The man in white is always right Cricket, law and the meaning of life When I first came to Australia in December 1988, the Pakistani and West David Fraser Indies cricket teams were touring this country. I knew little, if anything, about cricket and was astounded by the blanket media coverage accorded to the sport. One day as I watched with some Australian friends there was a unani­ mous shout from the fielding side and the batsman was, or so I was informed, given out LBW. As my friends answered my queries I suddenly *What do they know of found myself with an anchor, a point of reference from which I could begin to understand this game. The LBW decision bears a strong resem­ cricket who only cricket blance to the issues raised in the very problematic area of causation in tort or criminal law, especially when dealing with liability for an omission. know99 How can something which did not occur be said to have ‘caused’ some­ C.L.R. James thing which did? How can the umpire be sure the ball would have hit the stumps? While my fascination with cricket and obsession with the game soon found other points of reference and ways of understanding, the connec­ tions with law continue to fascinate. From the case of William Waterfall, the first person convicted of manslaughter on the cricket field at the Derby Assizes of 1775, to the restrictive trade practices litigation of Packer cricket, and continuing controversies over the tax status of benefit proceeds, cricket provides useful examples of ‘real law’. More important­ ly, however, cricket offers examples of how legality, ethics and moral judgments inform all our lives and our daily social practices. Cricket, and all the complexity and contradiction which make up our understanding of that game, can tell us much about the way we live and about the role and function of law in our society. What this article is about is the breaking down of barriers between the parts of our lives. It is an argument against seeing either law or cricket as a distinct area of exis­ tence which has nothing to do with the other. It offers support for the con­ tention that it is wrong and counter-factual for us to think, as traditional views of the role and function of ‘the law’ would have us believe, that there are important and higher things like ‘the Law’, and unimportant and lower things like cricket. This does not mean that we must not make individual and social order­ ings and rankings of priorities, but it does mean that we must realise that there is nothing pre-ordained or immutable about the orderings we do make. What follows, then, is my own idiosyncratic view of the inter-con­ nections between the various parts of what we might call cricket, law and the meaning of life. Some of the analogies and metaphors are straightfor­ ward — causation and LBW, frequency of appeals and respect for the judicial process, neutral umpires and judicial bias. Others involve discus­ sions of broader, traditional meta-constructs — race, class and gender. What they all share is a narrative ability, that is they can all serve as a means to understand and create stories about who we are and how we live. Cricket in society There is, of course, little doubt that organised sport as we now know it __________________________________________ originated and grew in England at the time of the Industrial Revolution. David Fraser teaches taw at Macquarie University. Because of these historical and social roots, sport (and cricket) quite This•n.- article_• 1 is• an editedx.-A extract. „,f from a book of the _same______ name clearly reflected the dominant culture of the time. Mandle rputs it sue- to be published by the Institute of Criminology, Sydney. Cinctly when he States: 54 ALTERNATIVE LAW JOURNAL CRICKET, LAW AND THE MEANING OF LIFE . .. its framework, organisation, ethics, even its quirks and quiddities, Cricket and legal formalism were nineteenth century industrial. In organised sport we see the inventor, the entrepreneur, the employee, the class conflict. Whatever Rather than always being an ethically-governed practice in you like to name as part of Victorian industrial society was there: its which the Laws are merely second-order norms, much of the passion for classification, order and detail, for moralising, for self- character of cricket can be found in a rigid and unbending for­ improvement, for respectability.1 malism in which the Law dominates ova* ethics and indeed Nowhere is this better epitomised than in the most Victorian commonsense. The first part of Law 28 states that the wicket is of sports — cricket, with its fascination with statistics, its dis­ down if either the ball or the striker’s bat or person completely tinctive and gentlemanly clothing, its ideological connection removes either bail from the top of the stumps. In 1924, when with upright Christian morality — ‘it’s not cricket’ etc. Nor batting for Cambridge against Surrey, R.J.O. Meyer was need one be a Marxist to recognise the intimate connection ‘bowled’ by a ball which caused his leg bail to hop up and bal­ between cricket and capitalism. No less an authority than ance itself on top of the leg stump. The umpire adjudged him Neville Cardus, certainly no political or cultural radical, writ­ out, but the MCC later regarded this decision as incorrect The ing about the ‘greatest of all cricketers’, W.G. ‘Doctor’ Grace, Law was later changed. saw such a connection as he wrote: ‘In an epoch of prosperity, In an eight ball over at Georgetown in 1946-47: ‘D.F. Hill when the idea of material expansion was worshipped for its bowled an over of 14 balls without any wides or no balls. The own sake, even the vast runs made on a cricket field by W.G. Grace seemed symbolical; his perpetual increase of authority umpire had simply miscounted after reaching the number of and performance suited a current love and respect for size and eight and poor Everton Weekes was given out LBW off the prosperity’.2 fourteenth ball’.5 Yet to describe Grace, cricket and the accumulation of runs Wellington’s Robert Vance created an unenviable first-class as prototypically capitalist is to tell only half the story: capital­ record of 77 runs scored off his one over in the match against ism, even at its Victorian zenith, was not a cultural monolith. Canterbury at Lancaster Park, Christchurch. Vance was under Cricket, as the epitome of capitalism, has always carried with­ instructions to bowl no-balls to encourage the Canterbury bats­ in it apparendy unresolved and unresolvable contradictions. men to go for runs which would give Wellington a better Even in the paradigmatic Grace we find the conflict of cricket chance to bowl them out. Canterbury batsman Lee Germon as ‘a violent battle played like a genteel, ritualised garden took maximum advantage of this act of 'charity and goodwill’, party’ as well as the conflict between ‘a new profession’ and a plundering a record 69 runs in the over, hitting eight 6s, five 4s game ‘practised as if it was a pastime’ .3 and a single. There were 17 no-balls besides five legitimate What makes cricket so fascinating as a cultural phenome­ balls in this over. Chaos reigned, the match ending in a draw, non, and so similar to law as a social practice, is not its mono­ both teams scoring the same total but Canterbury having two lithic and one-dimensional connection to the mode of produc­ wickets in hand. tion. Rather, it is at once inside and outside the mode of pro­ The first two of these extracts illustrate that a narrow, legal­ duction, it affirms and denies capitalist values, it is anarchic istic approach to the Laws has always been a strong and domi­ and governed by Laws; it is a team sport dominated by a fasci­ nant theme of cricket; the third example shows, however, strict nation with individual performance; it is a bouigeois game legality as a guise for sharp practice. dominated in many ways by a proletarian practice; it is gov­ erned by Laws which are often supplanted in practice by high­ er ethical conventional norms; it is the epitome of British It’s not cricket — underarm bowling, legality and imperialism and colonialism and has in many instances been a the meaning of life driving force for colonial national freedom struggles. It oper­ No other incident in recent cricket memory has so epitomised ates, as does law, at many levels, through multiple contradic­ the conflict between law and morality than the infamous tions and somehow, with all this, it continues to thrive. Indeed underarm incident at Melbourne in February 1981. In a one- it might be argued that cricket, like law, is a system of norma- day match with New Zealand, with the visitors needing six tivity which thrives and grows because of the contradictions from the last ball for a tie, Australian captain Greg Chappell which create it ordered the bowler, his brother Trevor, to deliver a ‘mullygrub- The fundamental problem of cricket, like that of the legal ber’, an underarm delivery rolled along the ground. Trevor system, arises not so much as a conflict between myth and Chappell complied — the incident continues to haunt him. He reality, but as a conflict between competing myths and reali­ points out, however, that at one level, the incident has a differ­ ties. Admirers of the higher or true cricket are wrong when ent epistemological status than that attributed to it generally.