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Views on Mankads are like arseholes; we all have one and we should mostly keep them out of public view. I know this. People, I know this. After this, I’m really going to try to be good. But please, let me just do this one thing, then shut up.
Because here’s the thing. I love cricket culture, and I’ve come to feel really at home in it. The Mankad debate is one of the few times, however, when I feel like what I really am – a foreigner from Not Cricketania who came to the sport as an adult.
Because beneath all the jokes, I find it genuinely stupefying that anyone, anywhere, finds any need whatsoever to debate this. This makes no sense. Like, all that other stuff that people always joke about as “The thing that Americans would never get about cricket?” Nuh-uh. This.
This is the thing.
Let’s start with intent, since that gets brought up so much. Rules (or laws) in sport never really care about intent. The basketball referee does not ask why the player with the ball took too many steps without dribbling, he just whistles her for travelling.
Umpires don’t probe psyches, they enforce rules.
And yet when a batsman is out of his crease, we want to get into his motivation like he’s a method actor. Is he seeking an advantage? Is he lost? Did he notice a lovely piece of turf and lose himself thinking about the John Clare-style poem he’d write about it later? Who cares.
In no other sport does a player get out of trouble for doing a bad thing by noting that it wouldn’t have helped anyway. In other sports, that gets you in even more trouble.
I remember, in my rightly unheralded career as a high school gridiron lineman, getting yelled at for holding on a play that was going the opposite direction from me.
What my coach did not do was note that useless number 66 was on the left side and the play was going to the right, so the fact that he was clinging to the defensive lineman’s leg like a tic should really be overlooked. Because that would have been stupid.
So, that’s the batsman. What of the bowler? If it’s stupid to think that rules in sport can sort out a player’s motivation, it’s even more nonsensical to expect them to have a go at somebody’ manners or moral fibre.
In this current mankadaladadingdong, Simon Hughes reckons Ashwin’s mankad was “unnecessary and frankly undignified.” To the first point, retiring Jos Buttler strikes me as a reasonably necessary thing to do if you’re trying to win a T20 match. So then. “Undignified.”
Again, an umpire enforces rules. He is not Mister Belvedere. If it’s within the laws, Ashwin can set up a velvet portrait of Elvis at midwicket for all I care. We don’t need The Hundred to make cricket relatable, we just need people to stop sounding like cravat-wearing clichés.
The thing that kills me here? That really kills me? This particular case does actually present an interesting debate. Ashwin engaged in a little trickery. OK, or at least umpire’s call, as the laws are written, but should the laws be changed? Maybe! Fun chat! Let’s discuss!
Because that’s what we do in sports. We debate laws, and we call into ridiculous radio shows to yell about them, and they get changed or they don’t. But we don’t attempt to use the rules to peer into the very souls of players to discern if they meant to do a naughty.
IN CONCLUSION: Leave it to Buttler and Ashwin’s mothers to decide whether or not they’re good boys. Cricket should concern itself with having reasonable laws. Thank you for coming to my TED Dexter Talk.
