Dear Cricket Monthly,

A Test match on television and a wicket falls and the fielding side comes whooping in to celebrate. My nose wrinkles and my lips purse. And I fear that I've become Crusty.

A Test match on television and a fast bowler follows through and spits words at the batsman. I cannot lip-read but I wince. And I fear that I've become Crusty.

Crusty was the landlord of the Plough. The Plough stood in the heart of a pretty village in the south of England near where I grew up, a village of crooked medieval lanes and roofs of thatch or tile and walls of little, pitted, dark-red local bricks, the sort of village people used to think of when they thought of England, or indeed fought for England.

And Crusty probably fought for England. He was in his late 50s or so and this was the mid-'70s, so he'd have been a young man during the war. Crusty always wore a tie and what appeared to be a regimental jacket, and his hair, though thin, was combed through with that inexplicable cosmetic Brylcreem.

His saloon bar was lined with men who wore cravats and moustaches. They drank gin and in the rich and fruity accents of BBC announcers they complained that the country had gone to the dogs. They moaned with relish about striking unions, about declining standards, and in particular about layabout long-haired youth.

Layabout long-haired youth in 1975 meant us. We had to part our hair to see where we were going. We wore cheesecloth shirts and jeans so flared you could have hidden a Jack Russell under them.

The Plough was not a pub we often went to. But one Sunday lunch a group of us went in, all hair and jeans and unlined flesh. And Crusty flipped. I don't know why it happened then and not some other time, but when he saw us coming through the door he somehow seemed to swell with indignation and then burst.

"Out," he bellowed, "out, out", and he shooed us from the bar like hens. Our crime, so far as could be made out from his spluttering words - though no words were needed; we sensed precisely how he thought - was to embody all that he found wrong about the modern world. We were delinquency made flesh.

He couldn't have been more wrong, of course. We were good kids, well educated and about to go to university. Crusty had fallen for the oldest moral trap of all, which is to equate one's own prime with the world's prime. It follows that the way things are done then are the way things should always be done. So change can mean only decay.

It wasn't us that Crusty was shooing out through the door of the Plough. It was his own increasing frailty and irrelevance, his sense of his own mortality. And though I now live on the far side of the world, when I watch cricket I wonder whether I've become Crusty.

All sport is a luxury, even international sport played for vast sums of money. It is a game, a parody version of something else

In my defence there are countless changes to the game that I accept and even applaud. Coloured clothing doesn't offend me, nor does playing under lights. And though T20 bores me because all the matches are effectively the same, I love what it has done for batsmanship in longer forms, the invention it has generated, and the will to attack.

But when a wicket falls and the bowler whoops and the fielders leap all over him and the team becomes a single swarm, a mass of flesh, with those who have run in from the deep having to leap to reach in and make contact with its vibrant vital heart of happiness, I feel there's something wrong. It didn't used to be that way when the world and I were young.

What I dislike is the triumphalism, the crowing in the face of the defeated. It seems to me, wait for it, rude. It is simply - and here's a phrase that damns me for a fossil - bad manners, something that is not done because it is discourteous.

Courtesy is respect for an opponent. It acknowledges his feelings of defeat and does not seek to make them worse. It declines to gloat. It also perhaps acknowledges that the roles may well soon be reversed. It is a form of mature restraint. It takes a longer view than the immature exultation of the moment. It is, in short, grown-up. And dancing around in a tactile heap is infantile.

And as for sledging, well, it is cheating. So much seems obvious. But it is also worse than cheating. To abuse an opponent in the hope of worming into his psyche and destabilising him is to forget the nature of sport.

All sport is a luxury, even international sport played for vast sums of money. It is a game, a parody version of something else. That something else is war. And you can only do parody war when you are not doing real war. When real war happens sport stops.

Sport, then, is a symptom of civilised peace, of a condition beyond the brutal state of nature. It is indulged in only by nations or communities who respect each other enough to live in peace. They may feel rivalry, and that is borne out in the thrill of sporting contest, but in the end they are civilised enough to let the other be, win or lose.

The sledger knows nothing of civilised respect. He cannot see a game for what it is. The sledger has slid backwards down the evolutionary scale. Or so it seems to me.

Sincerely,
Crusty Joe

Joe Bennett is an English-born newspaper columnist and author of over 20 books. Since 1987 he has lived in Lyttelton, New Zealand

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