Leo McKinstry

Not ‘cricket’s darkest hour’

Leo McKinstry says that the Pakistani players have behaved like spoilt children and that the sport has survived far worse controversies than this flurry of feeble pique

In the post-war history of English cricket, there have been few more universally respected figures than John Lever, the Essex left-arm bowler. Modest, friendly and hard-working, he was regarded by both colleagues and cricket followers as the ideal professional. But when he made his debut for England during a tour of India in 1976, he found himself embroiled in the kind of ball-tampering row which brought the last Test to a farcical conclusion and plunged the sport of cricket into a major crisis.

Unaccustomed to the sweltering heat of Delhi, Lever came up with the unorthodox idea of attaching a number of gauze strips to his forehead to stop the sweat running into his eyes. Fixed in place by Vaseline, the gauze appeared to have a remarkable effect on Lever’s bowling, as he ripped through the Indian line-up by swinging the ball prodigiously. The Indians accused England of using underhand methods to achieve victory, with Lever all but labelled a cheat by Indian captain Bishen Bedi.

Yet, unlike the tantrum-throwing Pakistanis, Lever and the England team reacted with utter stoicism. There was no hysterical talk of wounded national pride, no explosive protest. They just went on with the match and the series, eventually emerging triumphant by three Tests to one. The Indian skipper, Bedi, was a man well used to controversy. Earlier in the year, during a Test against the West Indies, he had declared his team’s second innings prematurely closed in protest at the intimidatory nature of the opposition’s pace bowling. In effect, he, not the present Pakistani leader Inzamam-ul-Haq, was the first Test captain to forfeit a game by refusing to participate, a fact which undermines some of the overexcited talk this week about the ‘unprecedented’ nature of events at the Oval.

Indeed, it is absurd that a dispute over a cricket ball in the fag end of a Test series should have been elevated into a geopolitical incident, winning far more media coverage than civil unrest in Iraq, home-grown terrorism or Iran’s nuclear programme.

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