Play the Game Was that a hint of spring in the air the other day?

It set me anticipating the cricket season, Bat on willow, long drowsy afternoons. And then I thought O, dear theres still that business at Lords last season. But dont worry. This is not going to be all about cricket but something else: what you might call playing the game. Three Pakistani cricketers have received fines and suspensions for cheating in last summers Test match at Lords What they did was intentionally to bowl a few no-balls at pre-arranged times. So far as the game at Lords was concerned the cheating was rather trivial. The odd noball was not going to affect the result of the match. But it was part of an alleged international betting scam. For nowadays it is possible to bet on particular events within a game, not only on the final result. The world of cricket was rightly scandalised. The game on the field of play had been corrupted by considerations from elsewhere. So why did the cricketers do it? The simple answer is that they might have gained financially from it, they were bribed. But these young men are exceedingly well-paid and, accepting that greed knows no limits, I reckon there may be another sort of reason as well. I once heard the former England captain Michael Brearley describe professional sporting teams as primitive hunting packs. He meant that individuals often do things in a group they couldnt do-and wouldnt even think of doing-as private persons on their initiative. We simply dont know whether there is a culture of corruption in cricket at this level. We do know that the culture in which we ourselves live and work deeply affects the sort of things we are prepared to do. We have to be careful of the company we keep. Whatever the reasons, lets look at this cricketing dishonesty a little more closely. The real issue is that the deliberate no-balls damaged cricket by casting suspicion on all cricketing events, in the first place those involving the players concerned, then those of the team and so on. There were dropped catches and misfieldings in that Lords Test and previous games that in retrospect look suspicions. If we begin to think that the players are not playing the game but are letting other business interfere, we lose trust in what we see. These doubts are highly infectious. They raise nightmares of the what if? variety. What if the umpires were involved? Then cricket could degenerate into something like some sorts of professional wrestling, where everyone knows it is more of a circus than a sporting contest. In fact, it would be more honest that way. But it wouldnt be cricket any more. You are not going to see betting scandals affecting the honesty of your local club cricketer. But there are many ways of failing to play the game. Michael Brearley also described how a well-known county player reacted to being relieved of the bowling by deliberately letting balls go through for four on the boundary and laughing with the crowd about it. Brearley went over to him between overs and said Now, play the game or get off the field! That player had also damaged the spirit of the game by letting his bruised ego become bigger than the game itself. This is not all about cricket. Really. Whatever game we are playing or job we are doing, its wise to take a pretty strict view of our own personal honesty especially when temptations, group pressures and wounded pride are around. Honesty is indivisible and only we ourselves can corrupt it. Play the game! Michael Golby, Quaker Chaplain, University of Exeter Multi-Faith Chaplaincy Team