Sledging – Modern Day Warfare

An article that I wrote for a cricket writing contest on a topic about which I have had very strong opinions 

Ice Hockey players are known to often trade punches during the course of the game, football has one provision for intentional physical aggression and several for verbal abuse, the all-blacks in rugby literally take aggression to a superlative degree of hostility by performing a war-dance on the field.

And where did good old cricket stand midst the myriad displays of legitimized aggression by other sports?

Cricket just like other occasions came up with a purportedly classy and original reply - Sledging. Sledging till now has served the inadequacies that arise due to cricket not being a contact sport. But the big question is where should one draw the line between not so friendly banter and trauma inducing verbal assaults?  

The proponents of sledging claim it to be a subtle act to gain strategic advantage over one’s opponent, an expression of a need to demonstrate authority, but far from being all that, this menace time and again seems to show its ugly colours and lends further strength to the argument that it (sledging) is indeed an absolutely irritating from of bullying.

Everyone knows that success in sport is obtained through the subtle marriage of ability, work-ethic, resilience and strategy. Behaviour, a personal choice or privilege worryingly misused by many, is definitely not a catalyst to the success equation. Many of the greatest players in cricket have let their performance do the talking. Rahul Dravid did not sledge the bowlers he pulverized; Shaun Pollock never stooped down to sweet-chin music, theirs was a form of aggression worthy of gentlemen. By resorting to sledging few teams consider themselves well equipped to handle the opponents even if the opponent team is the better one in conventional terms. They believe a loud mouth to be more powerful than the Brahmastra in war. The truth which says otherwise has still not dawned upon them.

A perspective of the bigger picture would suggest that the victim, apart from one of incidents like that of Jonathan Trott in the 2013 ashes, is so often the sledger. The act questions his fundamental morals. And unlike war he has to meet the opponent the next day in an altogether different setting like a friendly get-together in a bar, a charity match or an award function with families around. Our sporting community which is actually a small family can’t afford its members not looking into each others’ eyes. 

As the sledger and the ‘one sledged at’ do not obtain any substantial benefit or long term gratification out of the act and animosity is what results out of this conundrum, why is bullying often hyped as one of the causal reasons for on-field victory?

The answer lies in the question itself. It is the ‘hype’ and fabricated stories created by media and the so called pundits about certain aggressive teams of the past that has strongly ingrained this behaviour in the new generation gentlemen2.0 Kohlis and the Johnsons. We should not forget that the Australian culture which is so often used as an excuse to explain their national teams’ antics, had also produced the Bradmans and Gilchrists who were gentleman embodiments.   

By ignoring and sometimes even celebrating sledging, our cricketing community, like a test veteran trying to slog awkwardly in the IPL, believes it is just embracing the zeitgeist. This transformation has provided initial success thanks to a headline hungry media thirsty for drama and most importantly the low attention span of the new breed of cricket watching public.  

Cricket has to choose either to serve the ephemeral pleasures of certain section of viewers and media moguls or to build a long standing edifice cleansed of all the mercurial behavior that it is comfortably ignoring currently. The future of the game that we love rests on this tough question that the administrators have in front of them.