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Giving lip like this is not cricket

Sledging, as many cricket fans know, originated in Australia where the game is played hard. But what precisely is the word origin of ‘sledging’? According to Ian Chappell, who should know, the term originated in Adelaide in the early 1960s. For a cricketer to use foul language in the presence of a woman was compared to the action of a sledgehammer. The cricketer was called a Percy or Sledge, after Percy Sledge (best known for the song ‘When a Man Loves a Woman’). Sledging aims to apply pressure on the opponent through a barrage of borderline playful, now increasingly taunting, words. It is not just that, in contemporary cricket, sledging has been given open general licence; it is a prized skill, speaking to competitiveness and originality. Steve Waugh’s euphemism, ‘mental disintegration,’ conferred some legitimacy on the practice; and Australia’s domination made it fashionable. In cricket where physical contact is frustratingly minimal — where the nature of the game provides no real opportunity to kick, trip, push, hold, charge, strike, or spit at, not to mention head-butt, an opponent — the contemporary way of asserting competitive edge is to give lip, the more colourful and provocative, the better. These days, giving lip has become truly multi-lingual: you might hope to get away with saying in Hindi, Urdu, Sinhala, Tamil, Bangla, Malayalam, or Afrikaans what you cannot really say in English (not with the stump mikes on, at any rate). Sledging, especially ganging up on a player to upset his mental equilibrium, must be distinguished from exchanging of words in the heat of battle. If the International Cricket Council does not act decisively to check sledging, invoking its powers under law 42.4, it might as well petition reputed dictionaries of usage to omit the cliché for unfair conduct, ‘it isn’t cricket.’

A fine contest between bat and ball in the second England-India Test was marred by displays of unseemly behaviour — on both sides. The inane chatter of England’s prime offender, wicket keeper Matt Prior, should have been stopped in its tracks. Merv Hughes’s witticism aimed at Graeme Hick — “Mate, if you just turn the bat over you’ll find the instructions on the other side” — sounds positively sporting in comparison with the non-stop audio streaming Indian batsmen were treated to at Trent Bridge. As for whoever tossed jelly beans at Zaheer Khan — which had the unintended effect of sharpening his focus, according to pundits in the English press — he was executing a juvenile variation of the art of sledging. But the Indians were not blameless: Sreesanth bumped into Michael Vaughan and was fined 50 per cent of his match fee. But he should have also been punished for the vicious beamer at Kevin Pietersen, no question about that.

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