So many grey areas emerge when you examine the issue in any depth. Those who took offence at Broady refusing to walk in Nottingham after the Aussies had squandered their referrals were conspicuously silent when he walked after a much finer nick in the second innings.
Adam Gilchrist, whose insistence on walking famously upset his Australian teammates, was more concerned by the minute Stuart wasted tying a suspiciously loose shoelace when we were trying to disrupt the momentum of the match prior to regrouping during the lunch interval. We worked it out afterwards: thirteen people refused to walk during that Ashes series.
Of course, I am broadly sympathetic to the notion that cricket has a defining spirit, but when I’m asked about it, I find it hard to put into words what it means, beyond an unwritten commitment to a code of conduct drawn up in an era when it was regarded as a gentlemen’s pastime. Professional sport is harsh; footballers dive to win penalties, tennis players manipulate injury breaks, rugby players operate on the fringe of the laws.
I’m one of those cricketers who won’t walk.
It’s an individual decision, formed by personal experience. In my case, the pivotal influence was Ronnie Irani, my first captain at Essex. Playing against Nottinghamshire, I clipped one to short leg off Mohammad Ali, a sharp left-arm bowler from Pakistan. There was an element of doubt about the catch, so I asked the fielder whether it was clean.
When he said it was, I took the bloke’s word for it and walked off. That’s what I had been brought up to do. When I got back to the dressing room, Ronnie was unhappy. ‘The umpire has to make the decision,’ he said. ‘That’s what he is paid to do.’ When I asked him about walking, he replied, ‘Never walk.’
His logic was that cricket was a game shaped by human error. As a batsman you are judged on statistics. There’s not an asterisk against a certain score when you stand your ground, just as there isn’t one when you are given out mistakenly. By walking, on a purely professional basis you are reducing your odds of being successful.
‘Your job is to score runs, Cookie,’ Ronnie said. ‘If you’re decreasing your odds, even by a small margin, you’re making it harder for yourself.’ That made perfect sense. He then added the caveat: ‘If the umpire gives you a stinker, you can’t kick the doors down. You can’t moan about it because you’ve made your bed, and you have to accept it.’
There was a bit of pot and kettle in that, since Ronnie was mad, bad and dangerous to know when he was sawn off, but the advice about evening out the shockers has stayed with me. Of course, you get stick in the middle, all sorts of funny looks. They’ll say, ‘Fucking cheat … I can’t believe you’ve not walked for that,’ more out of habit than anything else.
What do you say when the umpire asks you whether you hit it? ‘Not sure, mate.’ Some might give you out for being cheeky, anyway. It’s a matter of degrees of difference. If you smash it to the keeper and there are two DRS reviews left, you just walk off. If the umpire gives you a little nod, that tells you he knows what’s happened, you’re on your way. But if it is one you might get away with, an inside edge off the pad down the leg side, you keep schtum.
It works both ways. Bowlers and fielders appeal in an orchestrated fashion, even when they know the correct verdict is not out. That would suggest the ‘spirit of cricket’ is little more than a clever piece of marketing, or an optimistic form of nostalgia. There are limits, however, because I understand the principle of trying to protect the game from itself.
As a captain, for instance, I would never want my bowler to Mankad a batsman – run out the non-striker before delivering the ball. I’d call him back, warn him, and warn him again, if he persists in advancing down the wicket. The term comes from the first such dismissal in a Test match by Vinoo Mankad, an Indian who ran out Australia’s Bill Brown during their 1947–48 winter tour.
That created an international incident, but, revealingly, Mankad was supported by Sir Donald Bradman. Referring to scandalized press coverage in his autobiography, he wrote: ‘For the life of me, I can’t understand why they questioned his sportsmanship … by backing up too far or too early, the non-striker is very obviously gaining an unfair advantage.’
The rules allow it, but, in my view, it is a low blow. That’s not to say I don’t appreciate the contradictions, complications and consequences. When Ravi Ashwin ‘Mankaded’ Jos Buttler in the IPL in March 2019 it came at a crucial juncture and enabled Ashwin’s team, King’s XI Punjab, to beat the Rajasthan Royals. In the bowler’s unrelenting world, the move made sense, but I found it objectionable because it looked premeditated. Jos would not have been out of his crease if the bowler had made a natural movement, planting his back foot in the delivery stride. Instead, Ashwin paused, prompting the batsman to edge fractionally out of his ground.
Ashwin had form in that area, having done something similar to Sri Lankan batsman Lahiru Thirimanne after warning him in a group match in the Commonwealth Bank Series, held in Australia in 2012. In that case, his captain, Virender Sehwag, withdrew the appeal after consulting the umpires, Paul Reiffel and Billy Bowden.
Buttler was also the victim in 2014, when run out by Sri Lanka’s Sachithra Senanayake in a decisive one-day international at Edgbaston. His captain, Angelo Mathews, reinforced the appeal because Jos had been warned about backing up in the previous over. We lost by six wickets with ten balls remaining. I top-scored with 56 out of 219, which didn’t seem terribly important at the time.
Imposing ethical behaviour, or strengthening a sense of fair play, is a tricky element of captaincy. New Zealand’s dressing-room door was slammed in the face of Paul Collingwood when he failed to withdraw England’s appeal for Grant Elliott’s run out after a mid-pitch collision with Ryan Sidebottom in the fourth one-day international at the Oval in 2008.
The Kiwis were incensed, arguing that Ryan had run directly at the batsman as he attempted a quick single. Daniel Vettori, their captain, later apologized for gesticulating and swearing from the balcony when his team won off the last ball of the match. They initially blanked Colly, who was contrite in an almost impossible situation. I wasn’t playing, but it was an emotionally charged game. He was under pressure from the umpires and his own players.
At the very most, he had twenty seconds to make a decision that had unavoidable ramifications. What would I have done? Hopefully, I’d have asked for a dot ball, so that everyone went back to where they began. That’s easy for me to say. Until you feel the heat of the moment, experience the pressure and transmit the tension of the situation – and I haven’t, thankfully – you don’t really know what you would do.
It was interesting that the MCC should make a point of publicly criticizing the Ashwin incident in this year’s IPL as being against the spirit of the game. They stage an annual lecture, originally named in honour of Colin Cowdrey, in which characters as diverse as Desmond Tutu, Geoffrey Boycott, Beefy Botham, Kumar Sangakkara, Brendon McCullum and Brian Lara have outlined their thoughts and philosophies.
That is staged at Lord’s, landing ground for the helicopter that ferried Allen Stanford, self-styled saviour of world cricket, and crates containing a supposed stash of $20 million in banknotes. He was welcomed gushingly by the ECB hierarchy, including Giles Clarke and David Collier, who sanctioned a winner-takes-all match against the so-called Stanford Superstars.
That was a West Indies team, selected by a panel overseen by Viv Richards. They prepared in Antigua under coaches Eldine Baptiste and Roger Harper. It was so disciplinarian that no-balls in the nets drew a fine. According to the late and legendary cricket writer Tony Cozier, one player, opening batsman Xavier Marshall, was dropped after failing a drugs test through his smoking marijuana.
I don’t think performance-enhancing drugs are especially common in cricket, by the way, though the advantages of, say, a fast bowler building muscle mass are obvious. During the course of a year hair samples would be taken from the England team twice, as part of a programme to test for recreational drugs. Urine samples were taken
randomly six or seven times a year to test for performance-enhancing drugs. You can always do more, I suppose, but that seemed adequate.
Going back to Stanford, some leading figures in West Indian cricket, including Michael Holding, Clive Lloyd, Desmond Haynes and Ian Bishop, opted out, sensing it was too good to be true. Yet the fraudster’s bluster and ambition swayed good judges like Mark Nicholas, who, according to Tony Cozier, observed that ‘Stanford’s calypso cricket revolution might just save the game’s fall from grace’.
It was surreal, extraordinary. I wasn’t at Lord’s for his arrival, but watched on TV, as fascinated as the rest. It felt like a significant event, a little like the Packer breakaway must have felt in the seventies. Life-changing sums were being talked about, and it captured the spirit of the times as part of the advent of franchised cricket. The IPL was coming on stream, and players were starting to get itchy feet.
Obviously, Stanford’s scheme was fundamentally flawed, given his subsequent conviction for orchestrating a $7 billion Ponzi scheme. He’s serving a 110-year sentence in a federal penitentiary in Florida. We were called England but, as players, objected to the connotations of the title. Playing for your country is an honour, a special thing that should not be for sale. We had no say in it, and it didn’t feel right.
The event itself was a circus, a shambles. We stumbled into the unknown. The match was staged next to Antigua airport, in a stadium Stanford named after himself when he funded renovations. It has now reverted to its original title, the Coolidge Cricket Ground, but is known locally as ‘Sticky Wicket Stadium’.
That’s appropriate, all things considered. Stanford was a bizarre figure who didn’t endear himself by posing for photographs with Matty Prior’s pregnant wife on his lap. My first impression of him was as someone who wanted fame as well as fortune.
It was sad, because it had the potential to splinter the squad. Each player on the winning side was due to earn £500,000. The ECB and West Indies Cricket Board took £3.5 million, with a further £1 million divided between the winning coach and the rest of the squad. That’s obviously a lot of money for carrying drinks; as it turned out, Jimmy Anderson and I watched our innings from a swimming pool overlooking the ground, after training earlier in the day.
We didn’t pick a specialist T20 squad and went with the one-day group that was due to go on to India. We made 99. Chris Gayle and Andre Fletcher, their opening pair, knocked off the runs in 12.4 overs. The local lads were beside themselves; they spoke of the cars and houses they would buy. The bubble burst quickly, but according to Tony Cozier, only one of them lost their money by ploughing it back into Stanford’s crooked investment scheme.
Times have changed. Virat Kohli picked up £2 million for captaining Royal Challengers Bangalore in the 2019 IPL, while Ben Stokes was the highest paid foreign player, collecting £1.5 million for six weeks’ work with Rajasthan Royals. Stanford’s fleeting success owed a lot to his ability to play on the inferiority complex created by historic underpayment of cricket’s best players.
Sportsmen who come from disadvantaged economic backgrounds are inevitably vulnerable to exploitation. Unfortunately, we see that, to an extent, in match fixing, especially on the subcontinent, where, by accepting as little as $100 from a corrupt bookmaker or gambler, a young player, very early in his career, can essentially sell his soul inadvertently. He is trapped, susceptible to blackmail, for the rest of his career.
The immediate motivation is understandable, since very few fledgling players make it. In a world without guarantees the chance of feeding the family for three months with that $100 is attractive. But if things go well, and his talent blossoms over two to four critical years of development into an international cricketer, he will feel the same individual or organization tapping him on the shoulder.
‘You owe us a favour …’
Dressing-room gossip involves unsubstantiated stories, but I have never been approached to do anything illegal. I did, however, play in one of the most notorious Tests of all, at Lord’s against Pakistan in 2010, the setting for the spot-fixing scandal that led to the banning and imprisonment of Salman Butt, Mohammad Asif and Mohammad Amir.
The sting, by undercover reporters from the News of the World, who secretly videotaped Mazhar Majeed, a corrupt sports agent, accepting money and promising deliberate no-balls on specific occasions, came at a time when, to be flippant, I couldn’t buy a run. The deal was that the first ball of Amir’s second over, the last delivery of Asif’s fifth and the final ball of the first over in which Amir went around the wicket to a right-hander would be no-balls.
Amir’s first one, to me, was so big that either he had completely messed up his run-in or something funny was going on. I thought Asif’s was strange, to say the least, but didn’t dwell on it, because it was marginal and, unlike the prodigy Amir, who had never overstepped the mark in first-class cricket, he had a history of problems in that area.
We were in a great position that Saturday night. I was caught behind for 10 off Amir on the Friday morning, after rain allowed only twelve overs on the first day. Jonathan Trott’s 184 and Broady’s only Test century, 169, got us to 446 before we bowled them out for 74. Pakistan had lost four more wickets before the close, by which time, unbeknown to us, the ground was crawling with senior policemen.
The story broke, on an embargo, at 10 p.m. that evening. Suddenly my phone was alive with messages from friends, saying, ‘Oh my God, are you watching TV?’ I sat in bed, following events on Sky for hours with a sense of disbelief. It even crossed my mind that the match would be abandoned. The following day was one of my most surreal.
Andy Flower’s team talk was direct and to the point. ‘We’ve just got a job to do,’ he said. ‘Turn up, do it, and let everything else fall as it may. We’ve still got to play our cricket.’ The Pakistanis arrived late; we had been in the players’ dining room watching TV coverage of their team bus, still parked outside their hotel, wondering whether they would turn up.
We talk about the ultimate satisfaction of winning in Test cricket, but there was nothing remotely satisfying about that morning’s play, when we wrapped up victory by an innings and 225 runs, with Graeme Swann taking five wickets. My abiding memory of it is the ICC’s anti-corruption guy having a glass of red wine with his lunch. Though I suppose there was little left for him to do, it was as if nothing remotely odd had happened.
The affair left a sour taste, most notably because of the manipulation of the inexperienced Amir, who received his man-of-the-series award from a visibly disgusted Giles Clarke. For Butt, a captain, to apply such pressure is against everything the job is supposed to represent. Asif even accused him, in court, of abusing him to ensure he followed the plan. You have a responsibility to set the highest personal and professional standards.
Is there a problem with match- or spot-fixing in cricket? All but two of the major nations, Australia and England, have had prominent players banned because of it, so it is natural to worry about what goes on beneath the surface. Greed and human weakness are not specific to any one sport: just look at cycling or tennis to see the gradual erosion of trust.
As mentioned earlier in the book, I played with Mervyn Westfield for Essex. He was found to have conspired with Danish Kaneria, who, unforgivably, took six years to admit his guilt. Sport is, above all, meant to be a genuine contest. If I score 5 and 0, I want you to trust that those scores are a result of poor form, technique or decisions, or good bowling, rather than some preordained bookmakers’ bingo.
I feel sorry for Pakistani cricketers, because they are paying the price for their nation’s isolation, but as a Test team they have a history of turbulence. I played in the forfeited Test at the Oval in 2006, but was in the shower, having scored 83, when they were accused of ball tampering. Paul Collingwood and Ian Bell, who were at the crease, came in at tea and confirmed the ball had been changed because the umpires considered its condition had been altered.
Cue chaos. Our batsmen went back out into t
he middle to resume play, but the Pakistanis barricaded themselves in their changing room and refused to leave. By the time they emerged, under protest at being penalized five runs, the umpires had taken the bails off and awarded us the match, and the series, 3–0. We were ushered out of the ground, supposedly for our safety, and had to return in the morning to collect our kit. The match referee later acquitted the Pakistan captain Inzamam-al-Haq of ball tampering.
Ball tampering isn’t black and white, because there are inconsistencies in interpretation. Though this is an area of current debate, you are not allowed to put an artificial substance on the ball, but you are permitted to spit on it, to assist the shine. You must not pick at the seam, but the ball cannot surely be said to be in a natural state if you are polishing one side of it.
That’s legal, but when you put sugar on the surface, by eating a sweet and applying impregnated spit to the ball, that’s a no-no. It certainly makes the ball shinier, but does it make it swing abnormally? The jury is out, though technically you are not allowed to take sweets on to the field. The residue from energy drinks, taken in the break? That’s also in the grey area.
It can get a little silly. Faf du Plessis, South Africa’s captain, was fined his entire match fee in a Test at Hobart in November 2016 for ball tampering when he was spotted on TV with a mint under his tongue. The Australian media pursued him like a convicted criminal in the build-up to the following Test, where I suspect I was not the only player silently hailing the strength of character that resulted in him scoring a century.
As he explained afterwards: ‘As a player, I was always taught when you’re trying to get the ball to swing you’ve got to put something on the ball. So for me, that was a normal day at the office. I wasn’t trying to do something different. My technique was bad: the sweet was out on my tongue, and the camera could see it. Obviously now I know that you can’t be that obvious about it.’
I’ve eaten sweets and shined the ball without directly using sugary spit. Many players chew gum. There’s something delightfully old-fashioned about the memory of the Aussies being upset when Marcus Trescothick was caught in possession of a Murray Mint in the 2005 Ashes. Australian teams of that vintage were hardly blushing innocents.
The Autobiography Page 21