Gideon Haigh and Tony Jones mourned the death of Phillip Hughes and then went straight into the concept of “lethal bowling”,
… we all cheered as Mitchell Johnson, the world’s fastest and arguably most dangerous bowler, steamed in to terrorise the English batsmen, literally terrorise them with the short-pitched bowling and many of them were so terrorised, they couldn’t continue.
What?
In the 1992 film Last of the Mohicans the colonial settlers and indigenous tribes had gathered to listen to demands from the English military for men to volunteer to join the Army in defending the district from the French. The terms of service settled, the men and boys join in a game of primitive Lacrosse.
Vitai Lampada is a similar juxtaposition of warfare and its extreme violence with the ritual of a competitive, harmless sport.
Are games, like cricket, steps along the evolution of humanity from savagery to civility? And, if so, should we be striving to eliminate the remaining risks of physical & emotional harm from sports, in order to pacify them and their participants?
It may be more helpful to admit, continually, that humanity’s behaviour defaults to violence, extreme savagery. That civilisation’s institutions have been designed to sublimate and control that violence.
Perhaps, retreating from the disciplined violence of cricket, by, in this case, changing rules and/or cancelling matches, is failure to admit the obvious, that we are violent by nature and must keep all those moderating influences in place.
Maybe, the test of cricket as an important civilising institution will be seen at the next India-Pakistan game. The rise of unreason
Now there’s Israeli cricket umpire killed by ball.
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