Are Indians right to boo Hardik Pandya, a star cricketer?
The practice of booing is as old as sport itself. During gladiatorial contests in ancient Rome, spectators expressed displeasure at athletes by giving them the bird. The consequences could be deadly. The recipient of their derision, usually the vanquished fighter, was sometimes sentenced to death. These days the consequences are rarely fatal, but the tradition flourishes with no less zest. Yet for such a deep-rooted and widespread habit, booing remains a charged issue for sports fans and society.
Consider the case of Hardik Pandya, an Indian cricket star. During this season’s Indian Premier League, the world’s most lucrative domestic cricket tournament, which began last month, Mr Pandya has been hit by a torrent of abuse at visiting grounds, and even at his home one. The harassment has prompted much hand-wringing from Mr Pandya’s colleagues, ex-players and pundits, who have urged fans to rein it in.
The fans are not having it. Mr Pandya’s first sin was to jump ship, moving from the Gujarat Titans to the Mumbai Indians. That move earned Mr Pandya, himself a Gujarati, the ire of his home-state supporters. But as part of the lucrative deal, Mr Pandya allegedly insisted that he replace Rohit Sharma as the captain of his new side. For fans of the Mumbai Indians, that act of opportunism against their hugely successful leader was tantamount to treason. That Mr Sharma is also the captain of the national team, of which Mr Pandya is a member, ensured that fans across the country shared the sentiment.
Fans in lots of sports see themselves—not the officials, team owners or players—as upholders of their sport’s unwritten moral code. Booing is their go-to way of signalling and punishing any transgressions. Moves between rival teams are common sparks for vitriol. But in some sports even seemingly innocuous acts are deemed sacrilege. In 1993 Emerson Fittipaldi was jeered despite winning the Indy 500, a prestigious American car race. His crime? Eschewing the 37-year old tradition of a post-victory drink of milk. (He instead swigged orange juice.) In the French Open, a tennis player who dares even to question the umpire’s decision can attract Parisian fury.
Sometimes, though, booing is a way to protest about more important things. Jordan Henderson, an English footballer, was jeered at an international match last year in London because his move to Saudi Arabia was seen as a betrayal of lgbt+, for which he had once been a vocal ambassador. (Mr Henderson has since left Saudi Arabia.) Booing can be especially powerful in places where protest is being stifled. In Hong Kong, where dissent against the government in Beijing is fast being extinguished, fans have booed the Chinese national anthem in matches between the territory’s and the mainland’s football teams, though such an act would now be deemed seditious.
The vast majority of booing, however, is done for more mundane reasons: to rattle the opposition or to cow the referee to favour your team. Home-field advantage is a well-established phenomenon in most sports, but there is scant research on booing’s role in it. One study in 1983 that examined the performance of basketball players after periods of intense booing suggests that the effect is real. Getting on the visitors’ backs unsettles them enough to hinder performance, but also boosts home players’ efforts.
That would suggest that booing your own team is not ideal. Yet that too happens. Fans can boo their team if they perceive a lack of application or quality. But other fans regard that as a betrayal (which can trigger a meta response: booing of the booing). This perennially fraught issue has become more acute in modern sports as team owners try to squeeze ever more money out of their customers in the stands. Ticket-price increases always irk, but when they are not matched by improvements in quality they can push even loyal supporters into anger (but rarely ever into abandoning their team—the ultimate sacrilege).
There is another reason for booing. It is contagious and fun. A big attraction of live sport is uniting for a shared cause. And nothing brings people more into harmony than a common enemy—even if that is your own team. Booing and the hostility it brings can spice up games (and lives). But as in society, so in sport: mob mentality can go horribly wrong. For decades football fans in Britain expressed the racism that was common in society by jeering black players from the terraces.
Such explicit abuse may have faded, but sports remain a battleground for culture wars, and boos are a prominent weapon. American footballers and Premier League footballers in Britain have been jeered for taking the knee in support of the Black Lives Matter movement, with profound consequences. Colin Kaepernick, who started the take-the-knee trend in America in 2016, has struggled to find a team since. Similarly Adam Goodes, an Aboriginal Australian-rules football star who demanded the eviction from the crowd of a 13-year-old girl who had called him an ape, was booed into early retirement in 2015.
The solutions to this type of political booing are complex and lie beyond the stadiums. But for the more trivial forms of jeering, the answer lies very much within them. A visiting team can silence an aggressive home crowd with a dominant performance. Mr Pandya’s sins may be forgotten if he scores a few centuries in Mumbai. Fans are, after all, capricious. The surest way to get them on board is by winning.
Sport is all the better for a bit of abuse and hostility—but there are limits
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