Ashes 2023: Take the Ashes test away from Lord’s if the MCC disgraces cricket again

Illustration: Johannes Leak

June in UK was the hottest on record. How do I know this? Because as yesterday began, I found myself on radio talking about the Lord’s Test, Law 20.1.2, Australian perfidy and English virtue, ahead of a later scheduled discussion about climate change.

Except that the talkback lines kept jangling, with a terrific plurality of well-argued and strongly-felt opinion I might add, so that one might have imagined environmental armageddon of strictly secondary importance.

The chatter of talkback and the charivari of social media measure only our most momentary fads and discontents, of course. But, you know what, it felt great. It might have been greater had we been exalting Ben Stokes’s Homeric 155. Yet, it’s all of a piece, isn’t it? We’ve been captivated for the last week by brilliant deeds, and now by complex, resonant arguments: no sport, I think, does it better.

Lord's is supposed to be the genteel home of cricket — but what started as booing by the crowd during play turned into something more unpleasant. @FergusonNews spoke to Gideon Haigh. #abc730pic.twitter.com/D3acaZnEQp

— abc730 (@abc730) July 3, 2023

For cricket has a very particular emotional resonance. When we argue over it, it’s often as a proxy for other concerns: our feelings of connection, our anxieties about competition, our fears for the young, and, often as not, where we draw the lines in ethical conduct.

This, I might say, distinguishes it from football, perhaps because that sport has grown so bloated as to stand only for itself, and the arc of everything is toward money.

Pardon my Australian’s ignorance, and perhaps also my cricketers’ uprightness, but I am unable to warm to a game that winks knowingly at diving for penalties - an agreed and protected space for dishonesty.

Not that anyone calls it dishonesty; it hides instead behind the polite euphemism of ‘simulation.’ Efforts to stamp it out, furthermore, consistently fail, for a good reason given recently by my colleague Matthew Syed: ‘Fans do not hate simulation; they love it.’

Obviously there are complex and important reasons why this is so, but don’t tell me because I’m not interested in them.

Usman Khawaja walks through the MCC Members gate following Day Five. Picture: Getty Images.

Which brings us back to Alex Carey’s run out of Jonny Bairstow on Sunday. Because, whatever you may think about it, no dishonesty was involved: it was an open and frank attempt to get the better of a respected opponent.

Carey did not try to deceive Bairstow, or injure him, or intimidate him, or insult him. He did not hide the ball; he did not try to distract Bairstow; he did not push him out of the crease. Carey simply took the ball, rolled it towards the stumps, and caught Bairstow napping - just as Bairstow had attempted, unsuccessfully, to catch Labuschagne napping at Edgbaston.

This last fact, furthermore, invalidates the argument that Carey was somehow unsporting because he did not defeat Bairstow with skill.

On the contrary, Carey’s stumping was full of dexterity: it involved observation, anticipation, skill reproduction under pressure, and originality.

The unusual is sometimes mistaken for the unethical. When BJT Bosanquet invented the googly, some obscurantists decried the notion of pretending to spin the ball one way but actually spinning it the other. Bosanquet himself joked that the googly was ‘not illegal, merely immoral.’

The on-field umpires did not help things, by referring to their off-field colleague what was actually an entirely straightforward decision once the appeal had been made, given that Bairstow made no attempt to return to his ground when the stumps were broken.

Had they, alternatively, decided that the ball was dead, a course which was open to them and which they did not take presumably because they believed it was live, I suspect you’d have had no argument from the Australians. Here was another instance of the stealthy bureaucratisation of officiation which is so simplifying its replacement by technology.

Anyway, the very intensity and passion of the exchanges are their own tribute to the Ashes. Had England or Australia been playing any other country, I sincerely doubt that any such discussion would have occurred; it is all the more delicious and provoking for playing to stereotypes of our respective peoples.

Had the incident occurred at any ground other than Lord’s, the actual font of the game’s Laws, the moment would also not have been so inflamed.

This leads us to the utterance of some pleasantries, in light of the utterly disgraceful conduct on display in the members’ stand at lunch on the final day, of which ample, disturbing footage is in circulation, with chants of ‘cheat cheat cheat’ following the Australians all the way through the Long Room and up the stairs.

The Marylebone Cricket Club is a great institution. Last week I was there for the, quite brilliant, launch of an exhibition on the Jewish contribution to cricket: where else in the world, I wondered admiringly, could you find any such thing?

I have immersed myself in the inspirational work of the MCC Foundation, and been introduced, for instance, to the Alsama Project supporting bottom-of-the-pyramid Syrian refugee children in Lebanon, which uses cricket as part of its educational and rehabilitative initiatives. Would that other private clubs harboured such noble philanthropic instincts.

But seriously? The behaviour of the members towards the Australians, with its public school puerility and reek of entitlement, suggest that the buck needs to stop with Marylebone rather than start with it.

Instead of Lord’s being afforded the freedom to police itself, a license it is hard to imagine being extended to any other venue, the England Cricket Board should be demanding that Marylebone take steps to ensure against a repeat, on pain of the ground’s suspension from the Test circuit.

This is all the sharper for the club’s status as arbiter of the laws. How can it set an example to the rest of the cricket world when its members behave with such impunity and hypocrisy?

What about the ‘spirit of cricket’, I hear you, and Rishi Sunak, cry. Granted, there is scope for disagreement about this. But I’d counsel those invoking it to consult the preamble to the Laws, promulgated, of course, by Marylebone. It recommends cricket that is ‘hard but fair’, and demands ‘respect for the umpire’s decision.’ In this, at Lord’s, the Australians set an excellent example.

And now …. well, sure is hot out there, eh?