July 2026
There's currently a shitstorm swirling on Twitter and it rumbles in my area of self-congratulated expertise: league cricket and etiquette.
If you haven't seen, a first slipper has been conning umpires to fire batsmen by clicking his fingers as the ball passes their outside edge, imitating the sound of a nick. Umpires fall hook, line and sinker, ruining somebody's weekend in the process.
The reaction has been emphatic. The cricketing public requests public execution for sins this unspeakable, and the poor first slipper is likely questioning life decisions.
I recall countless huddles where the umpire has triggered a batsman and, all of us to a man, know it's the wrong decision. You try to keep the sniggers at low volume, justifying yourself with the logic that it evens out over the course of the season. Was I complicit in fraud by appealing loudly? Absolutely. Did I stop to reflect on my ills? Nope. There's a million perceived wrongs fuelling those appeals.
Yet, cricket has a nasty habit of revealing character. The spirit of cricket became a bit of a parody after Jonny Bairstow was on the wrong end of some Australian misdirection a couple of Ashes ago. Us poms were accused of hypocrisy whilst Australians derided the concept, falling back on "the rules is the rules is the rules".
The playing public condones or admonishes certain acts. This filter weaves its way into the fabric of the game and becomes "the way to play". No rule states the fielding team enter the field of play before the batsmen at the start of a session, but it's just the way I've been brought up to play. It has become to me a hallmark of the people who know how to play the game and those who don't. A batter who walks onto the field of play before the fielding team gets categorised as a newb in my mind.
A good proxy for much of the spirit of cricket is enshrined in Taleb's silver rule: do not do unto others that which you do not wish done unto yourself. And Clicky Ponting falls squarely in this category. Would he like somebody to perform the same trick whilst he was batting? Undoubtedly not. So don't do it to others. Ya prick.
Buuuut, here's where the spirit of the game becomes magical. His behaviour has now been exposed and crucified. Will he do it again? Most certainly not, unless he is, indeed, a twat. The filter of the cricket playing population championing behaviours it wants and vilifying the ones it doesn't is working. And, like any good parent knows, mistakes can lead to growth, especially when it comes to morals.
We could (in fact we might) have a rule that prevents a fielder from clicking, but that removes the magic of the mechanism. Left to the spirit of cricket, it feels like magic. Like we've policed ourselves. Like we have an unwritten cultural code we all subscribe to that is larger than life. This shared culture of how to play is why cricket is so absorbing. It grows with us, in real time, and allows people to impact it. A fielder in their team could've said "lads, come on, we don't want to play like this". That then becomes a moral choice in real time. A test of character and an opportunity to display moral fibre.
That's powerful.
The elephant in the room is the question of where I stand on the Bairstow incident. I think it was undoubtedly against the spirit of cricket. How do I know? Well, the answer is in whether Alex Carey will do it again or not. I strongly suspect he will not.