The real lessons to be learnt

Here’s something I wrote early last year. It’s the next in my list of things to think about in a year when there has been no real school sport

 

Good men, not good players. That's what it's really all about

I, like many I guess, didn’t know why the running out of Jos Buttler at the bowler's end by Ravi Ashwin in the Indian Premier League recently is called a “mankad”.

So, I Googled it, and found out that this type of dismissal was named after Indian bowler Vinoo Mankad, who dismissed Australia’s Bill Brown in this fashion during the second Test in Sydney in 1947. It was the second time he got Brown out in that way on that tour and it caused a mighty uproar. The name stuck after that.

I’d never heard the term before, although I have come across incidents where backing up batsmen have been warned by the bowler for stealing a few yards and I always thought the laws of the game required that to happen before the batsman could be dismissed in this way.

It turns out that there’s nothing in the laws, or in the MCC guidance notes on the Spirit of Cricket, saying that there has to be a warning, so the dismissal in the IPL was perfectly legal and that’s the end of it.

It’s not really the end of it though, is it? Cricket, in particular, is a game that teaches life lessons all over the place, that’s why it’s such a good sport to play in schools.

The expression “it’s just not cricket” is what that’s all about and although it may be an old-fashioned concept with a bit of a paternalistic, colonial tint to it, the principles behind it are not.

It means just what the mankad debate is all about – sometimes the right thing to do is not governed by the laws, but it is the right thing to do. If you don’t do it it’s, well, just not cricket.

Cricket’s a good game for teaching values to children, but any game will do the same, it all depends on the way it’s coached and managed.

I firmly believe that the real reason we include sport in the school curriculum is to develop the young people involved into good human beings who can go out into the world one day and make a positive contribution.

It may be that they do that as professional players, but that’s incidental, that’s not the reason why we run sporting programmes at schools.

Any teacher or coach responsible for the running of a school sport programme who doesn’t have in mind that the most important task is to teach children to behave honourably and according to the values and ethics that are included in both the laws of the game and the ephemeral “spirit of the game” is not, in my opinion, doing his or her job.

And a cricket coach who teaches a bowler to mankad a batsman, or for that matter, tells a batsman that it’s OK to steal a yard backing up because there’s no chance that he will be mankaded, should be fired.

Let’s send young people out into the world who do good because it’s the right thing to do, because it’s just not cricket to do otherwise.

Can I add an example from the weekend past that, for me illustrates what I’m talking about?

 I was sent a copy of an e-mail to the principal of a school congratulating his boys on their behaviour at an airport on their way back from one of the weekend rugby festivals. I won’t say which school but the name wouldn’t surprise anyone who, like me, spends a lot of time among schoolboys in Joburg.

The players, just hours after what must have been a devastating, narrow defeat that afternoon, sprung to the assistance of two different mothers struggling with babies, prams and bulky luggage in the strong wind, and cheerfully saw them on and off the plane and onto the airport bus.

There were no real losers in that team – they have been taught, and they have learnt, the more important lessons that, in this case, rugby is meant to teach.