Sledging of the cricketing kind

“Merciless they are, and out of order. There’s no room in the game for that sort of thing.”

The Australians are reputedly the originators of what is commonly known as “sledging” in cricket. If you are unaware, “sledging” is talking to a batsman, with the goal to take their mind off the game and ultimately take their wicket. It can be merciless, in a number of ways, and it can be counterproductive, as different people react in different ways to a verbal battering.

There are three types of sledging in my experience:

1.       Abusive – calling the batter every name under the sun, insulting their family, and generally being unpleasant. Not intelligent, or likely to win you too many friends.

2.       Factual – this can be very amusing if you’re not on the end of it. This generally entails picking out a few choice facts about a batter’s current form. There’s a great clip of Mark Boucher asking then Zimbabwean skipper Tatenda Taibu about his batting average, which was between 9 and 10 – “What is it, about 9.5? I’ll tell you what, we’ll round it up to 10 for you”.

3.       Amusing – this can be funny for all parties, if they are in the right mood. There’s a famous incident where Shane Warne tells South African batsman Daryll Cullinan that he’s been looking forward to bowling at him for about 2 years (Warne got Cullinan out rather a lot in the previous series), and the batsman retorted with “It looks like you spent most of it eating”. Even though it may seem a bit harsh to comment on the great spinner’s weight, it is a great comeback.

When done in a friendly, banter-based way, sledging most certainly has a place in the game of cricket. The game is not the quickest and offers players plenty of time for reflection. A cricketer’s success is 50% talent and 50% psychological. There’s nothing much you can do about the talent, but the psychological state of a player could be a weakness if played correctly.

There are some people however where sledging works the opposite way in which it was intended by the fielding side. England batsman Kevin Pietersen is renowned for reacting in a positive way to sledging by getting more runs than he might otherwise have accrued.

The factual sledging is part and parcel of the game and can be avoided by simply getting some runs, so in a sense, you only have yourself to blame if you are sledged on the basis of your recent performances.

What needs to be stamped out, but is almost impossible to police, is the abusive type. This is not big or clever and no-one really enjoys it, even the perpetrator. Cricket is supposed to be a game for intelligent people, and the ability to recall as many insults as possible could be regarded as sub-intelligent.

In general then, long live sledging. It’s funny on the whole and makes the time pass far quicker and more enjoyably.