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Sledging or an excuse to get personal?

cnerd123

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Yeah but these things are absolutely impossible to police. Suppose someone makes a racist slur to another player, the latter reports, the player in question denies. What are you going to do? I am sure you weren't sleeping in 2007 right?
One guy's word against another. What do you do?

You are assuming the way things should work in an ideal situation. I am pointing out the way it actually works in reality. We all have our biases. We feel we 'our way of sledging' is right and 'their way' is wrong. There is no objective line of demarcation.

That's what I am trying to say, it's not possible to control or police this. Either you allow all kind of verbal sledging, or you ban it altogether.
I never meant to talk about policing it.

I meant to talk about its place in the game. Do people approve of disapprove of it. Where do people draw a line?

In terms of policing it..it's more or less impossible to control what someone says. But the way I see it, once the cricketing community figures out what is kosher and what isn't, you will see a form of self-policing amongst professional cricketers. The problem now is, as you pointed out, everyone's standards are different, and young cricketers will end up doing what their idols do. Young Aussies continue to be physically intimidating, young Desi cricketers continue to throw around casual racism, and young West Indians will keep making 'your mom' jokes.

If cricketers around the world could agree that some topics are off limits, and some behaviours are unacceptable, then we will have fewer nasty incidents.

But the first step is to see what 'Sledging' means to everyone, and what the general consensus on it is.
 

sledger

Spanish_Vicente
I always thought engaging in sledging was generally suggestive of someone with extremely low intelligence and a childish personality. Having used myself r as a case-study for the evaluation of this hypothesis, it seems I was largely correct.
 

Bouncer

State Regular
I loved sledging. Sledging means getting personal. Screaming out utter filth is not sledging. It needs to be more subtle. In last SL-ENG series Mathews kept reminding Joe Root about the punch he received, and then started discussing finer details of the punch among SL players in front of Root till Root lost focus. The sledge-gate went on four three hours. We don't sledge people easily, but Mathews, Mahela and Kumar are a deadly combo to have for sledging. Not a single four letter word uttered at Root other than his name, even Root used it frequently.

I have sledged people, and I have got very personal as well. But no filth used at all.
any clips of that incident between Matt, Joe and others?
 

Black_Warrior

Cricketer Of The Year
I never meant to talk about policing it.

I meant to talk about its place in the game. Do people approve of disapprove of it. Where do people draw a line?


In terms of policing it..it's more or less impossible to control what someone says. But the way I see it, once the cricketing community figures out what is kosher and what isn't, you will see a form of self-policing amongst professional cricketers. The problem now is, as you pointed out, everyone's standards are different, and young cricketers will end up doing what their idols do. Young Aussies continue to be physically intimidating, young Desi cricketers continue to throw around casual racism, and young West Indians will keep making 'your mom' jokes.

If cricketers around the world could agree that some topics are off limits, and some behaviours are unacceptable, then we will have fewer nasty incidents.

But the first step is to see what 'Sledging' means to everyone, and what the general consensus on it is.

And what I am saying is that it is almost impossible to reach a general consensus in practice. In theory everyone will agree and draw an imaginary line, in practice, things are very different and the line is between 'acceptable and unacceptable' is different for different teams, players, cultures etc.

If you look at some of the most controversial incidents - take Harbhajan and Symmonds for example, there is almost always totally different accounts of one incident. One set of players say this, another set says that. What do you do now? This is true for almost all of the controversial conflicts and incidents that have occured on the cricket ground.
 
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