Although history has not been kind to his name, Vinoo Mankad was one of India’s finest cricketers. He scored his country’s first double hundred, took 12 wickets in India’s first victory over England and was the fastest all-rounder to the cherished double of 1,000 runs and 100 wickets, until Ian Botham came along to snatch the record from his grasp.
Instead of those stirring deeds, his name has become indelibly linked to the dismissal that caused such a stink this week when Jos Buttler was run-out by Ravi Ashwin in the IPL, the batsman having left his crease before the ball was bowled. Amid the subsequent moralising, the context of the original deed has been forgotten and it was left to Mankad’s son, Rahul, to remind us in a rather touching interview yesterday with a newspaper in Mumbai.
Mankad ran-out Bill Brown, the Australian batsman, twice in this way during the 1947-48 tour, the first time in a state game in Queensland after multiple warnings for backing-up too far. “My father regretted it and wished it had never happened, but he felt it was the only course of action left [my italics] because Brown refused to heed the warnings,” Rahul said. He called his father’s actions “brave”, rather than underhand, echoing the contemporary comments of Sir Donald Bradman and other Australian cricketers, who exonerated Mankad from all blame.
Quite how, then, this mode of dismissal wrongly came to be tainted is uncertain. It can only be linked to its scarcity; I cannot remember it happening during my career, and I can count only nine instances in the history of international cricket, the last of which was Buttler against Sri Lanka at Edgbaston five years ago. That and the Spirit of Cricket, which, although associated with the game since its reinvention in Victorian England, was only codified in 2000, when it was written into the Laws of the game.
To be run-out in such a way once may be regarded as a misfortune; twice, as Buttler has now been, looks like carelessness. Except nothing is quite that simple in cricket. Certainly, Ashwin’s action this week was less clear-cut than when Buttler was so dismissed against Sri Lanka five years ago, or indeed when Ashwin attempted such a dismissal in an earlier ODI against Sri Lanka, only to be persuaded to drop the appeal.
This time, the third umpire’s opinion was a finely balanced one: as the MCC noted on Tuesday, it could have gone either way, depending as it did on the subjective judgment of when the ball would have been expected to be released. What seems clear is that Ashwin was looking for an opportunity to dismiss Buttler in this way and by giving the bowler such an opportunity, Buttler was guilty of doziness again.
Interestingly, I had a text from a friend yesterday from Chennai, Ashwin’s home town, who said that such dismissals are regularly seen during the ruthless floodlit 15-yard soft ball matches played during the steaming summer nights in the city, where every inch counts. Short-form franchise competitions mirror native playground games more and more (or the other way around), was his gist, and no one who has played in those games thinks of it as a moral issue.
In that context, bringing morality into such a dismissal is much like the infamous Australian “line” on sledging and behaviour, it being drawn differently depending on who you are or where you are from. One man’s sledge is another’s polite greeting. Morality, then, is best left to playwrights; cricket should concern itself with its Laws.
Part of the problem, indeed, was the change to the Law in 2000, whereby batsmen could leave their crease the moment the bowler’s back foot landed. This was an open invitation to steal ground — and therefore runs — and encouraged batsmen to be casual of their whereabouts at the crease. Rightly, MCC changed the Law again in 2017, so that batsmen must now be in their ground from the moment the ball is live until the moment the ball is expected to be released.
There has been a lot of woolly thinking in the reaction to the incident, mostly from those who are clearly ignorant of the Law. Breathless tweets from former players suggested the fabric of the game was threatened as further shenanigans would be encouraged. Few wondered what would happen if batsmen maintained their ground, as they are supposed to do.
Precisely nothing would happen, because that’s what the Law is there for. There can only be a virulent outbreak of similar run-outs, something no one wants to see, if batsmen continue to be dozy, or underhand, and leave their ground too soon.
When it changed the Law in 2017, MCC did two further things: it clarified that there was no stipulation for the bowler to give a warning (although that would still be reasonable in my view, to prevent the sourness that followed Buttler’s dismissal) and it placed the responsibility for fair play upon the batsman, not the bowler. It was a belated way of saying that the name Mankad should not be tainted at all.
That, really, is the starting point for any debate. The onus here is on the batsman, not the bowler: watch the ball, stay your ground until it has been delivered and, for the right reasons rather than wrong, we can all let Mankad’s name recede gracefully into history.
Warner played his ban to perfection
Exactly 12 months to the day after Cricket Australia handed down its judgment on the events in Cape Town, the bans on Steve Smith and David Warner from playing for their country, and in first-class cricket in their country, come to an end.
Cameron Bancroft, the third member of the trio to be barred, was able to return in December, his ban being shorter than his more senior team-mates. Not that he has been out of the news recently, given his remarkable elevation to the captaincy of a county, Durham, he has never set foot in before.
Of the three, Warner remains the most fascinating. It was widely felt at the time that Smith’s return to the Australia team was inevitable, that Bancroft’s was likely, if he had a return to form, and that Warner, despite his formidable record as a batsman in all forms, would be the most vulnerable to permanent exclusion.
Banned from leadership roles within Australia cricket for good, it looked like Warner was being set up to take the largest portion of whatever blame was being attributed. As Australia cricket distanced itself from him, what, we wondered, would Warner’s reaction be? Would he lash out? Would he spill the beans? Having left the reservation — the team’s WhatsApp group in this instance — where would this loose cannon train his fire?
In fact, as Gideon Haigh, columnist at The Australian newspaper noted recently, Warner has had the best ban of the three. After the initial teary press conference immediately on returning from South Africa, and one sulky retreat from the crease in club cricket apart, he has stayed out of view. He has refused all of the presumably many juicy offers to tell his side of the story and maintained a telling silence.
The heavy hand of spin could be seen in the televised interviews Smith and Bancroft gave at Christmas during the Test series against India. They were unenlightening and were clearly intended to be among the first steps back to rehabilitation. Smith did an advert with Vodafone around the same time — tagged “gutsy is calling” — which jarred. Warner has simply kept his head down, his mouth shut, and accepted the punishment.
Now he is back and in his first innings in the IPL for Sunrisers Hyderabad he made a blistering 85. Few would bet against a return in both the Ashes and the World Cup this summer, despite Australia’s performances having bottomed out following their ODI tour of England last summer.
The list of those who have left their jobs in Australia in the last year is a long one: gone are CEO James Sutherland, chairman David Peever, high-performance manager Pat Howard, head coach Darren Lehmann and bowling coach David Saker. Having wisely kept his counsel, Warner will outlast them all.
(or mankad them out.)
