Fair play in the age of professionalism: Cricket’s integrity questioned

There is no other sport on planet Earth which, theoretically at least, bends so far over backwards to burnish the principles of fair play and “sportsmanship” as cricket does.

That sense of doing the right thing is encapsulated by the old saying to describe injustice or incorrect behaviour: “It’s just not cricket…”

At the venerated Long Room at Lord’s cricket ground on Sunday, it certainly was not cricket for the angry members of the Marylebone Cricket Club (MCC) to verbally abuse Australian cricketers after the controversial dismissal of England batsman Jonny Bairstow during the crucial second Ashes Test.

It’s just not the done thing, old chap (and most of them were old chaps)… so the MCC suspended three alleged miscreants pending an investigation.

The “protesters” believed, though, that it went against the spirit of the game for Aussie wicketkeeper Alex Carey to stump Bairstow while the latter supposedly believed the ball was dead at the end of the over.

Mind you, they also seem to have amnesia when it came to Bairstow himself trying to do a similar thing to Australia’s Marnus Labuschagne on day three of the Test.

No less a personality than British Prime Minister Richi Sunak threw his moral support behind his countrymen but stressed that the angry reaction was uncalled for.

For South Africans, there are two things to say about this.

First, the English are world champions in both whingeing and taking offence, demonstrating both talents on Sunday.

Second, the Australians at least this time didn’t have to resort to the use of sandpaper to swing a Test their way, as happened some years ago at Newlands…

The real question is: are such ideas of fair play – conjured up by the “flannelled fools” who invented up the game – still relevant in 21st century professional sport?