Warner outburst shows shifting ‘line’ on cricket sledging
David Warner’s South Africa run-in has led to vows of better behaviour, but our sledging days aren’t over yet.
“How’s your wife and my kids?” runs a classically tasteless sledge in Australian cricket folklore. Some may also be familiar with the time-honoured, politically incorrect retort: “The wife’s fine, the kids are retarded.”
A certain innocent merriment can be derived from evaluating this exchange according to the International Cricket Council’s various overlapping codes of player behaviour.
It is not, arguably, “seriously obscene”. It involves neither “excessively audible or repetitious swearing”, nor does it “denigrate a Player … in relation to incidents which occurred in an International Match”.
It might, all the same, conceivably “give serious offence” and “provoke an aggressive reaction”. Whatever the case, the Australian cricket team has in the last fortnight of a series in South Africa rendered its own somewhat counterintuitive verdict — that it would no longer approve of it.
Why counterintuitive? Because for as long as anyone can remember, it has been Australians who have if not owned the copyright on sledging at least had it firmly trademarked, wearing it as an emblem of their clannishness.
Their press conferences have grown almost ritualised, players defending a degree of verbal aggression on the grounds that it makes for “good, tough Test cricket”, while undertaking not to cross “the line” — an ill-defined cordon sanitaire, known only to them, separating fair comment from unfair.
Ten years ago it even inspired a song. “We never cross the line,” leered the white-clad chorus line of Aussie cricketers in Eddie Perfect’s Shane Warne: The Musical. “Calling somebody a maggot or a filthy faggot is fine.” How we laughed.
What happened during the first Test in Durban, however, may represent a watershed. Led by captain Steve Smith and vice-captain David Warner, the Australians approached their task with their usual swagger, even cheekily dropping their sponsors’ names within range of the pitch microphones to discourage the surveillance of the local broadcasters.
But the Proteas are themselves no shrinking violets: what Australians call sledging, they cheerfully condone as “chirping”.
‘I play with aggression on the field and I try not to cross that line’
David Warner
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After 3½ rankling days, some sort of confrontation seemed inevitable, with one half of it almost bound to be Warner, who relishes the role of “keep(ing) our guys motivated on the field”.
The cause was unexpected: a sotto voce retort by South Africa’s Quinton de Kock as the teams ascended the stairs at tea, referencing Warner’s wife Candice — in particular a 2007 incident in which she was photographed making alternative use of a hotel toilet cubicle with All Black Sonny Bill Williams.
The uxorious Warner flew into a towering and sustained rage, and had to be restrained by teammates from expressing it physically. This we know because it was captured on CCTV footage subsequently leaked to a South African media outlet.
As it is silent, one subconsciously provides one’s own soundtrack. It is transparently not a response to “So how’s your wife and my kids?”
But whatever the provocation, it is pretty repulsive.
Hearings were heard, sentences imposed, and “the line” made its inevitable appearance.
Copping a fine, Warner conceded losing his temper while defending his perspective: “I play with aggression on the field and I try not to cross that line … I don’t think whatsoever there on the field that I have ever crossed that line … I’ll keep continuing to stick up for my family …”
His hard-nut coach Darren Lehmann depicted “the line” as a sort of chivalric code: “When it crossed the line he defended his family and women in general, so from my point of view I thought he did the right thing.’”
But in this case, perceptions quickly came to matter more than distinctions.
One of the best responses to events in South Africa, by Cricinfo’s Sharda Ugra, not only assembled a 21st-century Australian rap sheet but noted the frequency with which our cricketers “claim to be the victims, while often being deliberate and even skilful agents provocateurs”.
It was illustrated, inevitably, by a photograph of Warner, on Boxing Day last year — chest out, striding snarlingly towards the English bowler Tom Curran, who had had the misfortune on his Test debut of dismissing the Australian with a no ball.
“I overheard the bowler say something,” explained Warner afterwards. “And I thought it was probably directed at me, it might not have been. I found a way in there.”
“Found a way in”: there’s your modus operandi right there. Warner looks for contests, seeks out vulnerabilities.
A player in his first Test who has just suffered a harrowing disappointment? The perfect target. Smart cricket? Or the epitome of bullying?
In Durban, Smith couched support for his deputy in familiar terms: “Quinton got quite personal and provoked an emotional response from Davey. As far as I am aware we didn’t get personal toward Quinton.” But even softened by that politician’s “as far as I am aware”, the distinction sounded self-serving.
De Kock to Warner: “vile slur”. Warner to Curran: “old-fashioned banter”. Why? Because of “the line”?
No wonder, then, that the personal/non-personal has begun to seem like a distinction without a difference.
“All sledging is personal,” observed the former Australian opener Ed Cowan in an interview on ABC radio last weekend. “You’re calling someone fat, thin, hopeless, it doesn’t matter — that’s a personal attack.” The line? “I always felt that as an Australian team member, we should be nowhere near the line.”
When you’re in proximity to the line, furthermore, ugly things have a way of happening. None were uglier than the two officers of Cricket South Africa who during the second Test in Port Elizabeth took it into their heads to admit fans wearing masks of the rugby star Williams, even posing for smirking photographs with them on Twitter.
The officers were stood aside pending an “investigation”, which, frankly, need only take as long as the pair clearing their desks. But in Port Elizabeth, South Africa rather abandoned any high moral ground it had occupied in favour of a slightly shallower moral trench.
The Proteas’ star bowler Kagiso Rabada incurred a two-Test suspension for, having dismissed him, brushing the shoulder of Smith as they passed: the taboo on physical contact is one that cricket has proved capable of preserving.
After CSA lodged an appeal, a tweet appeared in the timeline of Rabada’s opening partner Vernon Philander containing a counter-accusation that Smith was “just as guilty” in the incident and could likewise “have avoided any contact”. Philander quickly disowned it, claiming his account had been hacked. What next?
It’s all … well, curiously invigorating. Test cricket, a 19th-century invention, finds itself in a 21st-first century controversy, with eavesdropping microphones and CCTV, macho posturing and slut-shaming, and social media at its most fervid and phony.
There is a tendency to say that controversy drowns cricket out, but its effects can also be magnifying and intensifying — and who would not rather watch this series, for all its abrasive edges, than another moribund Ashes?
The cricket has scaled rare heights; the scenario, at one-all, could hardly be improved. Had this been a series of T20s, we would already have played five more games and forgotten all of them. Nor does holding the modern age up against an imagined past perfection serve much purpose.
We are no likelier to return to an era of white-flannelled knights than we are to the White Australia policy.
In the 1960s, when everyone was so moral and upright, our cricketers toured South Africa under apartheid — arguably a teeny bit more problematic than some cricketers swearing at each other.
No, the times have changed, and actually are more challenging for a team such as the Australians, wrestling with a decidedly adhesive reputation. To update another old Aussie shibboleth, what happens on the field can be very hard to keep on the field when it is shared with much of the world, and all the world is positioned to offer an instant, free, partly informed and completely uninhibited opinion about it.
Because let’s be straightforward here: many fans in other countries regard Australian cricketers as baggy green pricks, and, as such, fair game.
That will make life no easier for them abroad; it may make it a damn sight harder.
A fair proportion of fans in Australia, meanwhile, including parents in whose good graces it is important for the game to remain, aren’t that enthusiastic about them either. If your son or daughter took up a parrot cry about “the line”, how would you be disposed towards the game?
This public disgruntlement is not a recent development.
Fifteen years ago, a confrontation between Glenn McGrath and the West Indian Ramnaresh Sarwan in a Test in Antigua caused such a public backlash against McGrath that the receptionist at Cricket Australia needed counselling — in those pre-social media days, people more freely picked up the phone to air their indignation.
As a result, players signed up, some perhaps more willingly than others given that Lehmann was one, to a charter committing them to honour a (self-defined) “spirit of cricket”.
This “spirit”, interestingly, disavowed “sledging” but deemed “banter between opponents and ourselves” integral to “the competitive nature of cricket” — an antecedent, perhaps, of “the line”.
Ten years ago, during the so-called Monkeygate affair, Ricky Ponting’s Australians were surprised by the equivocal public support they received. When India’s dignified captain Anil Kumble claimed that “only one team was playing with the spirit of cricket”, he gained a noticeable degree of public sympathy.
We’re now a decade’s further fatigue, frustration and disaffection on, in a coarser, crueller, more combustible environment, where if you can’t stand the heat then maybe you shouldn’t set fire to the kitchen.
The experience may yet be salutary — a reminder that the good conduct of cricket requires rather more than superficial adherence to written codes and statutes.
Both the Australians and the South Africans are coming, it is fair to say, towards the end of long seasons, which inevitably fray tempers and loosen restraints.
All the same, old habits die hard, especially when they are subject to a leadership’s regular reinforcement. We remain, one suspects, some distance from the Australian cricketer who will greet his opponent with: “How’s your wife and your kids?”
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