Dear Editor,
I have been watching and loving the game of cricket for nearly seventy years. The first Test match I ever saw was the 1948 match, West Indies versus England in Port of Spain, when Andy Ganteaume scored an excellent century and was rewarded by never being selected again.
In all these years of watching Test cricket I have never seen a more despicable and mean-spirited show of bad sportsmanship than that inflicted on cricket lovers everywhere by Shane Watson on the fourth day of the Perth Test when he crudely taunted Chris Gayle after getting him out in the West Indies second innings.
If ever behaviour brought the game into disrepute this behaviour of a brawling yob did so.
There is a quotation from Lord Harris’s essay ‘A Few Short Runs’ which I like: “You do well to love this cricket, for it is more free from anything sordid, anything dishonourable, anything savouring of servitude, than any game in the world. To play it keenly, honourably, generously, self-sacrificingly is a moral lesson in itself, and the classroom is God’s air and sunshine. Foster it, my brothers, so that it may attract all who can find the time to play it, protect it from anything that would sully it, so that it may grow in favour with all men.”
If ever a man sullied the game, Shane Watson did so in his gloating display on what should be a field of honour. By contrast, our captain, Chris Gayle, behaved with great dignity as all the (Australian) commentators remarked. And may I say that West Indies in these last two Tests have come away with a victory of the spirit which, in the long sweep of the game’s history, is as important as winning games and will be remembered.
Yours faithfully,
Ian McDonald
