India v Australia - Bangalore Test: We have a double-standard
- Mar 8, 2017
- 3 min read
It’s time for us to own up to something. When it comes to cricket, we Australians have a double-standard when passing judgment on players accused of bending the rules or playing against that most fluid and imperceptible of things, the ‘spirit of the game’. And it’s a double-standard of Orwellian simplicity: Australians, good. Australians are underdogs, battlers. Not Australians, bad. Not Australians are cheats, dogs, flogs and so on.
This hypocrisy has reared its professionally indignant head once again in the stoush between rival captains Steve Smith and Virat Kohli during the Second Test between Australia and India at M. Chinnaswamy Stadium, Bangalore. What had been a hotly contested contest in a hotly contested series blew into outright hostility when Smith appeared to look to his dressing room for consultation in considering referring his LBW dismissal. With a great game of cricket at a crucial turning point – and previous complaints of the same action levelled at Smith over the match’s first three days – it’s no surprise that Kohli and central umpire Nigel Llong immediately remonstrated with the Australian.
Consulting the dressing room for advice on referring a DRS decision is explicitly forbidden by the International Cricket Council Standard Test Match Playing Conditions for 2016-17, which states that “in particular, signals from the dressing room must not be given”.
All black and white, you would think. Not unfairly, Kohli called Smith out for his actions in his post-match press conference while very deliberately and obviously avoiding labelling his counterpart a cheat.
“We make our decisions on the field ourselves,” said Kohli. “We don’t make our decision upstairs… it’s happened twice that I’ve seen their players looking upstairs for confirmation. There’s a line that you don’t cross on the cricket field… I don’t want to mention the word but it falls in that bracket. I would never do something like that on the cricket field.”
In his own presser and to his credit, Smith apologised for what he had done, calling the act a “brain fade”, and vowed to not do it again. Professionalism and cool heads all round.
Yet it seems that the fires back home are far out-burning those on the front line. Scroll through any social media comment section and you’ll find a cavalcade of pithy, bitter vile stabbed at Virat Kohli.
Even Cricket Australia CEO James Sutherland saw fit to explode his way into the conversation in a rush of blood to the head. Sutherland described Kohli’s accusations as “outrageous”, elaborating that "[Cricket Australia] reject any commentary that suggests our integrity was brought into disrepute or that systemic unfair tactics are used, and stand by Steve and the Australian cricketers who are proudly representing our country”.
Are we such sore losers that we can’t take a step back in this instance? Does patriotic barracking blind our objective analysis of what happened in Bangalore?
Virat Kohli has been portrayed as the pantomime villain for doing nothing more than holding Steve Smith to the rules. And it’s extraordinary how short and selective our memories can be.
After all, have we not just spent four long, perpetually tiresome years demanding that the Essendon Football Club be held accountable for their illegal and potentially dangerous supplements program? And is Smith’s sneaky consultation really so different to Novak Djokovic’s blasé, widely condemned 2015 confession that he regularly bent the interpretations of tennis rules by communicating on court with coach Boris Becker? I certainly seem to remember being part of a very large contingent demanding South African Test captain Faf du Plessis be hauled over the coals for tampering with the ball with a mint during play in last year’s Hobart Test. Nonetheless, even I was a little quizzical about the mob rule that tried and lynched Stuart Broad for refusing to walk after obviously edging a delivery but being unfathomably spared by umpire Aleem Dar during the first Test of the 2013 Ashes series at Trent Bridge. After all, isn’t that the Australian way? To let the umpire do his job and have faith that the good and bad decisions cancel each other out.
Steve Smith used a resource neither legally available to him nor fairly available to all players. To attempt to defend him or somehow distract the issue by attacking Virat Kohli is to do both men and a great match of Test cricket a disservice. Yet it is a habit that has crept into the way we watch Test cricket. And we won’t be able to reasonably discuss cricket until we own up to it.
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