Cricket: A Modern Anthology. Jonathan Agnew

to take seriously the long-held view that its cricket team was more exposed to corruption than any other.

      However, there was a shock in store for followers of county cricket when, in January 2012, a young Essex fast bowler, Mervyn Westfield, pleaded guilty to accepting £6,000 to deliberately under-perform in a match against Durham in 2009. He was imprisoned for four months after alleging in court that he had been persuaded to accept the bribe by the Pakistan and Essex leg-spinner, Danish Kaneria, who had been initially arrested with Westfield. Kaneria was released without charge, and denies Westfield’s allegations. However, the case underlines the extent to which corruption has infiltrated the game of cricket and that, potentially, any match televised live to the Indian subcontinent is at risk.

      Why is it that cricket has attracted so many controversies over its relatively short life? Racism, corruption, politics – the great game has endured more than its fair share of issues, all of which have threatened its welfare. At least part of the answer must lie in the fact that it is a traditional sport founded upon a strict moral code of fair play and sporting conduct. Any threat to those principles is big news, and I am quite convinced that cricket crises – particularly of the political variety – make bigger headlines even than football crises because of the game’s historical links with the Commonwealth.

      It is a fact that cricket has at times played a crucial role in shaping the world in which we live. This is plain to see in the D’Oliveira crisis, which made a nonsense of the often cowardly ambition of many to keep sport separate from politics. Separating the two is almost impossible to achieve and, besides, when you consider the dismantling of apartheid, sport – and cricket in particular – made a significant contribution. The D’Oliveira affair led directly to the 1977 Gleneagles Agreement in which Commonwealth leaders agreed to boycott all sporting contact with South Africa as part of the international fight against apartheid. Supporters of the rebel cricket tours that broke that agreement will say that the English XI tour in 1990, led by Mike Gatting, played a part in speeding up the end of the reviled political system in South Africa. It did, but not because it was the right thing to do. The ill-timed and insensitive tour was a financial disaster for the South African Cricket Union, coinciding as it did with the unbanning of the African National Congress and Nelson Mandela’s release from prison. The tour became a focal point for demonstrators – Gatting famously admitted to hearing a ‘few people singing and dancing’ outside his hotel – and it quickly became obvious that the tour was unsustainable, and was called off.

      Sport and politics are inextricably linked, but the type of sustained pressure that worked against South Africa does not work in every situation. It would not, for example, have made the slightest impression on Robert Mugabe’s stranglehold on South Africa’s neighbour, Zimbabwe, because sport does not play such a strong part in that country’s everyday life. However, an England cricket tour to Zimbabwe in 2003 did allow a precious opportunity for Western journalists – banned at the time by the regime – including myself to enter the country. Once inside, we were able to report on life within the country, from the consequences of rampant inflation to the witnessing of farms being burned to the ground.

      It might be everyone’s ideal to keep sport and politics as far apart as possible, but not only is that naive, but it also denies sport the opportunity to play its part in civilizing society and improving lives. A number of great South African cricketers had their international careers ruined by the Gleneagles Agreement, and have every reason to be bitter towards the politicians who drove their own country into sporting isolation. Mike Procter, as fine an all-rounder as there has ever been, was restricted to just seven Tests before the curtain came down. ‘What’s one life,’ he asked me, ‘compared to the millions who were liberated?’

       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?

DONALD BRADMAN

       Body-Line

      The last thing I want to do at the close of my career is to revive unpleasant memories. However, I would be failing in my duty if I did not record my impressions of something which very nearly brought about a cessation of Test cricket between England and Australia, especially as I was one of the central figures.

      Jardine, who captained England in that series, wrote a book defending his theory. So did Larwood. The defence could have impressed the jury not at all, for body-line is now outlawed.

      Of paramount importance is the fact that body-line can no longer be bowled because the M.C.C. has passed a law which has the effect of prohibiting it. I make this point very strongly because even today, in parts of England, people think Australia stopped it.

      The M.C.C. at first were reluctant to believe the reports emanating from Australia as to the nature of the bowling, called “body-line”. They very rightly wanted evidence, and one understands their reluctance to act without it.

      Having obtained the evidence they did not hesitate.

      Now what exactly was body-line bowling? It was really short-pitched fast bowling directed towards the batsman’s body with a supporting leg-side field.

      In his book, Anti-Body-line, Alan Kippax defines it fairly well in setting out the following objections to that type of bowling:—

      1 That a considerable proportion of the deliveries were directed straight at the batsman’s body.

      2 That