When law and spirit are not the same

WE’VE heard an awful lot – far too much, frankly – about the spirit of cricket just recently, and it has had little to do with the amount of single malt a multi-coloured blazer in human form can chuck down his neck in the Long Room. The Great Jonny Bairstow Stumping Scandal has propelled us headlong into the realm of sporting morality: two words that fit together like “love” and “divorce”, or “parliamentary” and “standards”.

- CHRIS HEWETT

Let’s move on quickly from the behaviour, rib-splittingly hilarious and deeply pathetic at one and the same time, of MCC members who spat the word “cheat” in the faces of the Australian cricketers as they made their way through the holy of holies for a spot of lunch on the final day of the second Ashes Test. These were the very men – it’s always men, isn’t it? – who insisted that the Eton-Harrow match should retain the privileged Lord’s status it has held since the Norman Conquest, while, for almost as long, being unable to countenance the presence of women in their “space” unless they were clearing the tables. If this is the spirit of cricket, we must hope it is hit by the same asteroid that did for the dinosaurs.

Rugby has a “spirit” of its own – indeed, there is a bar at Twickenham named…you guessed it…“The Spirit of Rugby” – and the blazers bang on about it all the time. The five immutable values of the game, as defined by a governing class that would struggle to run a bath, are integrity, passion, solidarity, discipline and respect, which is all fine and dandy until you lift the lid on each in turn and find that they have about as much substance as Rishi Sunak’s five pledges.