Mankading: an unnecessary moral dilemma
A sport that breaks for lunch and tea, and harks back to a genteel time of measured applause while paper napkins are discreetly used to wipe away the crumbs of cucumber sandwiches, can lend itself to excessive philosophy and a supposedly higher moral plane. Cricket inevitably became a prisoner of its old pastoral image even if Test whites now jostle with coloured clothing in the laundromat while ODIs and Twenty20s crowd the calendar and draw fans to massive stadiums.
A bored shepherd’s sport with rough-hewn logs and balls of wool played in the English countryside is now a full-fledged commercial endeavour greased equally by the athlete’s sweat and the corporate dollar. But the link to an unhurried time, when twitter was only associated with birds, triggers interpretations that point...