AGB Cricket

DISPIRIT OF CRICKET

It's all good then:

ICC moves 'to root out corruption'

THE International Cricket Council has requested all players sign a one-off anti-corruption declaration before their next international match to ensure integrity in the game.

SLEEPING DOGS LIE

And cheat and, errr, fraud:

Darrell Hair calls Pakistan's tour players 'cheats, frauds and liars'

Darrell Hair, the former Test umpire, has branded the Pakistan cricket team "cheats, frauds and liars" and criticised the International Cricket Council, the world governing body, for refusing to act despite apparent evidence that Shoaib Akhtar tampered with the ball during the one-day international between Pakistan and England at the Rose Bowl last Wednesday.

Hair said of the tour: "The fans, viewers and crowds have been watching cheats and liars. How long will they continue to part with their money to watch manipulated matches and players cheating? The ICC should be ashamed to allow these matches to take place."

Shoaib was apparently caught on camera interfering with the ball and Hair said: "Regardless of irrefutable evidence of ball tampering the ICC still choose not to take action, which is unsurprising given their record and inability to control their own game. 'The game must always go on' seems to be their motto.

"Unfortunately the Pakistan cricketers show no respect for the game and continually attempt to cheat. The game as currently being played by Pakistan is a hoax and a fraud to the public."

There is the remotest chance Darrell Hair has an axe to grind.

MELVIN, SON OF...

No word yet on whether Melvin Muralidharan will be forced to visit UWA for corrective action:

Patients put at risk when disgraced surgeon allowed to work unsupervised

PATIENTS have potentially been put in danger after a disgraced surgeon worked in emergency unsupervised, due to systemic failures by two NSW hospitals.

Despite knowing of serious complaints against Melvin Muralidharan, including allegedly indecently assaulting a patient, St George Hospital sent him to Shoalhaven Hospital in April 2007 and failed to inform it that he must be directly supervised "to protect the public". For four weeks, Mr Muralidharan worked alone in emergency and after hours, was sometimes in control of the surgical division and supervised junior medical staff.

Thanks, Prof.

HOMINEM TE MEMENTO

An article in today's Age by Chris Middendorp is somewhere in the vicinity of my comment about faith in spectator sports:

Forget drug cheats, sport stars fail the other sort of dope test

Less adulation may keep their feet on the ground, not in their mouths.

Chris doubts that "sport helps to develop a person's character and promotes a healthy lifestyle." He, in part, attributes this to the personality distorting attention of the fans who "believe that our champion athletes are heroes and demigods."

There's probably something in that. The more you praise someone, the bigger their head gets, the worse they behave. Throw in a bucket of money and wall-to-wall women and many sportsmen start to think their shit doesn't stink. It's not new. Apocryphally, a Roman general granted a tribute was accompanied by a slave who would whisper in his ear: memento mori, remember you are mortal. The modern sporty, lacking a classical education, would say "touch wood" or "don't get ahead of yourself" or "take it one war at a time".

(It's my experience that if you've played sport you are less likely to treat sportsmen as gods and heroes. Nevertheless, I take the point.)

Chris does not mention a far greater problem: booze. Just about every incident of a sportsman being excessively dickheaded can be blamed on them sucking too much sauce. Forget misadventures on Twitter or Facebook; they, for the most part, are mere bagatelles compared to boozing followed by dick flashing, fighting, tit grabbing, you name it. Find a way to stop sportsmen pissing it up and you will have a fvck sight more success getting them to behave.

(Drugs, which hold a higher prominence in Chris's article, would be less of an issue if the players didn't first get a gutful of piss.)

A season ticket holder of the same school of thought voiced by me about the vicarious nature of spectator sport is this excerpt from a book by British author A.A. Gill, The Angry Island: Hunting the English.

I'm not much of a football fan, more of a fair-weather football father. I take my boy to see Chelsea occasionally and laugh in a disengaged way at the vicious humour of the terraces. I try to be an ironic observer [TT: the Coodabeens' Nige from North Fitzroy, perhaps], aware that this is a touchstone father-and-son-dom; but secretly, I'm also frightened of football. It's like standing on the edge of a precipice. I can feel its pull, sense its power. I know the true reason I keep my distance from this game; it's because if I allowed myself I could become as tunnel-visioned and enraptured by it as the millions and millions of poor indentured fans - week in, week out, round the world slaves to the results. Leisure life would be a glissando of air-punching triumph or knuckle-gnawing disappointment a jerky circle of emotion, a life-long tease of little false endings in a drama without a plot.

Investing that much emotion in a game that you have no control over, that you don't play in, that is run for sponsorship access to television and derivative clothing lines, that offers so much unproductive disappointment and triumph, is cultural suicide. But I can hear the siren call of the crowd and feel the prickle of addiction in the veins, that great primal sense of belonging, the salty comfort of shared misery.

FIX MARKS THE SPOT

From Crikey's Tips & Rumours: Who can it be now?

Match-fixing probe phones home. Authorities are now looking at a prominent Australian fast bowler and some of the games in which he played...

BOOM......... TISH

Scyld Berry gets to the punchline, eventually:

ICC must reform or coffin will close on the game of cricket

Inside the cricket cases or 'coffins’ which Pakistan’s players are scheduled to open at the Cardiff ground on Sunday are shirts sporting the name of their kit suppliers, BoomBoom.

If, however, the allegations against three of their players are proved, and their 'example’ is followed as widely in other countries as I believe it has been, then the name might soon evolve to spell out the future of professional cricket: Doom Doom.

Also, does anyone think The Telegraph could do with a little tightening in the subby department? Can't be long until they fit the whole article into the headline.