Spirit of Cricket Compromised By England's Shenanigans

The question isn't 'was it out?'. It was. The question is whether it was unsportsmanlike or not. Again, the consensus answer appears to be yes. Cricket puts a high premium on the notion of sportsmanlike conduct, but it draws short of punishing actions that are within the Laws even if they are contrary to that elusive concept 'the spirit of the game'. It is a voluntary rather than a mandatory code, unless the umpires decide otherwise.

There is a certain satisfaction that what many will see as suitable justice has been served by proxy after England were penalized for their slow over rates. More gratifying for aggrieved cricket fans is the simple fact that England lost the game. The rotters didn't prosper, and that's about all anyone can ask.

Among the morass of opinion and conjecture on the subject there's a line that says we've actually got the villain wrong, and that Grant Elliott could have legitimately been given out for obstructing the field. For me it's a specious line: there was clearly no gut feeling on the part of the England players that they'd been wronged, quite the reverse in fact. Elliott, taking on a rash single, went for the quickest line available.

The logic governing the umpire's decision appeared to be that once the appeal had been made, the decision had to be given. It is worth noting that the appeal was lodged by Ryan Sidebottom in the moment after he was picking himself up from the floor. Disorientated, and obviously suffering from some red hot white line fever, Sidebottom quickly gathered himself and went to check on Elliott's condition.

It was here, in the moments following the incident, that there was an opportunity for Paul Collingwood to play the gentleman and recall Elliott to the wicket. He didn't. When challenged on this point in his immediate post-match interview, Collingwood estimated that the time between Elliott being given out and his leaving the pitch was only "around 20 seconds" and so he didn't feel he had time to make such a cool revision.

It's a good example of how such drama distorts the participants' sense of passing time, Collingwood clearly misjudged how much time he had to make that call. For all that, calls for his head as captain are plainly out of all proportion to the offense, which was born of his inexperience in the job and his subsequent indecision rather than malice.

As fans, our notions of sportsmanship are easily distorted. As Andrew Flintoff has since joked, it is just as possible that when he swung his arm around Brett Lee's shoulder after England's two-run win at Edgbaston in 2005 he wasn't offering words of consolation but was instead whispering "that's one-all you Aussie bastard". Compared to Viv Richards' appeal against Rob Bailey, or Mike Atherton's dirt in the pocket, Collingwood's mistake was more naive than it was cynical.

How many sportsmen are still 'sportsmanlike' anyway? In his recent book What Sport Tells Us About Life, Ed Smith admitted that his early tendency to walk rather than wait for the decision earned him nothing but scorn from his team-mates. Sportsmanship (on the field of play at least) is a word in danger of being re-appropriated, its meaning reversed from being admirable to contemptible. The concept of being an amateur went through just that process.

Collingwood certainly regrets what happened - and there is no better judge of the rights and wrongs of the matter than the players' own feelings. More worrying is the question of whether England would still feel they'd crossed a line if the same thing had happened at the close of the Stanford Twenty20, with $20m at stake. A simple win may not excuse such conduct in the players' minds, but a million certainly might.