Peter Robinson cricket
One of the least fearsome sights of recent weeks has been the United Cricket Board’s (UCB) disciplinary committee girding its loins to take swift and decisive action. Herschelle Gibbs should be able to vouch for that.
Gibbs, who has been in so much hot water over the past couple of years that he risks wrinkling prematurely, was back in front of the disciplinary committee last week to explain why a suspended fine and three-match ban should not come into effect. Quite how he talked his way out of this one is not known, but he managed to have his suspended sentence extended by a year on condition that he submits himself to counselling.
That should teach him, shouldn’t it? In fact, the idea of getting someone to try to talk some common sense into Gibbs’s head could have some merit, although whether the UCB can come up with someone better able to do the job than Ali Bacher, the headmaster of Bishops and an assortment of coaches, managers, administrators and teachers remains to be seen.
The problem, rather, is that by shrugging their shoulders and deciding not to invoke the three-match ban, the disciplinary committee has contrived to send out a message that is almost impossible to decipher. If smoking dope while on tour is not considered serious enough to bring the game into disrepute, then what sort of behaviour would?
Gibbs, no doubt, must be pleased with the outcome of last week’s hearing. He might also be a trifle confused, as are the rest of us.
It is as well, though, not to get too pompous about the whole thing. Not a few of the game’s great figures Denis Compton, Keith Miller and Ian Botham spring immediately to mind played out their careers with a fine disregard for authority. If they were in their twenties today, you would almost expect them to arrive each day, minutes before the start of play, wearing shades to guard bloodshot eyes and their caps on backwards.
It is also true that most of Gibbs’s transgressions are driven by mischief rather than malice. There is a great deal of the Artful Dodger in him, both in his batting and fielding and his personality as a whole. He does not labour under the burden of foresight and if he were a more thoughtful and considered person, he might not be such a thrilling cricketer.
And yet at the age of 27 Gibbs needs to make up his mind what he wants to do with his career. Or if he is incapable of this, then someone needs to make up his mind for him.
What should have counted against him at his most recent appearance before the disciplinary committee was that he was one of the senior players in the room when the joints were passed around.
True, Paul Adams has more Test caps than Gibbs, but Adams’s Test career has stuttered through the past 18 months and Gibbs was the only one present able to take his Test place for granted.
He played wonderfully well in the Caribbean, but after 28 Tests he has just two centuries to his credit and an average in the mid-30s. Simply put, for all his talent he has yet to fully deliver for South Africa.
Some form of counselling could help, particularly if it emphasises the need for Gibbs to take responsibility for his own actions. For all that his carefree nature is essentially likeable, it also means that he is a compulsive show-off and it is this side of his nature that has to be curbed.
Whatever Gibbs’s defenders may say, whenever he gets into trouble the mind flashes back to Headingley in 1999 and a stupidly dropped catch that might well have cost South Africa the World Cup.
Gibbs needs to make amends for his serial transgressions and he needs to do so publicly. A carefully phrased statement, drafted for him by someone else, hardly washes as far as contrition goes.
It is said that genius makes its own rules and that players like, for instance, Barry Richards and Graeme Pollock were good enough to be forgiven a multitude of sins. The point about Gibbs is that he is not a genius. He could be, though, if he was persuaded to care enough about the game.
Peter Robinson is the editor of CricInfo South Africa