Call for action against 'player power'

Press, 27 February 1980, Page 6

Call for action against 'player power'

Urgent action against increasing “player power” in test cricket was called for yesterday by two Fleet Street newspapers. Reacting to incidents in the New Zealand-West Indies series, John Woodcock in “The Times” and his colleague. Alex Bannister, in the “Daily Mail,” both criticised the reluctance of team managers and controlling bodies to discipline wayward players. Woodcock, writing before the Colin Croft incident on the fourth day of the Christchurch test, said that when things are going wrong for the West Indians, “they are worse behaved than they used to be.” There is a growing reluctance among test cricketers, he said, to accept the umpire’s word as final and there is a failure by team managers to insist that they should do so.

“It is time for someone, at whatever cost, to come to cricket’s defence,” he wrote. “There are too many players behaving as though they are bigger than the game—and getting away with it.

“The call for neutral umpiris is a tcover-up for a widespread lowering of standards,” )Vood- ■ Bannister said that thelAVest Indies Cricket Board seems to have' lost control of its players. “It is increasingly evident that countries can’t, or won’t,? discipline offenders and I: believe that the international cricket conference must take, wider and firmer control,” he -, wrote. Recent test series have-offered clear evidence that the<players are taking over without a rial sense of responsibility. 7 “A new charter laying down acceptable levels of behaviour, together with punitive measures for offenders, has to be worked out if world opinion is not to become totally disenchanted with the game,” Bannister wrote. ‘(Whatever the provocation—and visitors to the West Indies are seldom short of experience of bizarre umpiring—players are not entitled to kick stumps out of the ground or threaten to strike.”