Unfair to drag players who are mourning Phillip Hughes into sledging debate

http://www.theguardian.com/sport/blog/2015/jan/13/cricket-sledging-debate-reaction

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Awkwardness. There have been many words to describe the summer of Australian Test cricket just passed but so often that one could have done the job.

When is it right to play again? Should we bowl bouncers? I guess we should, but who should bowl the first? How should the batsmen react? What do we do if someone gets hit? Of course they’ll get hit at some point, but it’s something we should consider, right? Do we stop sledging? But what would it look like if we did? Will people say we don’t care? Do we honour Phillip Hughes by playing the way he played, or do we change?

Australian cricketers asked themselves a lot of those awkward questions in the days and weeks following Hughes’s death, some publicly, most behind closed doors. Often they probably had awkward answers, too. What worked well for some didn’t for others. As with any human beings, cricketers mourned their loss in different ways and at different speeds. The difficulty for them as opposed to the rest of us is that their reactions would be closely scrutinised, words and deeds so easily misconstrued. Not exactly a job you’d be lining up for.

Last week Glenn Maxwell gave a brutally honest interview in which he detailed his internal struggle with the loss of his team-mate, and how he and his housemate Aaron Finch – Hughes’s close friend and frequent opening partner in one-day internationals – had experienced their worst bouts of grief at different times, making their communication and support for one another fraught. Here were two young men at almost identical points in their lives, going through the same loss, and even they couldn’t avoid the awkwardness. “We were on different paths the whole time,” said Maxwell. “I really struggled to deal with that.”

Not a stretch then to conclude that if any summer begged sensitivity, compassion and understanding from fans and the media, it was this one. In the past 24 hours you wouldn’t know it. The BBC cricket correspondent Jonathan Agnew has drawn what was possibly the intended level of attention to himself and his thesis on sledging by dragging Australian captain Michael Clarke and the memory of Hughes into the debate. Quite a way of scoring a point on such a hoary old debate, you might conclude.

Related: Jonathan Agnew disappointed Australia have not stopped aggressive sledging

Agnew’s major problem was Clarke’s apparently broken promise – made as it was during a funeral, metres in front of Hughes’s grieving family at whose side he’d spent the week, as he fought off his own tears and with the entire world watching his every facial twitch – that the Australian team would play their cricket this summer with Hughes’s spirit in mind and as custodians of the game. Putting aside the more obvious issue of sensitivity, Agnew possibly asks an unintended and awkward question of his own here: what exactly was Hughes’s spirit?

Was it the off-field Hughes, a gentle and kind young man who won friends everywhere he went and for whom the team always came first? Was it the cheeky country larrikin Hughes? Or was it the far different character who – once across the white line – often batted with unflinching belligerence? In what proved his final Test at Lord’s he felt so aggrieved at the first innings umpiring decision that led to his dismissal that he swore loudly and swung his bat at a mantelpiece on his way back through the pavilion.

The latter is an example of the internal battle that plays out for many cricketers and one intrinsically linked to Agnew’s issue of sledging. Often we describe it in terms of “white line fever” – that the alter ego who enters the field of play is a different person to the one on it. In sport you’ve never had to reach too far to find these characters. Agnew probably played with a fair few of them himself.

We might not like the look of sledging and it’s debatable that any of it this summer was good for the game, but perhaps the Australians – against considerable forces and under the type of emotional duress that only they could truly comprehend – played exactly as they would have with Hughes in their midst. That is to say, they played like an Australian Test team, humourlessly staring down Virat Kohli, barking almost comical send-offs at vanquished Indian batsmen and never once looking like yielding in a physical or emotional sense. An abnormal summer thus regained some normality.

Hughes knew the ways of the Australian cricketer. When he was done with his triumphant debut tour of South Africa, posters of Steve Waugh still hung on his bedroom wall at the family home in Macksville. By that point he’d been initiated into the same two brotherhoods – the cults of the baggy blue and the baggy green - that had for so long been home to his hero. Hughes, like Waugh, entered a lineage whose ingrained customs and rituals were on display all this summer.

“Rituals” is probably the right word, because there was often a kind of hackneyed and uninspired monotony to the various verbal exchanges this summer. Australian sledging is rarely Wildean, a factor drummed home in recent times by the snooping ear of effects microphones. Even when it was particularly bad – the normally affable Mitchell Starc screaming in the face of Murali Vijay – it actually wasn’t. What price Starc saving his reputation by directing that outburst not at Vijay but at its real target, Channel Nine commentator Shane Warne? The same Level 1 reprimand, probably.

Related: Chris Rogers: Australia will not hold back on-pitch aggression

Agnew’s right in one sense. Sledging is certainly not an issue to be brushed off. Many opponents would justifiably claim that it’s workplace bullying dressed as entertainment, but where it sits in cricket’s long list of pressing concerns is debatable. Perhaps more galling than the various imbroglios themselves in the past month have been the attempts of certain serial transgressors to position themselves as arbiters on the matter.

Still, the greater disappointment out of this most recent development is that Hughes should be used as a pawn in a debate so peripheral to his life and death. To complain about the verbal misfires of cricketers while using as grist for your mill one man stricken with grief and another who can no longer speak for himself takes the gall of … well, a sledger.