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Sledging

All that strictly needs to be said of the relationship between this cricketing branch of low-level bullying and genuine wit is this: of all the cricket-playing nations, sledging is beloved solely by the Australians.

There was a time, long ago, when it may have had some appeal. When W.G. Grace reacted to having his stumps clattered by informing the bowler, ‘’Twas the wind which took the bail orf, good sir,’ and the umpire chipped in, ‘Indeed, doctor, and let us hope the wind helps thee on thy journey back to the pavilion,’ the coalescence of mannerliness and the lingo of the Amish barn-builder lent the exchange some charm. Nothing there to induce the enquiry, ‘Where is thy ribcage repair kit, good doctor, when thou most sorely requireth it?’ perhaps, but rather sweet for all that.

By the time, some half a century later, that F.S. Trueman was advising an incoming Aussie batsman who shut the gate to the pavilion behind him, ‘Don’t bother, son, you won’t be out there long enough,’ the art of sledging may already have been in decline. Another half a century on, and it is virtually impossible to find any sledge that is not predicated on either the batsman’s girth or the conceit that his wife has a sexual appetite so rapacious that her reflex observation, having serviced the entire Household Cavalry, is to ask after the whereabouts of the Scots Dragoons.

Perhaps this is too harsh. It could be that Shane Warne was indeed a larrikin Mark Twain, and Adam Gilchrist an ocker Tallulah Bankhead. We’ll never know for sure, because seldom do the stump microphones capture the inter-ball hilarity. However, now and again a sledge is picked up. It may give a flavour of this nourishing comedic form to quote this citation, offered by New Zealand blogger Michael Ellis as his candidate for history’s greatest sledge: ‘And of course you can’t forget Ian Healy’s legendary comment that was picked up by the Channel 9 microphones when Arjuna Ranatunga called for a runner on a particularly hot night during a one-dayer in Sydney. “You don’t get a runner for being an overweight, unfit, fat cunt.” ’ It is not known whether the Sri Lankan felt it beneath him to offer the mandatory reply to a portliness-related sledge (‘Yeah, mate. Well, it’s yer missus’s fault for giving me a biscuit every time I fuck her’).

The oppressively limited range of subject matter qualifies the sledge as sport’s closest equivalent to the haiku. If the batsman isn’t fat or a cuckold in the imagination of the Oscar Wildes of the slips, he must be gay. ‘So,’ Glenn McGrath once enquired of Ramnaresh Sarwan, ‘what does Brian Lara’s dick taste like?’ ‘I don’t know,’ responded the West Indian, preparing a foray into virgin sledging territory. ‘Ask your wife.’ If anything encapsulates the exquisite subtlety of the two-way sledge, it is McGrath’s counterstrike to that. ‘If you ever mention my wife again,’ he said, expecting a degree of sensitivity (his wife, now deceased, had been diagnosed with cancer) his reference to the fellating of Mr Lara might be seen to have sacrificed, ‘I’ll fucking rip your fucking throat out.’ Whether or not Mr Sarwan is indeed a friend of Dorothy, who would deny that Mr McGrath, in common with all the legends of Australian sledging, is a spiritual friend of Dorothy Parker?