Bans will scare away offenders

RCB senior pro Virat Kohli and LSG mentor Gautam Gambhir were slapped with fines after Monday night’s fracas at Lucknow, but penalties like these seem light considering the damage it causes to cricket, which is often referred to as a gentleman’s game

Ashley Mallett, the Australian, who passed away in 2021, was not just a good off-spin bowler for his country. He was a prolific writer, and scripted fine biographies for some of his teammates. One of the last ones to come out of the printing press was a book on Neil Harvey who, at 94, is now the last surviving member of Don Bradman’s 1948 Invincibles.

Harvey unlike his other subjects including Ian Chappell, Doug Walters and Jeff Thomson, was not Mallett’s teammate, but someone whose career Mallett followed as a kid. Harvey was a selector when Mallett played most of his 38 Tests —in the 1970s.

Among the many Harvey stories Mallett packed in his 280-page book, there is one incident which showed what a fine sportsman the left-handed great was. 
Jim Laker, the English off-spinner, went down in history as the first bowler to claim all 10 wickets in a Test innings at Old Trafford, Manchester. In fact, he claimed nine in the previous innings of the Test.

The Australians were convinced that the English authorities had doctored the Old Trafford pitch so that Laker and Tony Lock could thrive.

“We were dudded alright, conned,” Harvey says in the book.

I’ve also heard Harvey say that the ball he got from Laker in the first innings was comparable to the one Shane Warne bowled to bamboozle Mike Gatting at the same ground in 1993.

Harvey dismissed for a duck was so significant that Laker reckoned it won England the Test match. In the second innings, while Australia tried in vain to deny their traditional rivals an innings win, Harvey says he, “holed out lamely to Colin Cowdrey at short mid wicket.” He laughed at his folly, but once he reached the dressing room, anger kicked in, feelings that would afflict any other batsman who had just bagged a pair.

The following day, Laker ran through the Australians. Post-game traditions were gladly maintained by the losers—a visit to the victors’ dressing room. The Australians, as revealed in Mallett’s book on the champion batsman, were not upset with the England players. It was the English cricket bosses that had ordered the groundsman to prepare that pitch.

Both teams enjoyed a chat with drinks and Harvey was the first to “thrust out his right hand: Well done Jimmy. Great performance.” It was probably not the easiest thing for Harvey to do that night. As Australia’s premier batsman, he was upset at the pair and his team were unfairly given a doctored pitch to bat on.

This book arrived a few days ago and I got to the above bit on the very day Virat Kohli and Gautam Gambhir indulged in their street bawl-like arguments after Kohli’s Royal Challengers Bangalore trumped the Gambhir-guided Lucknow Super Giants.

Their all-out scrap was not surprising. Nothing should be shocking when it comes to these two hot heads. What did surprise me was that they stopped short of striking each other.

Cricket fans are realistic enough to realise than mingling with the opposition is impossible after these highly-combative on-field IPL battles. There is too much at stake to always conform to the spirit of the game. To be competitive yet nice could be viewed as a weakness in the present ecosystem and we will all have to live with this. After all, when an individual is overcome by sheer anger, nothing can stop him from going to extremes. But the cricket authorities can infuse an element of fear among the players if they take such steps.

Fines even to the tune of 100 per cent of match fees don’t justify the misdeed. The solution lies in making the rules more stringent and start imposing bans. Kohli and Gambhir deserved to banned for at least a couple of games.

But what do we see at 2.42 am on Tuesday? An IPL press release about the 100 per cent fines for Kohli and Gambhir and a 50 per cent one for Naveen-ul-Haq.
Players are bought at auctions and some of them are retained by franchises. Mentors and coaches are on a contract, so how in hell will we know the exact amounts of the fines?

And how about a line from the BCCI or IPL condemning such behaviour?

No one expects matches of such nature to be played in a friendly environment. Full-on aggression is only to be expected, but players displaying such rage after a match is simply deplorable, and kudos to all the former players who condemned the Lucknow incident.

One of them was Harbhajan Singh, who also said that he regretted slapping S Sreesanth in the inaugural edition of the IPL in 2008 after the Mumbai Indians v Punjab game at Mohali.

Whether Gambhir and Kohli will regret the Monday night post-match show they put on for spectators and viewers to remember, is anyone’s guess.

I always like to recall what the late Martin Crowe wrote in Cricinfo after David Warner had a go at India’s Rohit Sharma in a 2014-15 ODI at Melbourne: “I don’t care how good he [Warner] is: if he continues to show all those watching that he doesn’t care, he must be removed, either by Cricket Australia or definitely by the world governing body.”

Some pundits hold the view that the highly entertaining T20 format shouldn’t be called cricket. However right or wrong that assessment is, what we saw at the end of Monday night was definitely not cricket.

mid-day’s group sports editor Clayton Murzello is a purist with an open stance. He tweets @ClaytonMurzello

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The views expressed in this column are the individual’s and don’t represent those of the paper

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