Killed in a "Gentleman's Game"

Phil Hughes collapsing after being hit by Abott bouncer

Raju Korti
The death of promising Aussie cricketer Phil Hughes after being felled by a short-pitched delivery from Sean Abbot in a domestic match should make all people who claim to have a passion for this game -- touted as Gentleman's Game -- sit up and take notice of the needlessly fierce competition completely smothering the fun in the sport.
There is every reason to believe that Phil, just 25 and in contention for a Test recall for the series against Indians now in Down Under, has fallen not to a bouncer but to this vicious facet of a game which has degenerated with the obscene amount of money rampaged on cricketers for whom nationalism is only an offshoot of their flourishing bank balances.
Presumably, my refrain will find several specious arguments, one being bouncers are part of the game and are a perfectly licit and accepted weapon in the armory of a fast bowler. That contention, however is not without a semantic riposte in where does one draw the line in gamesmanship when it comes to competition.
Way back in 1962, I vividly recall how Nari Contractor was knocked down by a vicious bouncer from Charlie Griffith, considered by many, including West Indians themselves, as more dangerous than his counterpart Wesley Hall. Of course, the Indians were warned and Contractor couldn't escape his share of culpability of misjudging it and taking the blow bang on his head. Even as a child who was fixated on the game like most at that age do, I had joked that Griffith didn't have to bowl at that destructive speed to get the Indians out since the Indians were never comfortable playing the fast stuff anyway. Contractor survived an emergency surgery and lived to tell the tale of how a penitent Griffith shed copious tears by his side till the time he was in hospital. That remorse was never seen in action though as Griffith butchered the Indians like he was in an abattoir.
Fourteen years later in 1976, the Indian batsmen of the likes of Sunil Gavaskar, Mohinder Amarnath, Gundappa Vishwanath and Anshuman Gaekwad touring the same West Indies were not exactly lambs to slaughter. If anything, these names were reverentially mentioned as the best players of fast bowling. But Gavaskar recalls in his book how in that Kingston Test, speedsters like Michael Holding and Wayne Daniel were egged on a by primitive spectators to the call of "Kill him maan" and "Tear off his head maan". Even the rival skipper Clive Lloyd, clearly rattled by the Indian response, was believed to have asked his bowlers to aim at the Indians instead of the stumps. A brave Anshuman Gaekwad had actually bared his black-and-blue chest to show how manfully he had taken on all that marauding stuff. It was not a game, it was hostility and bloodshed to put it mildly.
It was so Calypso in character when a sports magazine had put Holding, Roberts, Garner  and Croft on its cover and had described them as Dogs of War. Croft was later thrown out after he threatened an umpire with a stump. He was deadly anyway.
If you thought that the game had turned cruelly competitive in the days of Holding, Roberts and Lillee, Thomson, please go back in time to the late thirties when Douglas Jardine gave a new euphemism to gamesmanship by coining the word "Bodyline." The underlying message was clear. When you couldn't get run machines like Bradman out, you always had the superior option of aiming at his body -- stumps be damned -- because that would get him out for the whole of the series.
Not everybody is a Roy Fredericks. As was the won't in those days, the 1975-76 series between mighty West Indians and equally mighty Aussies was preceded by a war of words and just how ferocious the game had become, got clear from the word go. In a bluster and bravado so peculiar to most fast bowlers, Thomson had claimed that he would smash Fredericks' skull with the very first delivery that would be the fastest bouncer. Fredericks, amused by that braggadocio, said he would dispatch it for a six come what may. Both kept their promises but the series which West Indies lost 5-1, showed barbarity was becoming the name of the game -- all in the name of intense competition.
If this way of testing a batsman's skill could be rationalized for Fredericks, how does one do it for a tailender like Ewen Chatfield who was almost killed by a short-pitched delivery from Peter Lever? It is an irony of sorts that the Kiwi fast bowler, a hopeless Number 11 batsman by his own admission, feels for Abbot and hopes the guilt doesn't weigh on his mind in future. Implicit in this apparent sportsman's spirit is the acceptance of a dangerous attitude that has crept into the game. Fast bowlers the world over seem to believe that with a batsman wearing a helmet, he has every license to aim at his head. Hughes was not a tailender and was wearing a protective gear. Gavaskar is often commended for having played the best of fast bowling without ever wearing a helmet, and rightly so, but the Hughes incident should make us believe that he was lucky to have gotten away without being harmed because players with even the best technique can falter at times and that one mistake could be fatal.
The move by Cricket Australia to organize counseling -- whatever that involves or means --for its players is a proverbial case of putting the cart before the horse. It also raises a tricky question whether players will (care to) remember the counseling in the heat of the moment and if they do so, whether it will inhibit them from playing with their inbred attitude. There will be arguments for and against. I am inclined to believe that self counseling is always the best and if the game is played like a sport, it retains its old world charm.
During that epoch-making series against West Indies skippered by Sir Garfield Sobers in 1971, Captain Ajit Wadekar had said that "good batsmen are never afraid of good bowlers." The question, rhetorical though, is how good is good enough.