Recent sporting headlines and commentary have been dominated by the controversy concerning the dismissal of English batsman Johnny Bairstow on the final day of the second Ashes Test at Lords. Bairstow was deemed out, stumped by Australian wicket-keeper Alex Carey after Bairstow wandered out of his crease and Carey threw down the stumps.
The controversy concerned whether the ball was ‘dead’ before Bairstow left his crease. Bairstow assumed it was and hence he would not be out when the ball hit the stumps. In the eyes of many (mainly English) media and fans, because Bairstow wasn’t seeking an advantage by his actions his dismissal wasn’t in keeping with the ‘spirit of cricket’. Most accept that what Carey and the Australian team did was perfectly within the laws of cricket, but their actions weren’t in keeping with the ‘spirit’ of the game. Even English Prime Minister Rishi Sunak weighed into the row by claiming that Australia did not act in the spirit of the game by dismissing Bairstow in such a manner.
The purpose of this reflection is not to adjudicate on the rightness of the actions of the Australian cricket team, nor to comment on the reaction by English media, but to acknowledge that everyone connected with the game accepts that a thing called the spirit of cricket actually exists. The spirit of cricket is a real, yet intangible concept.
But what exactly is it? And where is this spirit?
The Spirit of Cricket
The Cricket Australia website attempts to define the spirit of cricket:
Cricket is a game that owes much of its unique appeal to the fact that it should be played not only within its Laws but also within the Spirit of the Game.[1]
This spirit, Cricket Australia goes on to say, involves respect, particularly respecting opponents, umpires and the game itself. Whilst this is a helpful start, Cricket Australia never fully articulates a precise and comprehensive description of this spirit or the limits of respect. Other journalists acknowledge that this spirit is “a subjective and slightly hazy concept”.[2] It is behaviour that a laws can’t fully describe or define.
However its haziness does not remove its reality. Since the late 1990s, the laws of cricket have also had an introductory statement or preamble speaking about how the game should be played according to the rules and the spirit of cricket. Thus the spirit of cricket is real, but remains intangible and in some sense exists above the rules.
And it was to this spirit that many appealed after Bairstow’s dismissal with thousands of tweets with the hashtag: #SpiritofCricket. This appeal assumes that Bairstow was out according to the law, but contrary to this spirit of the game—the spirit of the game should trump the letter of the law.
Atheistic Materialism and the Spirit of Cricket
It’s intriguing that so many sports fans appeal to this spirit as an overarching philosophy for how to play the game. It accepts that this spirit exists and has authority even though it can’t be fully defined. It is intriguing that in the godless sporting domain where there is no reference or appeal to God, gods or the supernatural, this concept of a transcendent and supernatural spirit offers such power.
Indeed, the appeal to this intangible and transcendent spirit seems to challenge the purely atheistic, materialistic, naturalistic perspective of the world. It challenges the notion that everything in our world is explicable in terms of the blind physical forces of matter and energy and where everything can be measurable scientifically—as Richard Dawkins has claimed: “DNA neither cares nor knows. DNA just is. And we dance to its music.”[3] The Atheist Foundation of Australia say on their homepage:
We live in a natural universe with known natural laws. We can understand why primitive cultures believed that invisible beings controlled what we now call the elements and natural phenomena. With access to factual knowledge, there is now no excuse for believing in gods, fairies or any supernatural concept.[4]
There is now “no excuse for believing in … any supernatural concept.” But what about the spirit of cricket?
Given it doesn’t have any physical attributes or qualities, it is a transcendent ideal; it can’t be defined by matter and energy. So then, in what sense does it exist? It appears to be a super-natural concept. So in the atheistic naturalist account of reality, if it’s not explicable in terms of matter and energy, what is it? Where is it? It would seem that the atheist worldview claims that there is no excuse to believe in the spirit of cricket.
How to Account for This Spirit?
Yet humans do accept the reality of something like the spirit of cricket. Though immaterial and somewhat hazy, it is still real as thousands of cricket fans appealed to it just this last week. Hence the challenge for the atheist is to account for the emergence of immaterial and transcendent concepts like the spirit of cricket. Atheists often attempt to account for the emergence of altruism or love as useful psychological and social evolutionary mechanisms that facilitate group survival. The same could be said here. But just because something is useful doesn’t explain its nature.
The atheistic naturalistic worldview faces more than a trivial challenge in explaining the emergence of the immaterial from the solely material. How can the significant but immaterial things like a strong sense of morality, values and ideals (of which the spirit of cricket is a small example) emerge from nothing more than blind physical forces? If matter and energy account for all reality then the reality of immaterial concepts, which is such a substantial aspect of meaningful human experience, becomes somewhat inexplicable. It almost renders irrational the appeal of cricket fans to the truth and reality of something that can’t be explained by atoms and energy. I’m not sure any cricket fan would want to be accused of irrationality!
The fact that humans acknowledge the reality of a transcendent spirit, which governs how we play games and navigate life, possibly points to something more. Perhaps it shows that atheistic materialism fails to account for all of our human experience. Perhaps the appeal to the spirit of cricket doesn’t cohere as easily with an atheistic, naturalistic account of our human experience as it might with a theistic, supernatural account.
Rather than postulating the spirit of cricket emerging as an accident in a universe of blind physical forces, perhaps recognition of this spirit implies a greater Spirit, something truly supernatural and transcendent, that challenges athetistic materialism and shows that there might be something inherently spiritual about being human.
[1] “Spirit of Cricket”. https://www.cricketaustralia.com.au/about/our-values/spirit-of-cricket.
[2] Kirsty Wigglesworth, “What is the difference between the laws of cricket and the ‘spirit’ of cricket?” The Conversation. 5th July 2023. https://theconversation.com/what-is-the-difference-between-the-laws-of-cricket-and-the-spirit-of-cricket-209124.
[3] Richard Dawkins, River out of Eden.
[4] “About Us”. https://atheistfoundation.org.au/about-us/.
