Leading Edge: Why sledging matters

Sunday Times

TELFORD VICE, Cape Town

In real life, telling someone you are going to “fuck your mother up the arse” will get you beaten up, or worse. And rightly so.

On a cricket field, where bowlers are within their legal rights to kill batsmen without even having to bother with firing four shots through a shut bathroom door, all it might get you is a fine to the value of what would amount to several seconds work for the average Indian Premier League star.

Shanthakumaran Sreesanth, who legend has it spat that phrase at Graeme Smith at Kingsmead on a muggy morning in December, 2010, was not fined.

He did, however, get Smith’s goat. The SA captain, all 1.91 metres of him, is never short on intimidatory presence. But when he is pointing a bat at you and corroding the grille of his helmet with the glare and the growl of his retaliation, which is what he did to Sreesanth, you should be careful.

Unless you happen to be bowling at him. Then you can say or do what you like, even kill him with your next delivery.

And why should you not be allowed to say what you like? At least part of the reason we have enshrined freedom of speech in countries like SA is that it allows us to know who the idiots are - let the racists and the sexists and the otherwise bigoted reveal themselves in all their inglory so we know who and what they are.

The same should go on the field. Unless, of course, the unreal life lived by those whose egos are pumped full of fatuous compliments at every turn makes them lose the plot when they run into a brainless insult.

Perhaps the game should stop and the damn fools should get on with beating each other up. Hang on, we do that already. It’s called ice-hockey.

Happily, Smith and Sreesanth did not kill one another. But Sreesanth did get what many will see as his comeuppance last September when he was banned for life for spot-fixing. Smith, meanwhile, has segued seamlessly into the corporate life.

Years from now, when Dale Steyn nips out for a midnight milkshake and finds Michael Clarke wearing an apron and a funny hat and earning the minimum wage behind the counter, will their minds lock on what Clarke said to Steyn at Newlands in March, and which clearly is still on Steyn’s mind?

Yes. These things don’t die quietly. Step away from that milkshake, Dale.