Professional sport is seriously competitive; sportsmen and women react when frustrated, or feel badly done by. The distance between the performer and the spectator once lent sport a unique charm — and enabled writers like Neville Cardus to invent conversations. The quotes he fabricated were often humorous or imaginative, so the players didn’t mind. And then came the stump mic.

This was an innovation by Kerry Packer, who, briefly stole international cricket, spruced it up and returned it. He stuck microphones into the ground near the pitch so television audiences could hear the rattle of stumps.

Two consequences

There were two unintended consequences as the microphones graduated to the middle stump: they picked up the chatter around the bat, and they served as a vehicle for free advertisement.

This last was a response most recently by the Australian team during the ‘Sandpaper’ series in South Africa when the broadcasters refused to turn down the mics, and the players plugged their personal sponsors. The umpires, sponsored by Emirates, were asked, “How good is Qantas?”, and Australian beers were fondly mentioned. Australia had done this in 2006 when they played Bangladesh.

Whether it is more irritating to hear plugs for sponsors or well-articulated four-letter words and banter that wouldn’t pass muster in a low-grade movie is difficult to tell. Broadcasters love it; often listeners too, convinced they are being allowed into the sanctum sanctorum. The adage that what happens on the field should be left on the field no longer applies. What happens on the field lands up in our drawing rooms and on the match referee’s table.

In recent weeks, Pakistan captain Sarfraz Ahmed and West Indies bowler Shannon Gabriel have been suspended from matches for racist and homophobic comments respectively, thanks to the all-hearing stump mic.

Moral leader

Cricket is once again being asked to play the moral leader, to set an example for those who get away with casual racism or homophobia in everyday life. Perhaps the message will get through to the general public; perhaps it won’t, but there is an argument for keeping the mics on full-time to a) discourage bad behaviour and b) punish it so it stays as an example for those watching who either don’t know or don’t care that certain behaviour crosses a line.

Do stump mics add something to the audience experience, giving the sporting narrative an extra dimension, bringing everything closer home as it were, and painting the players in relatable colours? Maybe they do.

Breach in privacy?

Should cricketers be subject to such intense scrutiny? Or do we tell ourselves that a breach in privacy is the price they have to pay for the money they make and the fame conferred on them?

A day at a cricket match is work for the players, entertainment for the spectators. Players tend to swear on three occasions — at themselves when they make a mistake, to rile an opponent, or in response to an opponent’s attempt at riling.

It is convenient to believe that sledging is a modern phenomenon, invented by Ian Chappell. This is ridiculous. Human beings in competition have ranted and insulted and screamed at opponents ever since prehistoric man first dropped a rock on an opponent’s foot while attempting a version of soccer.

Read what Walter Hammond said to Don Bradman when the latter was given not out when caught at slip, or the South African fast bowler Peter Heine’s threat to English batsman Trevor Bailey: “I want to hit you, Bailey, I want to hit you over the heart.”

As Malcolm Knox wrote in Never a Gentleman’s Game, “Anglo-Australian cricket up to 1914 was cricket in the raw… when one cricketer had a problem with another, he did not background his media mates or manoeuvre with agents or sponsors. He punched him in the nose.” Let’s not complain. We may be in the golden age of player behaviour.

Spectators in television land who see sport as entertainment are happy if players go for each other verbally, or as in the case of Mahendra Singh Dhoni, bring them into the player’s mind when instructing the spinners.

Has the stump microphone improved player behaviour? It is difficult to say. Players quickly worked out how to say nasty things just out of range. In 2007 when the stump mic was introduced at the World Cup, the intention was to help umpires with their decisions, not compare the vocabulary of the players.

I suspect that players object to the stump mic because they don’t want us to know the real truth: that much of the chatter is banal. The best cricket stories don’t come to us via the stump microphone, but through imaginative writing, manufactured post-event.

Cricket’s mythology

“You have just dropped the World Cup,” said Steve Waugh to Herschelle Gibbs in 1999. Everybody knows that. Except, Waugh didn’t say that. Cricket’s mythology is built on Cardus’s dictum: “This is what he should have said.”

Keep the stump mics on, and player behaviour may or may not improve, but audiences will soon lose interest. Latter-day Carduses are more fun.