Daily Times

Another scandal has rocked the world of cricket to its bare bones and as Camus says, “it has shown its wrinkles and its wounds, old and new”. It has aged all at once and with it aged the spirit of the game. The apocalypse has not come to hurt any minnow of cricket but afflicted the superpower. The Aussies are in the news and, contrary to the past, what swirls around them is neither a grand feat of blasting the Poms to bits nor the honour of slicing the South African to smithereens or the exaltation of rising to the occasion by lifting a world cup. It is a moment of grief — the curse of Medusa has replaced the smile of Tychy.

Assisted by skipper and his deputy, one of the openers found himself involved in a controversial if not a sleazy act. In the end, the unfolding of the incidence was similar to uncapping of a Pandora’s Box, which culminated as collective hara-kiri. One can scarcely avoid Macbeth’s fate if a crime leaves behind the stains of blood or blemish on one’s hands. A small error of judgment and one has the retribution knocking at his door. Revenge comes with silent feet, and the technological revenge is more nimble and cold. It sighted the Aussies doctoring the cherry red-handed. Rest is a Shakespearean tragedy.

Once cricket was synonymous with human dignity and was supposed to reflect the sublime character of richly cultivated and refined individuals. A clichéd ‘gentleman’s game’ whose pioneers were hardly gentle and least benign. By the time it came into prominence, the founding ‘gentlemen’ fathers had already colonised nearly half of the globe. However, that did not make the game inherently satanic. On the contrary, it began with an air of rebellion against ecclesiastical hegemony. In 1611, two people were punished for their audacity; they chose to play cricket instead of attending a sermon in the church, but one rebellious act does not suggest that sport is innately revolutionary.

For a long while, the sport could not muster the nod of the masses and remained an upper-class pastime. Launched in the colonies by the British aristocracy, it not only became a symbol of dominance but of cultural hegemony as well. Cricket made its mark but could only manage to stamp its authority once the direct colonial rule perished. Once the masters left, the ruled embraced the cultural hegemony of the rulers far more enthusiastically than expected. In slavery, dumbness invariably becomes an objective spirit.

There were times when umpire’s domain was unchallengeable; their verdict had the last laugh. Even in those days, some players followed the game ritually and responded to the voice of their conscience even when the benefit of the doubt was enough for umpires to deliver the verdict in their favour. However, rare but happenings such as leaving the crease with a faint edge that eluded the umpire, were not uncommon since the sport was yet to be commercialised and remnants of aristocratic norms were still intact. The essence of the game was its spirit; the competition was a mere outward phenomenon. Losing and winning had some meanings, but the pride of fair play was deemed far more honourable than victory.

The game was the only art through which capitalism tolerated its former ideals of freedom and fair play, but with the introduction of money, it became a battlefield for gladiators to fight for their lives

Then came the era of cutthroat capitalism, and cricket could not escape the fate of becoming a commodity. The process was gradual, and so was the decline in the quality of the game. With the advent of the latest format of T20 cricket, a test tube version of the sport, a sense of vulgar and spiritless entertainment crawled in the sport and money began to set the terms of endearment. The play was cleaved from the sport. A purpose — the neurosis of victory — took the dream of freedom away. The lovely square-cut, a delectable late-cut, a spectacular cover drive, a chivalrous pull shot, a faint nick taken by the keeper with a leap, a blistering in-swinger and a toe-crushing yorker, everything was eclipsed in the mist of money. It was not the art and craft of the game that flourished. On the contrary, it was the divine gospel of capital that dictated the reason. The gulf between reality and rationality increased manifold.

“Work while you work, play while you play”, as Adorno states became the “basic rule of repressive discipline.” On the one hand, the capital brought science and technology into the game, on the other, its dialectical opposite, the moral crisis crept in. Money attracts money. It is a rat race, and anyone caught in its snare finds no way out of this vicious cycle. It is not power alone that corrupts, money behaves even worse, and many in the hierarchy see the corruption as a natural temptation. It is remarkably similar to Engels description of bourgeois divorce; abolished by the Catholic Church after recognition of the fact that ‘there was no more cure for adultery than there was for death’.

When stakes are high, and the charm of temptation is too fascinating, the best way to resist the temptation is to yield to it. Those who ascribe ethics to the market are under no illusion that it finds itself under no obligation to be dictated by them, no matter how convincing they are. It has its iron laws. It knows one language and a single logic that for its realisation, capital has to be invested continuously and reinvested and there is nothing holy or unholy about it. ‘There is no good life in a bad life’, once the law of Darwinian social existence is embraced the subjects have no options but to obey its commandments.

In the current South Africa series, Smith and his associates, dizzy with their success in the Ashes, found themselves at the receiving end. The Africans were proving too invincible to be conquered. In a weak moment, Smith and his allies fell to the ungracious act of tampering with the ball. Guilty as charged they faced humiliation and punishment. They broke the incentive-based law that promoted corruption, but the very nature of the law was never in contention. If the sport is rated and the only measure is a success, if the performance principal is the sole criterion of sublimity and high performers are the chief beneficiaries and the blue-eyed of the corporate world, why blame the cricketers — the mortal human beings. They can be sinners, but their sins are not mighty enough to sink a boat.

The capitalist society in every sphere of life save love insists on exertion of an individual or collective will. In its longing for love, it provides even a temporary exemption from work. The capitalistic idea of love, its truth transcends its own untruth, its society; here it reflects its own contradiction. However, the latter ends up corrupting the former. The same holds true for the sport, which brings a moment of respite, freedom from work, and anxiety. The game was the only art through which capitalism tolerated its former ideals of freedom and fair play but with the advent of money, it has become a battlefield for gladiators to fight for their lives. The truth stands for untruth; the synthesis is negation, chaos, a void.

The corporate world is a bigger stage and ‘the play’ as Oscar Wilde states ‘is badly cast’. The players are mere puppets governed by a morbid morality of a culture based on stylised barbarity. How else one can explain the logic of playing a Test match in a blistering summer of January when Sydney was an inferno burning at 47 C, the misery concluded when England conceded the victory more to the weather than to their arch-rivals.

In this play, the real culprits are the directors, the corporate sector that mediates and while remaining invisible rigs the laws in its favour. On occasions when the veil masquerading its hideous face is lifted, it cries wolf, shrieking and blaming of a foul play and finds an immediate scapegoat among the players, sacrifices him on the altar of a shame justice. The media remains hand in glove making the people forget the comparison between salesmen’s profit that runs in millions and player’s wage which is nothing more than the crumbs of the real profit pilfered by the stage-managers.

One can commiserate with Smith and his teammates in the same way as once one felt despair for young Amir and his comrades. “If glorification of the underdog is nothing more than the glorification of the system”, then the humiliation of a crestfallen villain is nothing but the humiliation of the system that makes him so. In the cold war era, people demanded to hang the system instead of giving a dog a bad name to hang it later. The phrase may have gone trite, but its rationality does seem eternal.

The writer has authored books on socialism and history. He blogs at saulatnagi.wordpress.com and can be reached atsaulatnagi@hotmail.com

Published in Daily Times, April 5^th 2018.