Paul Nixon column – Don’t take sledging too far

During the second day of the second Test at Newlands, Ben Stokes made the headlines for all the right reasons. His 258, an innings of breathless skill mixed with butchering brilliance, is one of the finest you will see in Test cricket. I cannot describe how well he played, and how thrilling it was to watch.

Later in the Test match, Ben hit the headlines again. But this time it was not for any skills he displayed with bat or ball, but for some verbals he delivered towards the South African batsmen, and most notably Temba Bavuma – the Proteas’ diminutive number six who would go on to make one of the most emotional centuries in South African colours.

Ben fronted up to the criticism by tweeting a lovely picture of him congratulating Bavuma on his hundred, claiming that he plays the game hard but always shows respect to the opposition after the game. Some will still question the morality here, but I have no issue with Ben, and players in general, having a word and trying to unsettle the opposition.

Anybody who watched me play cricket over the years will recall how I would never shy from having a word in a batsman’s ear.

I grew up playing cricket in the Cumbrian leagues and it was highly competitive.

It was a big rugby area, both league and union, and a lot of rugby lads played cricket, so the alpha male count was pretty high. You had to have pretty thick skin to get through it.

When it comes to sledging, what I cannot accept is people getting nasty. The expert lip readers among you may point to the fact that Stokes threw a few obscenities towards Bavuma, but I don’t think he overstepped the mark because if he did, I can tell you now we would know about it.

It was perhaps a mixture of frustration, and the hope that he was unsettling Bavuma, that made him speak the way he did – and the fact Bavuma had just inside edged him past his own stumps in the early part of his innings when he did look slightly ruffled.

If you go on YouTube and type in ‘Mark Boucher, sledging’ you will find a superb piece of footage where the legendary South African keeper delivers some legendary verbals to Zimbabwe’s Tatenda Taibu. He targets Taibu in a cricketing nature, highlighting his recent struggles with the bat. But at no point does Boucher overstep the mark; he is merely trying to shake his opponent out of his comfort zone.

That is what I tried to do. When I played for England, Duncan Fletcher and Michael Vaughan wanted me to stir things up – not just with the opposition but also the England players.

My aim was to make the batsman think about anything else than the ball he was facing. But it never got nasty! That was the last thing I wanted to be labelled as.

That’s my biggest issue with sledging today, and sadly the biggest area of concern is in league cricket. Club cricketers, who may be playing at a decent level, see first-class and Test players having a few words. But sledging is policed at professional level. The cameras catch anything that goes beyond the line. Club cricketers don’t have such restrictions, and that worries me.

We have to stamp out the nasty stuff in the leagues. Have a word, by all means, but don’t push it with personal attacks. It is particularly worrying when youngsters are involved.

The future of the game needs protecting, not needless and hurtful verbals.

Visit Paul Nixon’s Cricket Foundation – www.paulnixoncricket.com

This piece originally featured in The Cricket Paper, Friday January 8 2016