In his book Playing Hardball, the former Test cricketer turned sportswriter
(and baseball aficionado) Ed Smith writes: “Cricket is notoriously difficult to
explain [to Americans], and I am only marginally more confident about
clarifying the rules of baseball to the Brits.”
In my experience, the latter isn’t hugely difficult to achieve. My parents might not have been able to tell a screwball
from a sacrifice fly when we walked through the doors of the Citi Field stadium
back in 2011 to see the New York Mets take on the San Diego Padres, but my
mother was the first one on her feet when the Mets smacked the winning run at
the bottom of the ninth, so she clearly had a good idea of what was going on. I’ve not yet had an opportunity to give one of
my friends from across the pond a crash course in cricket, but I don’t foresee
any major issues. How the sport works
really isn’t hard to grasp when you get down to it. Yes, there are dozens of fielding positions
rather than the nine of baseball, but you don’t need to know all of their (mostly
very stupid) names to identify when the captain has set an attacking field and when
they are playing safety first. Yes,
there are ten ways to get out (it used to be eleven), but in practice only
about half of them actually happen in games.
What’s much more difficult for non-fans to comprehend is the wider
culture surrounding the sport, particularly how it relates to received notions of
“fair play”.
The example I always use to
illustrate this is Mankading, a technique named after the former Indian international
Mulvantrai Himmatlal “Vinoo” Mankad.
Put simply, here’s what it entails.
As the bowler runs in to bowl, the batsman at the non-striker’s end almost
always takes a few paces out of their crease, so as to gain a slight advantage
in they are called upon to run to the
other end; the reasoning is that these few paces might make the difference
between making your ground and being run out.
In 1947, Mankad hit upon the idea of simply stopping his runup and
running the non-striker out once they had left their crease, a plan he
successfully executed in the Second Test against Australia. The Aussie media castigated Mankad for the
practice – and coined the term “Mankading” in the process – but the Indian had
his defenders, most notably the legendary batsman and then Australian captain, Don
Bradman, who remarked in his autobiography:
“For the life
of me, I can’t understand why [the press] questioned his sportsmanship. The laws of cricket make it quite clear that
the non-striker must keep within his ground until the ball has been delivered. If not, why is the provision there which
enables the bowler to run him out? By
backing up too far or too early, the non-striker is very obviously gaining an
unfair advantage.”
Bradman is correct; Mankading is
completely legal within the laws of the game.
Yet, because it is widely considered to be an unsportsmanlike act, you
very, very rarely see it performed, and when you do it is invariably
accompanied by an almighty media storm.
In the 2016 Under-19 World Cup, the West Indian team was labelled “absolutely
disgraceful” by former New Zealand skipper Stephen Fleming after bowler Keemo
Paul Mankaded the last batsman in a tightly-fought match against Zimbabwe, an
action that sealed his team’s place in the quarter-finals. On the other side of the coin, in 2003
Bangladesh passed up a clear opportunity to Mankad the star Pakistani player Inzamam
ul-Haq, but declined. Inzamam went on to
make 138 not out, and Pakistan prevailed by one wicket. Bangladesh, who at that point had never won a
Test match, would have to wait another six years for their inaugural win.
Now, while I’ve never tried to
teach the laws of cricket to an American, I have
attempted to explain Mankading. Without
exception, my US friends have reacted with utter disbelief to the whole discourse. The sport of bat and ball they are used to is
baseball, which contains among its many intricacies a version of
Mankading. The pitcher, if they sense
that the player on first base is attempting to steal a yard, is perfectly
entitled, instead of trying to strike out the batter, to throw the ball to first
base and try to tag the runner out. They
may do this as many times as they like, and sometimes you’ll see half a dozen
attempts to run out the man on base before the ball even gets within spitting
distance of a bat. Catching batters stealing
is part and parcel of the game; an occurrence so frequent as to be completely
unremarkable. The idea that a sports
team would be so beholden to ideals of sportsmanlike behaviour that they wouldn’t
use every means at their disposal to try and win a game is something my
American friends find quite baffling.
All of which brings me, in a
roundabout way, to Marcelo Bielsa. At a
press conference this afternoon the Leeds United manager, facing accusations
that he had sent a spy to observe rivals Derby County conduct a training
sessions, confounded predictions that he would either resign or offer an
apology by not only confessing that he had engaged in this espionage but that
he had dispatched a member of staff to observe every team Leeds have played so
far this season. He then – as if this wasn’t
earth-shattering enough – fired up a PowerPoint presentation that detailed the
frankly insane amount of detail gathered by him and team in preparation for the
Derby game, right down to how many combined minutes their players have played
in each position, and which secret hand signals correspond to which set piece
routine. Speaking with remarkable
candour, Bielsa, who stated at the outset that he was confessing everything in
order to help the Football League with their investigation into his behaviour,
made several compelling points in his defence.
He explained that he had gained no advantage by doing this; his scouts,
he stated, didn’t tell him anything his own meticulous analysis of games hadn’t
revealed, and, at any rate, information on the opposition is useless if you can’t
marshal your own team to take advantage.
He recounted one game during his tenure as Athletic Bilbao boss after
which Barcelona manager Pep Guardiola had complimented him on how diligently he
had prepared. But for Bielsa “it was
useless information because they scored three goals”.
He also hinted that he is not the
only manager who engages in the practice, which I found incredibly gratifying,
because the tenor of much of the criticism levelled at the manager after the
initial allegations struck me as patronising and with a tangible xenophobic
undercurrent. A Match of the Day
interviewer asked if he now understood that spying on other teams is not
acceptable in this country, and more than one prominent pundit suggested that
Bielsa would have to learn “how things are done” in the English Football
League. Even the manager’s own board
threw him under the bus somewhat with a public statement asserting that Leeds
United would “look to work with our head coach and his staff to remind them of
the integrity and honesty which are the foundations that Leeds United is built
on” (this from the club of Billy Bremner, Norman Hunter and Lee Bowyer). To listen to these figures, you would be forgiven
for wondering if we had moved on from twenty years ago, where vices such as
diving and shirt-pulling were characterised as specifically foreign diseases,
and a “reducer” to the legs of newly-arrived overseas players by a Vinnie Jones
or a Julian Dicks or a Neil Ruddock was considered an acceptable way of nipping
this sort of thing in the bud before it started. None of this fancy Dan stuff, you’re in Blighty
now, where men are real men and real men get unbelievably irate at vegan
sausage rolls and shaving company adverts.
Meanwhile, you’d have been searching a long time to find an English
pundit willing to argue that Michael Owen dived to win a crucial penalty
against Argentina at the 2002 World Cup.
The Ricky Tomlinson film Mike Bassett:
England Manager, released the previous year, brilliantly skewered these
hypocrisies with a scene in which, against a fictional Argentinian outfit, mercurial
midfielder Kevin Tonkinson produces a carbon copy of Diego Maradona’s notorious
“Hand of God” goal to win the game, which is hailed by the English commentator
as a “fantastic header”.
To act, in the Year of Our Lord
2019, as if footballing espionage was imported by Marcelo Bielsa from Buenos Aires
this summer, is ludicrous. On the latest
edition of James Richardson’s excellent Totally
Football Show podcast, one contributor related the very salient fact that
many managers in England have, upon seeing that their club’s training ground was
offering onlookers numerous vistas of its sights, ordered the planting of trees
to obscure their practice drills from view.
Perhaps all these managers were reacting to utterly groundless fears,
submitting to an almost Pynchonian paranoia.
Or perhaps it is as Bielsa and others have intimated, that spying is
rife in English football, and the Leeds United manager has, like the boy who
points out that the Emperor has no clothes, merely named what others are too
unwilling or craven to admit.
And here’s the rub. Spying is absolutely permissible within the
rules set out by the Football League.
Bielsa, though he admits that “not everything that is legal is right to
do”, has broken no rules. He has been
pronounced guilty, by those who have criticised him, of a type of Mankading. The old Victorian ideal of sport as an arena
not only for athletic endeavour but the display of moral probity, to which
cricket seems especially beholden, clearly still holds sway in football too,
despite everything. The foreigner, moreover,
is expected to abide by moral standards that by all accounts are not widely
being followed by native-born Englishmen in the industry within which he
works. And it is precisely this promulgation
of the notion that ours is a people uniquely characterised by fair play, our demanding
that other nations follow rules by which we ourselves are only willing to abide
for show – consider our repeated demands for special treatment within the EU
both during and long before the Brexit negotiations – that is a chief reason many
people in foreign countries quite rightly despise the English.
Hearteningly, the vast majority
of the online reaction to Bielsa’s press conference has been very supportive,
and not only from Leeds fans. These is a
widespread recognition that if Bielsa is guilty of anything it is being too
honest about a practice many people in English football would rather wasn’t talked
about, and being too anxious to make sure he has prepared as thoroughly as
possible. I’m sure many of them wish the
clubs they support were lucky enough to have such a diligent manager. And that’s a good thing. I’m not completely instrumentalist in my
approach to sport. I recognise that
there are certain things in football which, while legal, do nothing for the
sport a spectacle; for example, keeping the ball in the corner to kill time, or
mouthing off at the referee. I have no
time for a win-at-all-costs mentality. However,
going the extra mile to scout opponents – for that is all Bielsa has done – harms
nothing of football’s essence, just as cricket would survive unscathed if
Mankading became seen as a legitimate tactic and batsmen at the non-striker’s
end have to start their runs later. If
anything, it raises the bar for English managers, who all too often get jobs
through the old boys’ network or because they are a known quantity. But as for the hypocrisy and petty xenophobia
of the English, I have a feeling that no matter how many dossiers you might
have Marcelo Bielsa prepare on the enemy, it will prove somewhat more difficult
to defeat than Derby County.
