. Picture: Kelly Defina/Getty Images

Given many of the combatants in the impending Border-Gavaskar Trophy series have been Indian Premier League teammates, or could be in the future, Smith said there was a reluctance to engage in anything nasty.

“There’s really not much said these days. I think you could potentially, with all the leagues around the world, you could be playing with someone a few weeks later or whenever later, and it’s kind of awkward. So I think there’s good on-field banter on occasions, but there’s nothing really like personal or anything like that.”

Smith said he was a fan of the changing attitude.

“I think that’s good. Just let the skills take over and play the game,” he said.

Test captain Pat Cummins agreed that sledging had largely gone by the wayside.

“There's a little bit, it's very rare that it ever gets personal,” Cummins said.

“Maybe back in the day, you would just try and upset your opponent, but also probably blown off bit of steam. I think nowadays it's everyone's pretty chilled most of the time, if you get hot and bothered occasionally, and you try to do it to get under a batter’s skin. But it's, it's never really personal.

“It's more talking about whatever, ‘you don't like the short ball’ to mess up their feet, or, ‘you're not going to leave any’ it's kind of more skill-based discussions.”

Franchise cricket has brought players closer together. Picture: R.Satish BABU/AFP

If anything this generation of Australia players rib their teammates more than their opponents, with the ever-energetic Marnus Labuschagne a regular target.

“He cops it a fair bit,” Travis Head said of Labuschagne. “He’s too easy to target.”

Ex-Aussie skipper and cricket great Allan Border – who was famously frosty towards England during the breakthrough 1989 Ashes triumph – agreed that there had been a shift in attitudes.

“They all know each other. Sometimes they’re teammates in an IPL franchise. So the mystique between the Indians and the way they go about their cricket and the way we go about, going back in time, it used to be an issue,” Border said at the Fox Cricket launch.

“There was a clash of cultures. But that doesn’t mean there’s not a rivalry, and they want to get the better of each other. They don’t have a lot of loose chat. Yeah, it’ll be good banter.”

Border and ex-England captain Michael Vaughan both said the Aussies should err against getting stuck into struggling Indian superstar Virat Kohli, lest they “poke the bear.”

“There’s some players that you just don’t talk to because you fire them up and the concentration levels raise and all of a sudden they’re hard to get out,” Border said.

“Kohli is one of those sort of blokes.”

Originally published as Why Australia and India won’t sledge each other in Border-Gavaskar Test series