{"id":255387,"date":"2026-07-30T17:25:50","date_gmt":"2026-07-30T17:25:50","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/sports.runfyers.com\/index.php\/2026\/07\/30\/the-guardian-view-on-sporting-fair-play-it-was-never-quite-cricket-editorial\/"},"modified":"2026-07-30T17:25:50","modified_gmt":"2026-07-30T17:25:50","slug":"the-guardian-view-on-sporting-fair-play-it-was-never-quite-cricket-editorial","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/sports.runfyers.com\/index.php\/2026\/07\/30\/the-guardian-view-on-sporting-fair-play-it-was-never-quite-cricket-editorial\/","title":{"rendered":"The Guardian view on sporting fair play: it was never quite cricket | Editorial"},"content":{"rendered":"

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O<\/span>ne incident has dominated this week\u2019s sporting headlines, garnering even more column inches than Gianni Infantino\u2019s apparent desire<\/a> to sell the football World Cup to the highest bidder. It occurred in a second XI cricket match last weekend between Saltburn and Norton in the North Yorkshire and South Durham League. A fielder at first slip was alleged to have clicked his fingers as the ball passed the batter\u2019s bat, in an attempt<\/a> to con the umpire into thinking that there had been an edge. The ball sank into the wicketkeeper\u2019s gloves; bowler, keeper and fielder erupted in a full-throated appeal; and the umpire sent the disbelieving batter on his way for a duck.<\/p>\n

There the matter might have ended, but these days even second XI matches are recorded and there was footage of the alleged finger-clicking. Over the past few days, this footage has been analysed in minute detail. One writer on The Athletic bathetically likened the interrogation<\/a> of the video to the decoding of the Zapruder film of President John F Kennedy\u2019s assassination. What precisely does it show? Could the sound have emanated from behind a grassy knoll at the Saltburn ground?<\/p>\n

The club and league have opened investigations, but, even without those inquiries being concluded, Saltburn have suspended the alleged clicker \u2013 38-year-old Brian Devine<\/a> \u2013 and said that he will not play for the club for the foreseeable future. Sleepy Saltburn, worried about critics labelling it the \u201cArgentina of village cricket<\/a>\u201d, are taking no chances. But is the footage really definitive? What will Devine\u2019s teammates say? The story could run and run.<\/p>\n

<\/svg><\/span>WG Grace.<\/span> Photograph: PA Photos<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s not cricket\u201d has been the hackneyed phrase rolled out in almost every iteration of this gloriously clickbaity story. But what is cricket? It\u2019s one player hurling a dangerous projectile at another. An odd activity on which to base a moral code. Yet, at the same time as parroting \u201cIt\u2019s not cricket\u201d, pundits have been enumerating the sport\u2019s numerous other falls from grace (and indeed the great WG Grace was a noted rule-bender) over the centuries. There was bribery and corruption in the early days, which led to games that both teams were trying to lose; numerous incidents of doctoring the ball to get it to behave in peculiar ways, the Australian \u201cSandpapergate<\/a>\u201d in 2018 being the most notorious; the time-honoured reluctance of batters to walk for catches even when they know they are out; and a host of modern-day match-fixing scandals<\/a>. The \u201cspirit of cricket\u201d is a fragile flower.<\/p>\n

We have an especially rose-tinted view of village cricket, insisting that amateurs \u201cPlay up! Play up! And play the game!\u201d, in the words of Henry Newbolt\u2019s poem<\/a> Vita\u00ef Lampada. We imagine village cricket as the bucolic dreamworld described in Siegfried Sassoon\u2019s recollections of prewar games (the idyll before the nightmare of the trenches), Hugh de S\u00e9lincourt\u2019s 1924 classic The Cricket Match and AG Macdonell\u2019s 1933 England, Their England. Endless summer days, resplendent rural grounds, sumptuous teas and pastoral rivalry.<\/p>\n

But even if that vision once shimmered, it does so no longer: the beautiful old cricket ground is now a supermarket car park, English summers increasingly Saharan, and the winning-is-everything mentality that has seeped into amateur cricket all too often ends with volunteer umpires being abused and rival players exchanging jibes \u2013 or worse<\/a>. It\u2019s just not cricket, but\u00a0then it probably never was.<\/p>\n