There were a combination of factors that made further activity hereabouts unlikely, but when I wandered into the office and fired up the computer a headline like Booing no more a reflex, but a calculated first strike in the Cricinfo feed was certain to catch the attention, wasn’t it?
Clicking there will take The Reader to an intermediary page that links, in turn, to this rather interesting little article (Booing at sports players hits a discordant note) in The Age by Greg Baum which prompted further musings on The Sledge and The Niggle over the morning walk.
It’s a thoughtful piece that lines up the booing of Michael Clarke after he was held responsible for the draw on Monday morning with the booing of an Essendon confessed drug cheat in the AFL over the weekend. Baum makes some interesting points.
Crowds never have been obliged to be nuanced and fair, he points out, and cites the barracking the 1974-75 England side copped when they were forced to deal with Lillee and Thomson on top of the inevitable parochial nationalism that arrives as part of an Ashes series.
He could, of course, have gone further and speculated that part of the joyous reaction to Messrs Lillee and Thomson was based on memories of John Snow and what he did to our side four years earlier. Very much, I think, an exultant get square Cop this you Pommy bastards sort of thing.
You can see same Get square in English crowds running through 2005 and 2009, replace Pommy bastards with Bloody convicts and there’s not a great deal of difference. An acquaintance who had the temerity to walk into a ground in 2005 wearing a shirt that identified him as an Australian supporter greeted the jeering with the astute response:
Friendly lot of bastards, aren’t you? Hate to see what you’d be like if you were losing...
Nice one, Arthur.
The key paragraph here is the one that reads:
And yet there has been an overall change in tone and temper, less informed by humour, more personal, more shrill, more than just sport's robust partisanship, nearer in disposition to a lynch mob - or commentators on a political blog. Boo not as reflex, but as calculated first strike.
This, folks is where we move from the random to the organized, from The Sledge to The Niggle, and it’s those two perennial topics that supplied the material to muse over yet again. It’s a subject that ha long intrigued me, and I’ve been known to indulge in The Sledge from time to time myself, largely as a preventive strike in environments where it’s known to operate.