Playing the Game?: Cricket's Tarnished Ideals from Bodyline to the Present

By Mark Peel

Of all games, cricket has long prided itself on its ethical traditions, but to modern skeptics the idea of cricket encapsulating a higher morality is actually something of a myth. Playing the Game? looks at the changing ethics of cricket, from its gentlemanly roots right up until the present day. After decades of sledging, intimidatory bowling, blatant gamesmanship and dissent, the MCC adopted "The Spirit of Cricket" in 2000 in an attempt to reclaim the game's original ethos—but was it already too late? While the concept is a noble one, its impact has so far been limited, as award-winning cricket scribe Mark Peel explains. As well as looking back to the infamous Bodyline series of 1932/33, Peel also investigates the effects of Kerry Packer's World Series Cricket; takes the ICC to task on their failure to quell rowdy behavior and gamesmanship; examines the double standards of Western cricketing nations towards Pakistan; and delves into the recent ball-tampering affair that has tainted Aussie cricket.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Independent Publishers Group
• Release date: Sep 20, 2018
• ISBN: 9781785314667

Book preview

Peel

Introduction

FEW passages of Test cricket have proved as riveting as the confrontation between Michael Atherton and Allan Donald during the fourth day of the fourth Test between England and South Africa at Trent Bridge in July 1998. Needing 247 to win, England had reached 87/1 when Atherton deflected a Donald bouncer to wicketkeeper Mark Boucher and was given not out by New Zealand umpire Steve Dunne, much to Donald’s consternation. Convulsed by fury, Donald then threw everything at Atherton in a blistering six-over spell which Atherton survived unscathed, living to fight another day. The spectacle captivated the nation, especially as Atherton carried on the good work the next day to see England through to a highly satisfying eight-wicket victory; but one person disturbed by the physical and verbal confrontation was Colin Cowdrey, one of England’s greatest batsmen and former chairman of the International Cricket Council (ICC).

In a stellar career between 1950 and 1976, Cowdrey, an England captain on 27 occasions, was the essence of decorum both on and off the field. Raised by a cricket-loving father and tutored by austere schoolmasters whose word was law, he learned to revere the game and embrace its finest traditions. With his natural modesty and charm, he was a cricketing idol to many, and although not averse to a touch of gamesmanship in his unwillingness to always ‘walk’ for a thin edge to the wicketkeeper, this was a minor flaw in relation to a life of service to the game. It was entirely appropriate that, given his concern about declining standards of cricketing etiquette, he was the driving force behind MCC’s Spirit of Cricket, a preamble to the recodification of the Laws of Cricket in 2000, commending the values of fair play and respect for one’s opponents. It was an appeal that won support from the majority of the English cricket establishment and many cricket lovers the world over. Yet for all the efforts invested in spreading its message, it has had only limited effect in restoring cricket’s lost soul, so that after a particularly acrimonious Test match between Australia and India at Sydney in January 2008, Jeremy Cowdrey, Colin’s second son, felt moved to write to the Daily Telegraph to ask whether the Spirit of Cricket still meant something important or was just an empty phrase.

To Michael Atherton, the former England captain turned cricket journalist, it was the latter, ‘a myth promulgated by Victorian moralists rather than an accurate reflection of the game as played by human beings rather than Gods’.¹ Yet even if we accept this view, and that of social historian Derek Birley that ‘Cricket, in particular, had been plagued by nostalgia since people first began to think it worth writing about’, the Victorian ethos of fair play won allegiance not only on the playing fields of Eton, but also across broad swathes of the Empire.² ‘From the eight years of school life this code became the moral framework of my existence,’ wrote renowned West Indian writer and political activist C.L.R. James, who grew up in Trinidad at the beginning of the last century. ‘It has never left me.’³ Many others in the Caribbean thought the same. ‘I always saw cricket as a noble sport and I tried to play in the true spirit of the game,’ recalled Gary Sobers, the great West Indian all-rounder.⁴

It was the same ethos which had always inspired Bill Woodfull, the Australian captain in the bodyline series of 1932/33, and which he articulated with devastating effect to MCC manager Pelham Warner during the Adelaide Test, when he said that one side was playing cricket and one wasn’t. It was to combat the genius of Don Bradman, Australia’s run-making machine, that England captain Douglas Jardine had resorted to the tactics of bodyline: intimidatory bowling at the head and upper body (see Chapter 1). He justified such tactics by claiming that they in no way contravened the laws of the game, and on this he was supported by most of his countrymen back home. It was only when bodyline made a brief but bloody appearance in England in 1933 that opinion quickly changed, prompting an amendment to the laws that outlawed fast short-pitched balls aimed specifically at the batsman.

Following bodyline, England–Australia Tests returned to more traditional standards of rivalry, but beneath the outward bonhomie the bitterness lingered. Bradman, for one, never forgot the humiliation heaped upon his compatriots by Jardine, and when Australia unearthed two exceptional speed merchants in Ray Lindwall and Keith Miller post-war, it was England’s turn to feel the heat, none more so than their revered opener Len Hutton (see Chapter 2). Beginning with a fusillade of bouncers on a treacherous wicket at Brisbane in the first Test of the 1946/47 series, they rarely let up thereafter. In England in 1948, Bradman’s final tour, the popular Miller was roundly booed at Trent Bridge for bowling persistently short at Hutton and Denis Compton. In the opinion of Compton’s team-mate Bill Edrich, Bradman was the best captain he’d encountered, ‘but nearly all cricketers agree that, since 1945, Australia under his captaincy had shown more ruthlessness, more cold-blooded determination to win, even at the cost of happy relationships, than any country has displayed, in 1932/33 or on any other occasion at all’.⁵ In time, Hutton fought back with Frank Tyson in Australia in 1954/55, as did Ray Illingworth with John Snow there in 1970/71, proving that any side with the necessary firepower would deploy it to the maximum effect.

During the later 1950s, the cricket world had been preoccupied by the vexed question of throwing, a question that Bradman, by now Australia’s leading cricket administrator, called one of the most complex because it was so open to opinion and interpretation (see Chapter 3). Confronted with evidence that was often ambivalent, umpires and administrators tended to turn a blind eye to suspect actions, leaving bowlers such as South Africa’s Cuan McCarthy and England’s Tony Lock free to ply their trade. By the time of England’s ill-fated tour of Australia in 1958/59, every state except Queensland had a fast bowler with a suspect action. Not wishing to disturb the waters – Australia hadn’t complained about the ill-prepared Test wickets in England in 1956 – MCC suffered in silence against the throwers. They did, however, warn their hosts that they intended to confront the matter on their return, and the Australians, appreciating the gravity of the situation, attended the Imperial Cricket Conference at Lord’s in July 1960. (They were normally represented by proxies.) The conference vowed to rid the game of throwing, and Bradman, in his role as chairman of selectors, returned home determined to act. It was a task he accomplished with his customary efficiency, culminating in the no-balling of Australian opening bowler Ian Meckiff for throwing against South Africa at Brisbane in November 1963 and his retirement from the game.

By then, Lock had rectified his action and South Africa’s Geoff Griffin had retired after being repeatedly called on his team’s tour of England in 1960, leaving West Indian Charlie Griffith and Derbyshire’s Harold Rhodes as the prime suspects. Although the former was called only twice during his career, it was enough to condemn him following a life-threatening injury he had inflicted on Indian captain Nari Contractor. Various opponents labelled him a ‘chucker’, particularly for his bouncer and yorker, helping to embitter the West Indies’ relations with England and Australia at a racially sensitive time. Three decades later, the throwing controversy was revived around the genial personality of Sri Lankan spinner Muttiah Muralitharan, when once again it proved extremely difficult to resolve satisfactorily.

In the 1960s, most cricketers continued to abide by an accepted code of sportsmanship which, above all, placed the authority of the umpire as paramount – but this was a decade of rapid change, when traditional authority and age-old certainties gave way to a dynamic youth culture addicted to greater freedom. In this more liberal climate, with greater social and recreational activities available, the stagnant cricket of that era was fast losing its popular appeal (see Chapter 4). It needed the onset of the one-day game, with its monetary rewards and more extensive television coverage, to revitalise cricket – but in this new competitive environment, players marched to a more discordant drumbeat. Spurred on by the greater financial rewards now available, the 1970s generation, opinionated and materialist, was less bound by the conventions of the past. Led by Australian teams at both national and state levels, players increasingly resorted to gamesmanship, verbal abuse and dissent, placing additional pressure on the umpires (see Chapter 5). The advent of Australian entrepreneur Kerry Packer’s World Series Cricket, with its gladiatorial atmosphere, partisan crowds and lucrative rewards, only accentuated such trends: West Indian Colin Croft barging into New Zealand umpire Fred Goodall, Australia’s Dennis Lillee aiming a kick at Pakistan’s Javed Miandad, and Greg Chappell, the Australian captain, instructing his brother Trevor to bowl an underarm grubber to win a one-day match against New Zealand (see Chapter 6).

In an era when fast bowlers became fitter and stronger, nothing compared to the abundance of West Indian pacemen during the 1970s and 1980s (see Chapter 7). Their fitness and skill couldn’t be faulted, but their sluggish over rate, their preponderance of short-pitched bowling and the physical threat posed to batsmen raised uncomfortable questions about whether they were flouting the spirit of cricket. These questions had rarely been asked in Australia in 1975/76, when the West Indians were on the receiving end of a fearful onslaught from the Australian fast bowlers Dennis Lillee and Jeff Thomson. Yet once the boot was on the other foot, the West Indians were accused of brutalising the game. After seeing them overwhelm England in the Caribbean in 1986, the Sunday Times cricket correspondent Robin Marlar wrote that current West Indian cricket had become ‘a missile out of control which will kill cricket, all cricket, including their own. Even protected, the England players bore bruises which would horrify the toughest among us, and bring tears to their maiden aunts.’⁶

A couple of years later in Australia, the West Indies won convincingly, but once again their style of cricket left most of the critics cold. According to Keith Rigg, an Australian batsman in the 1930s, the West Indian bowling was worse than bodyline because there was no let-up and many more batsmen were hit; while to Australia’s captain, Allan Border, his team could think only of survival as opposed to playing shots.

‘The West Indians took a long time arriving at the top, repeatedly suffering the kind of humiliating indignities it is now inflicting on its erstwhile masters,’ countered Tony Cozier, the respected West Indian cricket journalist. ‘Clive Lloyd is not the only one who still rankles when his side’s developing excellence is somehow interpreted as endangering the game.’⁷ They pointed to the tacit approval they had received from umpires the world over – but, while this was essentially true, it merely exposed the ambiguity of the law on intimidatory bowling, which was difficult to police and open to different interpretations. It wasn’t until the ICC placed a limit of two bouncers an over in 1994, and the decline of West Indian dominance, that batsmen could breathe a touch more easily.

Amid the turbulence of the 1980s, few countries created such an impression as Pakistan. Once the novices of the international game, they emerged from their chrysalis a talented, swashbuckling team whose flair and ingenuity were matched only by their disregard for cricketing protocol. Touring there had always been an exacting experience given its Islamic culture and the vexed question of its umpiring – but, in an age of instant communication, such grievances received unprecedented exposure, never more so than on England’s tour in 1987/88 (see Chapter 8).

After two rancorous tours to England in 1982 and in 1987 when they had criticised the home umpires, the Pakistanis were in no mood to accommodate England’s request to change the officials. In the first Test at Lahore, Mike Gatting’s side were undone by the genius of Pakistani leg-spinner Abdul Qadir, aided by some dubious umpiring. When opener Chris Broad was given out caught behind off spinner Iqbal Qasim in the second innings, the decision so outraged him that initially he refused to walk. His defiance brought widespread condemnation, although not from the England management. The most they did was to reprimand him, while reserving most of their spleen for the umpiring, insinuating that it had lacked impartiality.

Their resentment was further fuelled by the appointment of the egregious Shakoor Rana, an umpire renowned for niggling touring sides, for the second Test at Faisalabad. England batted first and took command on the second day, but, after an afternoon of petty wrangling with Shakoor in Pakistan’s first innings, Gatting went head-to-head with the umpire in an ugly finger-wagging confrontation that shocked the cricket world. Many England supporters sympathised with their captain given the provocation he had endured, but his demeanour, according to former Wisden editor Graeme Wright, ignored more than cricket’s code of the umpire’s word being law. ‘It overlooked an essence of English cricket that appears to be a weakness and is in fact its great strength: there is more to the game than the game itself.’⁸ Repeated gripes about Pakistani umpiring convinced Pakistan captain Imran Khan that independent umpires should officiate all Test matches, and when England and Australia opposed his proposal because it would deprive their officials of standing in home Tests, he accused them of opportunism. Independent umpires in Pakistan’s home series against the West Indies in 1986/87 and India in 1989/90 had helped keep the peace, a welcome contrast to the discontent the world over caused by mediocre umpiring. It was the increasing failure of umpires to hold the line against disorder on the field that prompted Colin Cowdrey, the first elected chairman of the ICC, to propose one independent umpire for each Test, accompanied by a new Code of Conduct and an international match referee (see Chapter 9). The reforms, introduced in 1992, heralded an orchestrated fightback by the custodians of the game, but, in truth, progress was painfully slow as their bark proved greater than their bite.

Few of the game’s ills proved more taxing to deal with than that of verbal abuse towards opponents, often referred to as sledging. Comments, witty, barbed and mildly insulting, were nothing new on the cricket field, but they were normally uttered on the spur of the moment and were rarely personal. In the early 1970s, this all began to change when the abuse became much more coordinated, frequent and offensive. Originating in Australian domestic cricket, it was given wings by their national cricket team and soon spread its tentacles to most forms of the game, right down to club level. While its practice was abhorred by traditionalists everywhere, contemporary opinion was more indulgent, viewing it as an acceptable part of the game, provided it wasn’t too personal, although exactly what constituted a personal harangue was very much open to interpretation. With umpires unwilling or unable to intervene – some of the chat among the close-in field was out of earshot – those teams that prided themselves on being good scrappers led the way in mouthing profanities, none more so than the great Australian side of the 1990s (see Chapter 10).

Following the decline of Australian cricket in the mid-1980s, it took several years of hard graft under Allan Border’s leadership to restore its fortunes. Criticised for being too friendly with the opposition on their 1985 tour of England, Border returned there four years later, a feistier figure intent on sacrificing all civilities to the greater cause of winning. The rumbustious approach helped his team to a 4–0 triumph, unleashing a golden era in Australian cricket, but one tainted by conduct unbecoming to a great team. When Australia, once again under Border’s leadership, retained the Ashes in England in 1993, Wisden felt moved to admonish them for their vocal abuse. The next year in South Africa, in Border’s final series, two of his leading players, Merv Hughes and Shane Warne, were fined by the match referee for obscene and offensive language towards an opponent.

Under Border’s affable successor, Mark Taylor, the boorishness diminished, only to be revived under the next captain, Steve Waugh. After a plethora of disciplinary lapses by his team at the beginning of 2003, fast bowler Glenn McGrath then became embroiled in an unseemly confrontation with West Indian batsman Ramnaresh Sarwan in the Antigua Test that May. The backlash in Australia was so widespread that its cricket administrators vowed to wipe the slate clean (see Chapter 14). In concert with the players, they introduced a Spirit of Cricket protocol committing Australia to playing the game fairly, and for the next 18 months they broadly lived up to that resolution without losing their winning ways until the 2005 tour of England. There, in a spectacular series full of captivating cricket, they lost the Ashes for the first time in 16 years, prompting accusations back home that they had gone soft. Determined to regain their former ascendancy, the Australians thereafter played with an aggression that, protestations aside, appeared out of kilter with their new-found ideals. Several players faced disciplinary sanctions, but as far as the team were concerned it was a price worth paying for a record-breaking run of 16 Test wins between 2006 and 2008. It was in the last of those Tests, against India at Sydney, a particularly unsavoury match in which gamesmanship and abuse abounded, that they fell under critical scrutiny. According to defeated Indian captain Anil Kumble, in echoes of Bill Woodfull in 1932/33, there was only one side playing cricket – his side – and, in a significant show of support, most of the Australian public agreed with him. According to Mark Nicholas, the former Hampshire captain turned cricket writer and commentator, Australian captain Ricky Ponting’s vision of fair play didn’t extend beyond the Australian dressing room. ‘His reluctance to connect with views contrary to his own crystallises the problem faced by the game. The players don’t fully realise what the true spirit is. Hard and fair is a cliché that tells us nothing. They see their approach as the norm. No one has had the guts to suggest otherwise.’⁹

Yet if Australia had violated the spirit of the game with their uncouth behaviour, the Indians were little better. Their disciplinary record was the worst in international cricket over the previous decade, and when the two teams had competed in a recent one-day series in India, Australian all-rounder Andrew Symonds, a man of partial Afro-Caribbean descent, had been subjected to monkey chants by sections of the crowd. Symonds had also allegedly been called a monkey by Harbhajan Singh, India’s feisty off-spinner, and during the Sydney Test several Australian fielders were convinced they had heard him repeat the slur. Having had Darren Lehmann, one of their players, suspended for using racist language in a match against Sri Lanka in 2003, the Australians were insistent that Harbhajan was brought to book now that they were the injured party. Match referee Mike Procter, the former South African all-rounder, found against Harbhajan and suspended him for three Tests, whereupon the Indians took umbrage. They threatened to abandon the rest of the tour unless the ruling was reversed, and Steve Bucknor, one of the umpires responsible for several questionable decisions at Sydney, was replaced for the next Test. By flexing their muscles so crudely, the tourists forfeited much of the sympathy they had previously elicited in Australia, but their brinkmanship had its desired effect. Fearing a massive financial loss, Cricket Australia, the sport’s governing body in that country, danced to the tune of the powerful Board of Control for Cricket in India (BCCI), replacing Bucknor and ensuring that Harbhajan was charged with the lesser offence of using offensive language. Left floundering amid the turbulent currents of high politics and finance, the ICC had once again failed to restore cricket’s good name.

While the West Indies were shaping the cricketing weather in the 1980s and Australia in the 1990s, England were left to dangle in the wind, their flabby defences cruelly exposed by the power of the elements. After yet another Ashes defeat in 1997, their leading batsman Nasser Hussain lamented the lack of a hard-edged ethos in county cricket and called on his countrymen to emulate the Australians in their approach. Two years later, on becoming captain, Hussain and new coach Duncan Fletcher set about putting the roar back into the English lion (see Chapter 17). A new swagger and aggression appeared, which reaped rich dividends under Hussain’s successors, even though it did little to advance the spirit of the game. While England led the world in 2011/12, their style of cricket won overwhelming support from their partisan supporters, but when on the receiving end of a verbal and physical battering by the Australians in Australia in 2013/14 they found that sympathy was in short supply. They had been hoisted by their own petard.

In July 2014, England fast bowler James Anderson, a veteran of many an Ashes altercation, clashed with Indian all-rounder Ravindra Jadeja during the first Test at Trent Bridge. After a mutual exchange of insults, Indian captain M.S. Dhoni, Jadeja’s partner at the time, accused Anderson of physically assaulting Jadeja and, against the advice of his superiors, insisted that he should be charged under the ICC’s Code of Conduct. The charge was thrown out by the Australian commissioner because of a lack of evidence, but the case did highlight the latent antagonism between the two sides. While Anderson was encouraged by his captain to continue to display aggression, he did tone down his sledging without any ill effect on his bowling.

On 24 November 2014, the world of cricket was plunged into grief by the tragic death of Australian batsman Phillip Hughes, struck on the neck when playing for South Australia against New South Wales. At his funeral, Australia captain Michael Clarke talked of the need to take stock and learn from Hughes’s ability to bring cricketers the world over together. Yet these fine sentiments lacked substance when, days later, Australia played India in an ill-tempered series in which several players from both sides were fined for various misdemeanours. Australian boorishness was again on display during the World Cup Final against New Zealand in March 2015, proving graceless victors against opponents who had rediscovered the art of playing cricket with a smile. Undaunted by their defeat, New Zealand, under charismatic captain Brendon McCullum, vowed to keep playing their brand of enterprising cricket devoid of personal abuse – and on their tour of England that summer, they lived up to expectation, so much so that they won plenty of new friends (see Chapter 18).

Another encouraging pointer was Pakistan’s more courtly approach under dignified captain Misbah-ul-Haq – yet these were but flashes of sunlight in an otherwise capricious climate. The unrealistic expectations that Victorian moralists placed upon the game have become increasingly difficult to uphold in an ever more competitive era. With the Spirit of Cricket meaning different things to different people, the game remains riven by moral confusion, reflecting the uncertainties of the age we live in.

Chapter 1

‘Well bowled, Harold’

CRICKET has always been a controversial game, and never more so than during England’s 1932/33 tour of Australia, when Douglas Jardine’s side challenged the very bounds of sportsmanship. The sequence of events of the infamous bodyline series are too well known to recount in detail, but what’s of interest is how the ethical foundations of the game cracked all too easily.

Following the evangelical revival in early 19th-century Britain, the cult of athleticism took root in its elite public schools from 1850 onwards, with physical exercise turned into a moral virtue. According to historian Jeffrey Richards, the whole ethos of athleticism could be summed up in three words – ‘play the game’ – which meant abiding by the spirit of the game, as well as the laws, so as not to gain an unfair advantage over an opponent. ‘This morality was synonymous with that of the chivalric knight – magnanimity in victory, dignity in defeat, hatred of injustice, decency and modesty in all things.’¹⁰ Yet according to distinguished sports historian J.A. Mangan, the idealistic world of Tom Brown seldom matched the reality of late 19th-century public schools, where kindness was often lacking. ‘The playing fields were the place where public schools put into practice their own distinctive brand of Social Darwinism; in games only the fittest survived and triumphed.’¹¹

This paradox between sporting ideal and reality was later re-enacted on many a foreign field. Imperialists saw cricket as a means of civilising the Empire and reconciling the natives to British rule, but its high moral tone concealed a more ruthless competitive streak. ‘Beneath the stuffy, benign image of public service cultivated by British imperialism lay a more strident belief in the mission of the English people,’ wrote historian Richard Holt. ‘The English, after all, had been the first to personify the nation in the robust shape of John Bull; they were also the first to have a national anthem. Sports were not just the source of high-minded ideals, they were inseparably associated with the more down-to-earth, assertive and patriotic Englishness.’¹² W.G. Grace was an English national hero not because of his moral conscience but because of his forceful personality and will to win. According to Simon Rae, one of Grace’s biographers, it was his highly competitive cricketing upbringing in the family home in Gloucestershire that bred in him a single-minded ruthlessness that overrode considerations of propriety and fair play. Notorious for his excessive appealing, abuse of opponents and hectoring of umpires, W.G. never walked, never recalled a batsman even when he knew he had been unfairly dismissed, and would exploit any chink in an opponent’s armour to his own advantage. Playing for the Gentlemen against the Players in 1874 and standing at the non-striker’s end, he obstructed the bowler, James Lillywhite, as he was about to catch his brother, Fred Grace; in 1893, he persuaded Nottinghamshire batsman Charles Wright to throw him back the ball, only then to get him dismissed for handling the ball; and in 1898, bowling for Gloucestershire, he caught and bowled Essex batsman Percy Perrin on the half-volley.

Grace reserved some of his most blatant gamesmanship for the Australians. At Sydney, playing for his XI against a Combined Fifteen from Victoria and New South Wales in 1873/74, he led his team off in protest when the crowd took exception to some dubious umpiring; then, against Victoria, he so abused the umpire after he’d awarded a boundary to the home team that the umpire refused to continue officiating. ‘He had gone to Australia pledging to maintain the honour of English cricket, and to uphold the high character of English cricketers and it cannot be said he did either,’ wrote Rae. ‘In fact he quickly exhausted almost limitless funds of personal goodwill towards him and his team.’¹³ In the Oval Test of 1882, Grace ran out Australia’s Sammy Jones, who, having completed a single, left his crease to repair the wicket – a breach of sporting etiquette that infuriated Australia’s legendary fast bowler Fred Spofforth, especially since he had earlier spared England captain A.N. Hornby from a similar fate. Having told Grace that he was a cheat, Spofforth then decimated England for the second time in the match, his 7–44 propelling Australia to a historic 7-run victory, a win that heralded the birth of the Ashes.

Grace’s second tour of Australia, in 1891/92, was no less acrimonious than his first, his lack of courtesy off the field matched by his gamesmanship on it. In the second Test at Sydney, he persuaded the umpire to give debutant Walter Giffen out by claiming a catch on the half-volley, and, when batting, he waved a glove at the umpire in response to a confident lbw appeal. Despite Grace’s shenanigans, England lost the match and the Ashes, a blow which did nothing to lighten his mood. Against the Twenty-Two Juniors of Sydney, he so insulted umpire E.J. Briscoe with stinging barbs about his performance that the latter stood down immediately.

Grace’s gamesmanship wasn’t the only instance of sharp practice in these early contests for the Ashes. According to Australian journalist and cricket writer Malcolm Knox, ‘the truth is that Anglo-Australian cricket up to 1914 was cricket in the raw. Cricket was never a gentleman’s game. It was a highly competitive affair played with desperation for the highest stakes.’¹⁴ On England’s 1901/02 tour of Australia, their captain, Archie MacLaren, refused to lead his team out if New South Wales played their Aborigine fast bowler, Jack Marsh, who was suspected of throwing. During the first Test at Sydney in 1903/04, the controversial run-out of Australia’s Clem Hill so irked the crowd that England captain Pelham Warner had to be restrained by his opposite number, Monty Noble, from leading his team off the pitch. In the Headingley Test of 1909, it was the turn