Fair Play and Good Behaviour

"But we understand there's a line you can't cross. You can go close to it, but you can't cross it. I think generally Australians play cricket extremely fairly, and play sport extremely fairly."
 ~ Michael Clarke

Clarke has come out in defence of his team's behaviour. I think this deserves some calling out.

Drawing a line between fair play and good behaviour is a red herring. Clarke and his men certainly do play fair, in that they don't cheat. If anything they tend to play fairer than average. Australian teams tend to see fewer match fixing scandals, fewer bent-elbowed spinners, and more walkers than other teams.

But good behaviour is not the same as fair play. Over the last two years Clarke's team has regularly crossed the line into unacceptable behaviour for a cricket field. There's prior here. Australian sledging has always been legendary, and Steve Waugh's doctrine of mental disintegration was well known. Both skirt the line bordering on boorish behaviour; neither are against the rules of the game. Clarke's men have physically confronted umpires and opposition players en mass, which crosses way over the line of what's acceptable. That behaviour might be tolerated on soccer fields, but it has no place in a game of cricket.

The Australians get away with this because of their place in the Big Three and because the morality of world cricket is still overwhelmingly Anglo-centric. Imagine if the Bangladeshi team massed to confront an umpire about a decision. If a Pakistani player sprouted some of David Warner's lines to the media. If the West Indian fielders broke out in dog howls to see a batsman off (and if it was a Muslim batsman?). Those players and teams would have been instantly and heavily disciplined.

The rest of the cricketing world is going to need to put up with Clarke and his team's ugly and ungentlemanly behaviour, because the authorities are on his side. That sword cuts both ways, so the most that the rest of us can look forward to is watching some disrespectful bad behaviour from Virat Kohli when India visit the land of Oz.