So sportsmen cheat. Big deal. Sometimes they get caught. Bad luck. Sometimes they cheat blatantly and are accused of “stupidity”. Australians used to pride themselves on the belligerence of their cricketers, as against the genteel northern hemisphere’s “sportsmanship”. What seems to have hurt most in the latest ball-tampering scandal is not the tampering but the idiocy. From booing terraces to newspaper headlines to the prime minister himself, Australia has risen in horror at the blatancy of their team’s malpractice in South Africa.
The history of cheating in sport is as old as quick-drying plaster in boxing gloves. Cycling and athletics have been cursed by drugs. Rugby has its fake blood scam. Football players “dive” to win penalties. Motor racing is a high-octane contest between technicians and inspectors. Cricket is periodically corrupted by match-fixing.
Sport was once a leisure activity. Until the 1960s, a line was drawn between amateurs and professionals, with the covert assumption that the former were nobler – and less inclined to cheat – than the latter. What mattered was not to win but how you played the game. Those days are over. “Amateur”, once a term of approbation, is now a term of abuse. Professional means serious, successful and rich.
As professional sport gets ever more lucrative, so does the financial – and patriotic – incentive to cheat. As fast as sportsmen and women try to bend the rules, camera surveillance tries to keep up with them. Refereeing has become not an art but a science. Rugby and cricket are interrupted as referees deliberate in front of screens. Even football has now conceded camera replays of fouls and dubious goals. This will render it as stoppage-plagued as American football.
Sport has long been a metaphor for life. We are constantly told that rules are made to be broken, whether in high finance, school exams or even democracy. We learned this week that an appearance on a Trump talent show could be offered in exchange for sex. We learned that an election or a referendum could be influenced with fake news. The whole world seems set up as a standing invitation to cheat.
To this there is no answer but ever more assiduous regulation. But that involves another cost. If we cannot trust each other – or the referee – in sport any more than in any other field of human endeavour, our faith in the informal bonds of community declines. If we cannot trust a cricketer to obey the rules, how can we trust a politician or a captain of industry? Or perhaps we should just relax a bit, and concentrate on things that matter. The world does not end if a scuffed cricket ball drifts an inch off its predictable line.
• Simon Jenkins is a Guardian columnist
