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.
Before we go any further, a word on that stumping, which I hope won’t cause any top-class MCC members to mail me their excrement or something. Women must always be extremely respectful of the judgment of the Long Room, of course, given that this was a place into which no female bar her late majesty Queen Elizabeth II was permitted to step until the year 1999. So forgive my opinion, but as a wicketkeeper himself, perhaps Bairstow will in future consider the wisdom of wandering out of his crease quite so frequently, judging that on the balance of probabilities, such a practice may end up getting punished at elite international level. As it did on Sunday, when Australia pulled a move that was apparently good when WG Grace did it, but bad in the hands of foreigners.
Anyway, maybe we should have expected an intervention from Downing Street on this matter, given that Rishi Sunak had already made an appearance on Test Match Special on Saturday. This involved an interview with Jonathan Agnew, another heavily oxidised individual, during which the PM talked with sledgehammer allegory about himself, through the prism of cricket. England captain Ben Stokes was praised for taking “essentially the same group of players with a different approach to playing and leadership … As someone who has to also lead in a different way it was just an interesting case study, how you take the same group of people and get so much more out of them.” Yes yes – we get it: “Hold your nerve.” I think the point was supposed to be that Sunak isn’t merely failing spectacularly on all his own five pledges, and managing the UK further down the road of decline. He’s actually playing some political version of Bazball, and you should, officially, be extremely into it.
Alas, as indicated, that was not the end of the prime ministerial pronouncements. “The prime minister agrees with Ben Stokes,” ran an official statement from his spokesman on Monday. “He said he simply wouldn’t want to win a game in the manner Australia did.” Again: great to take lessons in ethics from a guy currently trying to ram through a policy of freighting refugees off to cuddly Rwandan president Paul Kagame. As for the notion that it’s not how Sunak would have won, that doesn’t mean a whole lot coming from a guy whose recent form includes losing to Liz Truss. WinViz is no longer even offering a percentage for Sunak’s prospects in a general election, which will probably take place after a campaign of bellowing culture war banalities at a populace who honestly just want to see their GP inside of eight weeks.
The spokesman went on to confirm that Sunak believes Australia’s actions were not within the spirit of cricket. As someone whose wife’s tax affairs were for so long within the letter of the law, but certainly not the spirit of it, you’d think Sunak would avoid these little forays into matters that don’t concern him. Furthermore, it seems glaringly odd that he should find time to have a public view on this business, when he couldn’t find time to vote on the standards committee’s damning report into Boris Johnson’s Partygate lies, nor allow his spokesman to opine on whether or not he even agreed with it. Is true leadership having a view on a stumping but not on whether it’s actually bad to lie to parliament? It is now. Maybe you can appease your way to victory: something for our international sports players to consider.
For now, it must be hard for outsiders not to be struck by anything other than a sense of unwitting English smallness that stretches from the inner sanctum of Lord’s to Downing Street and beyond. Sunday’s scenes were the kind of unedifying thing some of those aggressive members prefer to think only happens in all the sports on which they look down, or during prime minister’s questions. The footage from the staircase and the Long Room show a large crowd so entitled and gripped by some fundamentalist belief in their own superior decency that they behaved in this way even though they knew the TV cameras were on them.
The MCC president who finally got the club to allow women in described the process of getting to that point as “like turning an ocean-going liner through 180 degrees”. Sunday was one of those days where one might reflect it would have been better to put a shell in its hull instead. Out in the ground, meanwhile, it was particularly disappointing to hear former England captain Andrew Strauss put the febrile atmosphere down to “people who don’t normally come to Lord’s”. Given the behaviour of the members, who do normally come to Lord’s, this seemed a bizarre attempt to offload the unpleasantness on hoi polloi taking advantage of some rare £25 tickets. Another great look in the week of a damning report that found “widespread and deep-rooted” racism, sexism, elitism and class bias in all levels of English cricket.
In the end, perhaps these deflections are easier than confronting the reality and debunking some of the less helpful stories a certain section of England likes to tell about itself. Much easier to just order another stiff one, and raise the old toast: “My country, right or wrong!”
Marina Hyde is a Guardian columnist
