Cricket banning orders, please, for the Wagner group of MCC blazers who took it upon themselves to enforce “the spirit of the game” by abusing the Australian team as they returned to their dressing room through the members’ pavilion shortly after their stumping of Jonny Bairstow on the last day of the Ashes Test at Lord’s. It was in the always-aggressively-hallowed Long Room that TV viewers witnessed confirmation that the spirit of cricket is 40% proof – although later social media videos confirmed the angry bellowing had happened all the way up the stairs in a display of herd behaviour some might class as lacking in class. Not me, of course; I don’t understand why the famously mild-mannered Usman Khawaja didn’t act more grateful for this lecture in dignity and personal responsibility from a bunch of baying gin-hounds whose wives buy their pants.
I know, I know – #notallMCCmembers. Still, if the club did go belt-and-braces-and-red-trousers on rooting out the bad apples, it could certainly get its waiting list significantly down from the 29 years at which it currently stands. In fact, it has suspended precisely three members for the scenes on Sunday, pending what we might hazard will probably be a most-stones-unturned investigation. Moves to defuse the situation have not exactly been forthcoming. Instead of treating what happened at the cricket as something on which nobody but newspaper columnists would wish him to declaim, the British prime minister himself has leaned into it and condemned Australia’s action on the field on Sunday.
