Sledging the dark art

THE DARK ART Sledging: it’s as much a part of cricket as batting and bowling.

But why has it become so entwined in the game? And how do cricketers employ the sledge to best effect?

By Dr Jodi Richardson

C

You've got to find that trigger: Graeme Swann has a crack at Chris Rogers at Trent Bridge.

ricket’s a gentlemen’s game, right? A noble pursuit buttressed by rich history and great rivalries; a grand pastime steeped in honour and tradition. Then there’s sledging, that fiendish act of using pointed barbs to insult, abuse and generally unsettle an opposition player.

This dark art is synonymous with cricket. Indeed, the very word “sledging” is thought to derive from a Sheffield Shield match in the mid-60s.

Word had been going around that one of the NSW players had been having an affair with the wife of a teammate.

When the poor cuckold came in to bat the fielding team broke into a rendition of the Percy Sledge hit When a Man Loves a Woman. And thus the “sledge” entered sporting parlance.

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The Craft Merv Hughes was a master of the sledge. With his imposing bulk, aggressive bowling style and uncanny ability to get under the skin of his opponents, he was intimidation personified. For Hughes, however, sledging was never random. Instead it was a craft that he carefully honed over the course of his career; a skill that required thought, discussion and dutiful preparation. “We would talk about strengths and weaknesses of the opposition,” he explains, “and then we’d talk about who we would go at verbally.

Some players were ‘no go zones’. If we go verbally at them, they’ll get themselves up and get into the game because they love the conflict. Typically, they were the senior players who had been around for a while.”

According to Hughes, the young, the callow and the nervous were fair game.

“Sometimes it was a team plan to go an individual because you see him as a little bit fragile. You put him under as much verbal pressure as possible. If he’s more worried about what you’re saying than what he’s doing, then you’ve had a win.”

Hughes, for example, would notoriously “go” the Zimbabwean-born English batsman, Graeme Hick. On one notable occasion, after Hick had played and missed a string of balls, Hughes fumed: “Turn the bat over – you’ll find the instructions on the other side.”

Did Hughes’ needling of Hick work?

It’s impossible to know. Notably, however, Hick’s Test average against Australia stood at a middling 35. “Ultimately sledging is directed solely at the opposition because we think they’re weak,” says Hughes. “It’s not what’s said that’s important. What you do is you keep going until you strike a nerve, then you just drill that point home. It’s planned who to go at but not what’s said.”

Hughes points to Hick's English teammates in the early 90s. “If we got through Gooch, Atherton, Gatting and we had Graham Thorpe and Nasser Hussain – two young blokes – at the wicket, you’d just drive it into them. You go at the young and the weak. Inexperienced blokes who may not have confronted this before, you go hard at them. You want to plant that seed: ‘Shit, every time I come out to bat I’m going to cop it from this bloke? I don’t really like this environment…’

“I got criticised for not going at senior players – Gatting, Gooch, Gower, blokes like that. But it was a waste of time. They’ve played a lot, they weren't likely to be intimidated. But a young bloke coming in?

He’s got to be unsure of himself, so you try to heighten those uncertainties.”

For Hughes, a key part of sledging was creating a personal aura that buttressed his verbal aggression. “I didn’t make a point of getting to know the opposition all that well because I found that if you were good mates with them, when crunch time came in games subconsciously you would ease up on them.

It’s easy to go at someone full tilt when you don’t know them. When you don’t know them,

Cricket lends itself to sledging for one simple reason: time. you can convince yourself that you hate them.”

Occasionally Hughes would “go” a batsman “just because I didn’t like the bloke”. More often, however, he would have a word to improve his own game, to fire himself up for the contest. “The main reason I used to sledge was if we were going through a flat spot in the game. You may not be going as hard, so you actually sledge to get yourself up in the contest. Get your blood pumping, your adrenalin going. It was irrelevant who the batsman at the other end was, I would go hard to get myself pumped up.” This notion of using sledging as fuel for competition was echoed by Steve Waugh, who described himself and Ian Healy in his autobiography as the “talkers on the field, the lifters of spirits and motivators during flat periods.”

For all the benefits he reaped from sledging, however, Hughes is adamant that you must never, under any circumstances, turn frustration into a sledge. “As soon as you sledge through frustration,” he explains, “you’ve lost the battle. If you don’t normally sledge but you start sledging because things aren’t going the way you want them to, you’ve lost the plot.”

The Science Cricket lends itself to sledging for one simple reason – time. The game’s languid pace makes it ideally suited to mental jousting. The long stretches of time between deliveries and overs not only challenge a batsman’s focus – they provide opportune time for fieldsmen to have a IN S IDE CRICKET

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word or two. Stretch this out over five days, then stretch it further over a five-Test series and it becomes clear why Test cricket is a sledger’s paradise.

A small psychological wound on one day can be opened a little more with each successive confrontation.

According to Dr Michael Lloyd, a psychologist at Cricket Australia, it’s these stretches of time that make cricket such a mentally challenging game.

“With all this time,” he says, “it’s a challenge for players to manage their thought processes and attention. If they’re not managing their internal environment – their thoughts and their emotions – it can create challenges with regards to performance. The other main reason why it’s a challenging game mentally is because the game is all about pressure, being able to build pressure. It’s quite challenging to have clarity of plan and to stay on task.

“Sledging is a common way to drag someone away from that plan, to drag someone off task. Attention is such an important aspect of expertise and skill execution; being able to pick up relevant information, cues, and incorporate that into some part of a performance routine.

Any way you can disrupt and distract that process may create a competitive advantage.”

Lloyd explains that performance in any sport depends upon a highly complex set of brain functions as visual signals convert to decisions in a matter of milliseconds. Facing a bowler who’s sending the pill down at 150km/h, of course, amplifies this process. Anticipation becomes an essential skill: identifying advance clues and signals, a cock of the wrist that suggests an outswinger, a grimace of effort that suggests a bouncer. Lloyd explains that when a batsman is in form he’ll describe “seeing it big, seeing it clearly, I’ve got more time”. But when he’s struggling for form he’ll say “I’m not seeing it, I feel rushed.” The physical information his brain is processing is the same – what’s changed is his ability to attend to it.

It’s a fraught mental process that demands intense concentration. It’s also a fraught mental process that explains why batters are typically on the receiving end of a well-timed sledge. If a few words can a shatter a batsman’s concentration, forcing him into a rash shot, then those words become a valuable commodity.

Of course, a successful batsman will mount his own defences against such mental skirmishes. Most rely on a pre-performance routine: a sequence of task-relevant thoughts and actions which they’ll employ before taking guard. Some fiddle with their pads, some shadow bat, some talk to themselves. Steve Waugh, for example, had an entire pre-Test routine: a haircut, a massage, a swim, pasta, a movie, and an anti-inflammatory the night before followed by a shave on the morning of the game. “I always wanted to wake up on a Test-match morning without any aches and pains, looking and feeling sharp and being energised and excited about the match ahead.

Words Can Never Hurt Me… Cricketing folklore is filled with stories of beautifully timed and perfectly weighted sledges.

Here’s our top five…

5. During a 1991 Ashes Test in Perth, a young Phil Tufnell bowled Craig McDermott before launching into a joyful celebration. The festivities were cut short, however, when the Australian quick snarled, “You’ve got to bat on this in a few minutes Tuffers. How does hospital food suit you?”

4. During a 1994 Ashes Test in Australia Mike Atherton was given not-out after a thick edge was gloved by Ian Healy.

“Fucking cheat,” seethed the Australian keeper.

“When in Rome, dear boy,” replied Atherton.

3. During a 1997 Test in South Africa, Daryll Cullinan was walking out to bat when Shane Warne – his tormentor in Australia two years earlier – sidled up. “Mate, I’ve been waiting two years for this,” said Warne. “Looks like you spent it eating,” replied Cullinan.

2. During a 2001 Ashes Test, Mark Waugh found himself unimpressed with the batting form of English seamer Jimmy Ormond.

“Mate, what are you doing out here?” asked Waugh.

“There’s no way you’re one of the best 11 cricketers in England.” “Maybe not,” replied Ormond. “But at least I’m the best player in my own family.”

1. During an 1898 county match, Essex fast bowler Charles Kortright had a string of appeals against WG Grace turned down by a thoroughly intimidated umpire. Finally, Kortright ripped the ball through the great man’s defence, flattening his middle and off stump. As Grace reluctantly turned to leave, Kortright called out, “Surely you’re not going, doctor? There’s still one stump standing.”

Hughes 1, Hick 0.

And isn't big Merv letting him know all about it IN S IDE CRICKET

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It was almost as if I was convincing myself that I’d never been better prepared and I’d given myself the best chance to excel. Tricking the mind by conditioning it is all part of the knowledge that comes with experience.”

According to Lloyd, these routines are not only a cue to focus on the ball ahead – they’re also a valuable means of passing time. “In cricket, you might have players on the field for six hours, but the actual times of contest are a lot less than that. It’s about how players manage themselves in that period from the point where the bowler is at the top of their mark coming in, to the point of release and how the batsman executes a shot in response to the ball that’s delivered. In that time, it’s about trying to be as clear as they can be in that contest. Experts pick up information better … but in order to be able to do that, they must be attending to the right things.”

Sledging, of course, is a base attempt to take a batsman’s attention away from “the right things”. “If someone’s sledging effectively,” says Lloyd, “they’re distracting that person by having them think about something else. If the sledging is particularly effective it will bring in an emotional component as well. The upshot of all this is that you’ll get a distraction in attention. If you’re distracting attention it means that people aren’t as effective and efficient in picking up performance information.”

Sledging, however, isn’t simply about breaking a player’s concentration – it’s also about jolting a player’s arousal. Every cricketer will have an ideal arousal level that allows for optimal performance. Some batsmen – like Sachin Tendulkar – find their timing clicks when they’re virtually somnambulant.

Other batsmen – like Kevin Pietersen – thrive when the heart rate’s up and the adrenaline’s pumping. For this reason, the timing of a sledge can be just as strategically important as the target.

In a recent study conducted at Loughborough University, researchers set out to explore the impact of sledging by interrogating a cohort of first-class batsmen. Firstly they discovered that all of the batsmen had been sledged at some point in their careers. Secondly, they discovered that all used self talk, set routines and quick pep talks with their partner as coping mechanisms at the crease.

Most importantly, however, they found that 90% of the batsmen identified the start of their innings as a frequent time to endure sledging, with the overwhelming majority fingering this period in their innings as the time when sledging was most effective. According to the researchers, “Both the beginning and the end of a batting team’s innings were cited as periods of frequent and effective sledging.

These responses imply that both periods of the game, for different reasons, are periods of intense pressure: the beginning because of the game’s openness and the end because of the possible result.”

Devil at the shoulder: Shahid Afridi has a nibble at Sachin Tendulkar.

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"The whole idea is to upset them. You've got to find that trigger."

The Ethics How does a cricketer know when he’s gone too far with a sledge? According to Merv Hughes, the umpire is the perfect barometer.

“They’re the ones that draw the line in the sand,” he says. “It’s hypocritical to say that you want to sledge someone but not upset them. The whole idea is to upset them. You’ve got to find that trigger. If you can get an advantage by verballing the opposition, you’re silly if you don’t.” Despite his belligerence on this point, Hughes admits there was a line he wouldn't cross: “Racism wasn’t tolerated. But everything else was open slather.”

Over his 11-year Test career, Sri Lankan batsman Asanka Gurusinha never experienced a racial sledge. But he did cop some almighty sprays. In his debut Test at Karachi in 1985 he found himself faced with the mouthy Pakistan duo of Imran Khan and Javed Miandad. “They really had a go at me,” he says. “But it actually motivated me to focus more. When I’m batting I never say anything, I wouldn’t let it affect my focus – but I’ll certainly give it back to them when I’m fielding.”

Indeed, Gurusinha contends that, as a whole, both the extent and the worth of sledging in elite cricket is largely exaggerated. “There were a lot of f’s flying around, especially when they’re fielding in close, but I didn’t take anything seriously. To be honest, in my career there was no racial abuse at all, I never got it IN S IDE CRICKET

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and I never gave it. Players respected each other. They knew when they could sledge, when they could disturb you.

They wouldn’t say anything when the bowler was running in to bowl. Some players get affected and try to argue and straight away you know you’ve got them – so you keep doing it.”

To illustrate his point, Gurusinha points to an occasion when the duo of Hughes and Healy undid him with words. “In fact, Ian Healy and I became good friends over that incident,” he laughs. “I was batting and he really got through to me that game. I was missing a lot, and he really had a go at me behind the wicket – as was usual with Heals.

Merv was bowling and half way through his run up, I turned and walked up to Heals. Everyone was looking. Allan Border, Dean Jones, Steve Waugh, David Boon, Mark Taylor – they were all looking at me, as if to say, ‘What the hell’s he doing?’ I walked up to Heals and pretty much gave him the whole alphabet.

Then I got out a couple of balls later …

So when I look at that sledging, they actually won with me.” He shrugs: “Sledging is part and parcel of the game.

As long as you don’t get families involved, your children, wife or your race.

Those kinds of things are where they have crossed the line.”

While Hughes admits that, at times, his sledging may have crossed the line, he contends that most of it was done for his own entertainment and that of his teammates. “A lot of it is to amuse yourselves … I mean, Australia have got ten matches against England this year.

When you play ten games against someone over 12 months, you find the idiosyncrasies and flaws in their character.

How they look and how they move. You’d always compare them to someone or something. There was a bloke down in Tassie who wasn’t the best looking bloke of all time and we used to call him John Merrick, the Elephant Man. We’d say that we couldn’t understand why he batted with a helmet on his head and not a hessian bag. While it’s cutting to the bloke, it’s amusing from your side of the fence.”

For Hughes, the seminal rule of sledging is: “Don’t give it if you can’t take it.” Certainly this was a rule he happily complied with during his career. Indeed, during a Test at Antigua's Recreation Ground he once levelled one of his trademark stares at Viv Richards.

The proud hometown hero met the stare, raised his chin, and said, “This is my island, my culture. And in my culture we don’t stare.

Get back and bowl”. Hughes held the stare before firing back: “In my culture we just say, 'Fuck off'.”

Hughes turned, walked back to his mark, and charged back in. The ball disappeared to the boundary. So did the next. And the next. And the next. Taut with rage, Hughes strode down the pitch. His eyes aflame, his moustache quivering, he squared up to Richards – and broke wind. “Let’s see you hit that to the boundary!” he whispered.

Truly, the dark art at its finest.