A bold declaration

No one in Carew seems to want to talk about what happened, not to the press anyway. You can sense their wariness when they answer the phone, almost hear their jaws tighten when their worst suspicions, already aroused by an unfamiliar number, are confirmed as you say why you’re ringing. They have been getting a lot of these calls lately. Carew, a little village in Pembrokeshire – notable for its Norman castle, so far as it was noted at all – has become the setting for a rancorous scandal. One covered heavily in local press, yes, and on beyond, pored over by the national papers, picked up in India, where the Hindustan Times and the Indian Express both reported the story, and picked over in Australia, where Fox Sports ran it too.

The Pembrokeshire league chairman is away, and his son offers a “try again tomorrow”. The league secretary isn’t answering his phone. The vice chair only has one thing to say, on or off the record, “no comment”. Carew’s players publicly refuse to add to the statement they put out last week, though one of them talks, anonymously, about the amount of abuse and hate-mail they’ve all received on social media since it happened. “Spineless, cowardly, pathetic”, “losers all round”, “shame on you”, “an embarrassment to the sport of cricket”, “an embarrassment to yourselves and your family,” “absolutely shameful”, “disgraceful and disrespectful”, “appalling”, “losers, cheaters”, “bunch of tossers”, “another proud day for Carew? Doubt there ever will be now.”

Ten days ago, Carew’s village team lost a game and won the league. They’d been leading the Pembroke County Cricket Club Division 1 right through the summer. They won almost every game they played, but for a couple that were abandoned. The “almost” is there for the one match they drew, against Neyland, and the one they lost, at Cresselly in June. Cresselly is only two miles away, barely a five-minute drive, and they’re a good side too. Since the start of June, the two teams were running first and second, Carew just ahead. They were still placed that way coming into the last weekend of August when they had each one game to play. Against each other.

Carew were 21 points ahead. Under the league rules, a team gets 20 points for a win, plus whatever bonuses they earn along the way. The batting side get one bonus for the first 40 runs they make, another for every other 40 runs, until they reach 200 runs. The bowling team gets a bonus point for every two wickets they take. So Cresselly didn’t just need to win, they had to score two more bonus points than Carew too. And if Carew scored so many as 10 points, they’d win the league. Which, Cresselly say, is why they chose to bowl when they won the toss. After 15 balls, Carew were 18 for 1. And then they declared. Which made it very easy for Cresselly to get 20 points, but impossible for them to get 21.

Carew hadn’t necessarily broken any of cricket’s laws. They’re clear enough. “The captain of the side batting may declare an innings closed, when the ball is dead, at any time during the innings.” But Cresselly released a statement that described Carew’s choice to declare as “deliberately at odds with their title of champions of the county”, and which raised, in a roundabout way, a more serious allegation. “Some people have asked if we think ‘deliberately losing’ is match-fixing and if we wanted to go down that road - but we will leave that up to Pembroke County Cricket Club to decide.” Carew have been accused of contravening the “spirit of cricket” and the PCCC, ever so grave, have set up a “four-man disciplinary subcommittee to investigate”.

The spirit of cricket, hazy phrase, was added to the game’s laws in a preamble written by Ted Dexter and Colin Cowdrey. If Carew have broken the laws, it seems to have been that they broke clause four of this preamble, which states “the Spirit of the Game involves respect for both your opponents and the game’s traditional values”. Which, if you know anything much of the way the sport was played back in the early 19th century, when it was a game for gamblers and sharps, is a ridiculous notion. But still, if found guilty, Carew could be expelled, relegated, docked points or fined.

This being cricket, there’s a precedent, and it doesn’t bode well for Carew. It was in the 1979 Benson & Hedges Cup. At the end of the group stage, Somerset were bound to qualify for the quarter-finals so long as they maintained their batting strike rate (which was used as a tie-break between teams who had the same number of points). In their last match against Worcestershire, Somerset’s captain Brian Rose won the toss, batted, declared after a single over with the score 1 for 0. Rose had checked with the authorities whether he was allowed to do this, and was told that while the declaration was legal, it would still cause “repercussions”.

These turned out to be rather more severe than Rose imagined. He was pilloried for “plumbing the depths” by the Daily Telegraph, and accused of “exploiting the laws” by The Guardian. At the subsequent disciplinary board meeting, Somerset were found guilty of “bringing the game into disrepute” and even their own chairman voted to expel them from the competition. Carew are preparing their own case. They say there is another side to the story.Last week, one local paper ran with the Carew declaration as its front-page lead, and had another story, about how the Mayor of Pembroke has been charged with six counts of indecent assault and another of rape, tucked into the bottom corner beneath it. Ever heard of Sayre’s Law? It’s one of those handy adages named after the person who coined it, in this case, Wallace Sayre, who was a professor at Columbia University. “In any dispute the intensity of feeling is inversely proportional to the value of the assets at stake.” Academic politics, Sayre argued, was the most vicious and bitter of all, precisely because the stakes are so low. But then Sayre would think that, since he had no experience in local league cricket.

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