‘Good morning, my name’s Cowdrey.’ England batsman Colin, later Lord Cowdrey, to the Australian fast bowler Jeff Thomson.
‘That’s not going to help you, fatso. Now piss off.’
Lord, who wrote those lines — was it Oscar Wilde? Noël Coward? Woody Allen, maybe? Or was it just a primordial example of sledging: the art and science of the cricketing insult?
Sledging is hot again as the Test series in South Africa against Australia reaches new heights of bad vibes. And when we’re getting moral lectures from David Warner — the Australian player who thumped the England player Joe Root in a bar for the unforgivable sin of wearing a joke wig on his chin — well, we know we’re faced with one of those fascinating moral puzzles.
Sledging? Etymology: an Australia cricketer was rebuked for swearing in front of a woman: ‘You’re as subtle as sledgehammer, mate.’ By extension the word became a slang term for on-field abuse of your opponents.
Cricket takes a long time and there are lots of pauses. There’s plenty of time for conversation. Cricketers have used words to put each other off since time and cricket began. It’s not exactly legal, or exactly illegal. And certainly it’s accepted.
But here’s a rum thing: you can play a game and you can break the laws, and it will be wholly acceptable to all concerned — so long as you don’t go too far. And yet what is too far? No one ever knows for sure: but here is Warner, a cricketer with a history of unruly behaviour, outraged because he believes the sledging from the South African Quinton de Kock was morally wrong.
Worse, it was ‘vile and disgusting and about my wife. It was out of line.’
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