RIP the Spirit of Cricket. You had your moments, and you came in handy when England moaned about the stumping of Jonny Bairstow by Alex Carey at Lord’s last summer.
But the sight of Matthew Potts changing a boot as England tried unsuccessfully to run down the clock and pinch a rain-ruined no-result – and a 2-2 share of the ODI series – against Australia at Bristol on Sunday confirmed the game was up.
The Spirit of Cricket is now the game’s answer to Monty Python’s parrot: it is an ex-spirit, it has expired, it has gone to meet its maker, it is bereft of life.
And about time too. The Spirit of Cricket, as outlined by MCC in the preamble to the laws, is actually a straightforward guide to playing the game. It says you should respect others and, er, that’s more or less it. What’s not to like?
Yet despite the simplicity of the message, the preamble has been twisted beyond recognition by both sides of the debate.
Matthew Potts changed a boot as England tried unsuccessfully to run down the clock
England tried to get a rain-ruined no-result and a 2-2 share of the ODI series against Australia
The Spirit of Cricket came in handy when England moaned about the stumping of Jonny Bairstow by Alex Carey at Lord’s last summer but Sunday confirmed that the game is up
One side (mainly English) has used it to clamber to the moral high ground: it’s more important to be a jolly good chap than to play according to the laws, which is why Australia should have rescinded their perfectly legal stumping appeal against Bairstow.
The sight of members of the very club which wrote those laws haranguing the Australians for upholding them was one of the many absurdities of that day at Lord’s.
The other side (mainly Asian, and especially Indian) believes the preamble is a means of imposing an outdated notion on the new world, a throwback to colonialism, a means of keeping them in their place.
Both sides are wrong: the Spirit of Cricket merely tells us to be nice to each other. It’s a lovely idea – and hopelessly optimistic.
Mainly, the idea that cricket has a spirit, perhaps even a soul, is evoked when it suits a team to evoke it, but otherwise easily ignored. England were inconvenienced by the Bairstow stumping, so they had a grumble. They also knew that time-wasting was their only chance of salvation at Bristol, so they parked their principles.
In fact, there was a less underhand way of slowing down the over-rate, but Harry Brook cottoned on too late. Instead of giving three overs to Adil Rashid, which yielded just eight singles and were bowled in a flash, England’s captain should have stuck with the quicks, whose overs take longer to complete.
Instead, we had the ludicrous sight of Potts pretending he had a problem with his studs and laces – just as Curtly Ambrose and Courtney Walsh did in Trinidad in 1989-90 when West Indies slowed down the over-rate to nine an hour with England on the brink of a historic 2-0 lead.
And that’s how it works. Other nations may love to point out English hypocrisy, but everyone’s at it, and they always have been.
Australia ultimately secured a 3-2 series victory over England in Bristol on Sunday
Australia have traditionally argued their batsmen don’t walk because the decision is the umpire’s alone. Fair enough. Yet they still foam at the mouth about Stuart Broad’s refusal to give himself out for a thick edge at Trent Bridge in 2013.
Bangladesh’s Shakib Al Hasan was happy to appeal for ‘timed out’ against Sri Lanka’s Angelo Mathews during last year’s World Cup match in Delhi because it was ‘in the laws’. The same Shakib once ripped the stumps out of the ground during a domestic match because he disagreed with an lbw decision.
India, meanwhile, routinely take matters to a macro level, brazenly switching the pitch ahead of the World Cup semi-final against New Zealand in Mumbai, despite the fury of the ICC’s independent pitch consultant.
When the story was swept under the carpet because it suited no one – not India, not the ICC, and not any of the other cricketing nations who depend on visits from India to bankroll their game – it was proof that the Spirit of Cricket is abused off the field as easily as on it.
The idea that cricket has a spirit is evoked when it suits a team to evoke it, but otherwise easily ignored
If anything good emerged from Sunday’s shenanigans, it was not only that England’s tactics failed, but that it may make them think twice before they next play the Spirit of Cricket card.
They should also feel chastened that Australia’s captain Mitchell Marsh claimed not to have noticed, instead insisting he had ‘respect’ for the England team. But you can guarantee that he – and Australian cricket in general – did notice, and have quietly filed ‘Bootgate’ away for future use.
And that, too, is how it works. Because the next time they need to indulge in a bit of gamesmanship against England, they will do so knowing that the most recent act of skulduggery was committed by the Poms. In other words, they have a contravention of the Spirit up their sleeve.
Needless to say, that won’t stop England complaining. Even in the chill of autumnal Bristol, the 2025-26 Ashes were hotting up.
