Cricket’s vices are no more common – it’s just harder to keep them secret | Andy Bull

Whenever David Green belched he would say “Boycott!” and since he belched a lot “Boycott” was likely one of the first few words I ever heard him say, followed, in short order, by a philippic against “whichever fucker” had forgotten to replace the cellophane wrap on the tray of sandwiches at the back of the press box, the admonishment of a sloppy piece of outfielding, and a caustic enquiry about whether any of the rest of us could possibly help him solve a cryptic crossword clue which he probably already knew the answer to.

Green, who played county cricket for 15 years, and wrote about it for another 30, was one of those characters people worry aren’t around any more. He died in 2016.

In 1965, Green scored 2,000 runs, and, they say, put away a pint for every one of them. “If ever there was a larger than life character it was Greeny,” said old his Gloucestershire teammate Mike Procter. “Extremely intelligent and witty, he had an old-fashioned attitude to new-fangled things such as training and fitness programmes. He didn’t believe in them. For him, cricket was a way of making a lot of friends, knocking the cover off the ball if possible, and making regular attempts to boost the profit of certain breweries.”

I read that quote back to Green once, and he replied “Aye, he’s a fine fucking one to talk” and followed up with an eye-popping anecdote about their adventures together.

Green knew a lot of those. Not just about Procter. He cared deeply about the game, but he couldn’t stand cant, and used to take great pleasure in disabusing all the rest of us of our romantic ideas about some of the men who played it. He horrified the biographer of one well-known cricketer by insisting that his idol had only ever walked when it suited him. Which is one of the few tales he had that are fit for publication. Green was a raconteur, with a repertoire of sordid stories about the stuff some of our heroes used to get up to at night-time. It was quite an education for a kid who had learned most of what he knew about the game back then by reading Wisden.

All that came back to me on Monday when Tom Harrison, the CEO of the England and Wales Cricket Board, was talking through what the board are planning to do in reaction to the recent disciplinary cases involving Ben Stokes and Alex Hales – who, as you already know if you’ve read this far, were both fined over their involvement in a fight – and Joe Clarke and Tom Kohler-Cadmore, who have just been dropped from the England Lions squad after it was revealed that they were involved in a WhatsApp chat group that recorded sexual conquests. I guess Green wouldn’t have approved, but I know he wouldn’t have been surprised.

Harrison was asked whether the ECB’s sponsors were worried about the damage these cases had done to the reputation of the game. Yes, he said, they are. “The reason why commercial partners get involved in some cases is because the culture beneath your game is something that attracts people,” Harrison said. “What cricket means to people, beyond the performance of the England teams, or the performance of the county teams, is this underlying sense of decency. The spirit that is associated with the game is a hugely important part of it.” Really, though, that decency is a bit of a myth. Players have been fighting, drinking, and sleeping around for as long as they’ve been batting, bowling, and catching.

Harrison touched on that himself. “These are societal trends, in some cases, that are coming into the game, and perhaps have been there for a long time but are coming to the surface,” he said. Then in his next breath he added: “It’s our responsibility as a governing body of the game to get on the front foot by addressing these issues whether they’re with problem gambling, whether they’re about drink, whether they’re about consent, whether they’re about recreational drug use. Whatever it is, these are issues that are pervading society now in a way that perhaps they weren’t 20, 25 years ago.”

It’s not that the vices have grown any more common now than they used to be, of course, an hour listening to David Green talk about the old days would have taught anyone that much.

It’s just that it’s a lot harder for the players to keep them secret. Back when Green was playing, and long after he’d finished for that matter, journalists used to protect the players they were on tour with. They say that all changed in the late 80s, when Ian Botham became such a draw that newspapers started sending news journalists on tour. Since then, the development of social media, and the spread of smart phones, has meant that everything changed all over again.

And standards are different now, too. The “societal trend” Harrison mentioned isn’t that people are misbehaving more now, but that everyone else is forgiving them less.

Expectations have changed, thank God. Which is why Harrison’s was right to promise that the ECB, together with the Professional Cricketers’ Association, are going to redouble their efforts again this season “to make sure that those messages are renewed and updated”. Players are as flawed and fallible as they always were, only now they can’t afford to be.

source: theguardian.com