Читать книгу Cricket: A Modern Anthology - Jonathan Agnew, Jonathan Agnew - Страница 13

Determined men will always push the boundaries until their actions expose a frailty in a law, and only then will that loophole be closed. It had been tried in the county game, but without the outright hostility and accuracy of Larwood or the volatile atmosphere of a seething cauldron of a Test arena. And we should remember that an Ashes series was the only series that really mattered to the cricket-watching public in the 1930s. Bowling short with as many men as you wanted on the leg side was a legitimate tactic, but not what cricket was meant to be, or the way cricket should be played. It would take Bodyline for people to see this, and it caused the Laws of the game to be changed to prevent it from ever happening again – quite rightly. Did it work as a tactic against Bradman? England won the series, so the argument goes that it did. Bradman always claimed that it didn’t.

The intimidatory bowling of the West Indies in the 1980s was as close to modern bodyline as you can get: the ball whistling past your head at more than ninety miles per hour was extremely nasty. I was a tail-end batsman at the time and did not relish getting out there. Even the top players were unnerved and saw it as a considerable challenge to face up to these great bowlers. But you never heard them complain about it.

The Bodyline story had all the right ingredients: a big, bad fast bowler; a brilliant batsman capable of dominating the series; the unbending patrician figure of Jardine as captain; and a hostile crowd all too ready to find fault with the tourists. Running through the game is the ‘spirit’ of cricket, something that is considered so central to the wellbeing and future of the game that it is articulated in the preamble to the Laws of Cricket under the heading ‘Responsibility of Captains’: ‘The captains are responsible at all times for ensuring that play is conducted within the Spirit of the Game as well as within the Laws.’ This is what holds the game together and I have no doubt Jardine fell short in this regard.

What followed was also a failure of communication, through the purblind inherent conservatism of the MCC and the rash injured pride leading to the intemperate complaints of the Australians. I have always thought the Australians took the wrong initiative in complaining so much.

Cricket’s lawmakers are still getting it wrong: today we have the absurdity of banning runners. It will only take a Test match with twenty thousand in the ground and a team nine down needing ten runs to win. The last batsman has a dodgy hamstring and can’t get out to bat so the game abruptly finishes. Is that what it will take for the ICC to realize what a daft rule they’ve brought in?