Ask anyone about funny stories from sledging and inevitably they will talk about those five stories that have been spat out a thousand times.
That one about Viv Richards being sledged by Glamorgan fast bowler Greg Thomas in a county game in Taunton is the first obvious candidate. After getting Richards to play and miss a few deliveries, Thomas piped up, “It’s red, round and weighs about five ounces, in case you were wondering.” Richards duly noted the fact and dispatched the next delivery into the river surrounding the ground. As Thomas walked back to his run up dejected, people scurried to retrieve the ball, provoking Richards’ famous reply: “Hey Greg man, since you know what it looks like, why not go and help.”
It’s funny, because it’s innocent, comes attached with a ‘moral of the story’, and because it happens to an Englishman (surely you didn’t expect this story to flow without a sledge or two in the direction of the English). But not all sledging is so richly annotative, repetitive or even admired. Some of it is cute, there are two stories that are brilliant, and of course they stop being funny when it’s about a man’s dead wife.
In the early years of this millennium, it was the Australians who sledged. They were brilliant at cricket of course, unbeatable even, and to top it off they were the “masters of mental disintegration”, in other words the “art of sledging” or the men who were always around to prove that they were men. Dishing it out with ease, no matter the opponent, Steve Waugh, Ricky Ponting, Shane Warne, you name the lot… they were the quintessential faces to a sledging match.
Except they weren’t always good at taking it themselves, and even if the returns did often cross the line (most famously when it happened to Glenn McGrath), it proved that “we be men” wasn’t a code of virtue, it was proof of idiocy.
Soon other countries followed suit, and in the Age of Virat Kohli, India were the sledgers supreme. Ravi Shastri famously told his wards that “if one came your way, give them three back”, a sentence that was celebrated and replayed across Indian media. A truth that soon spread into the lower levels of the game (a routine hot weather tournament game in Delhi now has as much sledging as a boiling Ashes game at the MCG) and resulted in West Zone captain Ajinkya Rahane having to send his own teammate to the dressing room — for some water and bit of cooling down, no doubt — because he was sledging the opposition too hard in their recently concluded Duleep Trophy game.
It isn’t enough to be good, but also to be bad and terrible and mean and monstrous. Be great athletes, but not sportsmen. Be men.
This of course is thin ice to tread. There is always a lot of vagueness about where exactly the line of acceptability around sledging is drawn — even if, in the grand tradition of invisible lines, it proves ineffective — but perhaps the important question to ask is if sledging even works?
A study conducted in 2018 by academics at the University of Birmingham and published in the Journal of Sports Sciences, found that being abused or verbally distracted while taking a free throw on a basketball did not affect overall shooting performance. Performance was assessed by the number of successful throws. The shooters’ anger and attention were measured afterwards. A control group was also in effect. The academics concluded that while verbal antisocial behaviour had no overall direct effect on performance, it provoked anger in some participants, a number of whom fed off it.
There are limitations to the study of course. First, it isn’t cricket. And secondly, shooting free throws in an empty gym with academics for observers is very different from being abused at a packed MCG, when you have batted for over five hours in the dry Australian heat.
Regardless, it’s worth considering why male cricketers (and male sportspersons overall) sledge at all (a lack of significant broadcast of women’s sport limits information about the standard and reach of sledging in sport, but it can safely be said that since no major incidents really come to mind, it is probably, thankfully, still in its infancy) when there are little to no obvious benefits to be found from it. Is the ‘banter’ really worth the effort? Why not spend it galvanising your own teammates or rustling up some jokes that could actually energise the game?
While Rahane’s actions were impressive, there is a reason it has gathered headlines — it’s unique and perhaps never to be seen again. The player Rahane sent off to cool down in the dressing room was Yashaswi Jaiswal, who, incidentally, scored a double century that helped West Zone win the game. He was, quite obviously, adjudged player of the match. And yet, the headlines were about the abuses he may or may not have uttered and how it provoked his “sending off” from the game.
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