We Australians enjoy sport.  Take footy and cricket – two team games.  Both come from England, as do our language and legal structure.  Most of us get some exposure to them at school, or playing in the backyard or park – the days have long since gone when you could stick a rubbish bin in the middle of the road as a wicket.  There was a popular song – ‘I made a hundred in the back yard at Mum’s.’ 

Team sports were and are thought to be good for school kids.  They can learn about teamwork, supporting others, how to lose or win with some grace, and accepting the decision of the umpire.  These are, if you like, lessons of life, and they are better learned on a cricket ground than on a battle field.  (The game of rugby was part of the education at the school of that name, but Lytton Strachey tells us that Dr Thomas Arnold fretted that the ‘naughtiest boys positively seemed to enjoy themselves most’ – which was at best a doubtful vindication of the principal’s godly vision.)

The nature of the engagement changes when most of us go from being occasional participants to being full time supporters.  Now what may be called the entertainment part becomes central.  Going to see a footy or cricket match is a bit like going to see a movie or musical.  We pay for the entertainment.  And what we get is a form of human drama.

But a sporting contest is a form of drama that is unscripted.  We don’t know what the end will be – which we always do when we go to see Shakespeare or the opera, or the pure delight of Casablanca on the big screen. 

We are concerned, if not revolted, by the often-insane amounts of money involved, the dependence on television, the evil influence of gambling, the patent corruption of almost all international sporting bodies – FIFA and IOOC are bywords for corruption – and the threat to the whole carousel posed by gold from the Middle East and Asia. 

But after all the razzamatazz and moonshine, in a test match or opera, some bunny has to go out there and lay it all on the line – when failure is very public and may be very wounding.  Then the contest resolves itself elementally into high drama.  It is a test of character – human character.  As often as not, this may come down to a test of nerve – or courage.  And in both footy and cricket, we can be captivated by the style or beauty – yes, beauty – of a passage of play.

Dogs, monkeys and gorillas may seem to play together, but they have not developed a game, much less identified courage or style in the way they go about it.  Those attributes are reserved to us humans – as, sadly, are other far less attractive attributes.

The drama inherent in a sporting contest gives us a mirror for the other forms of drama in our lives.  And just as importantly, it gives us release or relief from the burden of raising a family and paying off the mortgage – from dealing with the boundary riders, and enforcers.  And the technocrats and the robots.

For our allotted time, we are off the leash.  We can enjoy the company and the spectacle – with or without a drink – and we can – as they say – let our hair down.  We can flaunt our obvious prejudices, and give the umpire a raspberry – for each of which we could be smacked during the week.  (I can remember as a young boy listening to the instantly recognised thick Hampshire accent of John Arlott from England – ‘And a well lubricated gentleman outside mid-wicket is offering the umpire some gratuitous but quite useless advice.’)

And we need this relief much more than we did because of  the decline in the role of God in our public life.  Here we have what we would otherwise miss – the ritual, and meeting in common to partake of our culture – and a decent excuse for a form of tribalism, and even patriotism.  Sport provides, if you like, a form of communion.  ‘Communion’ need not involve God.  It is participation by members of a community holding or sharing a part of life in common – as in the Boy Scouts, the Country Women’s Association, or the Cavalry and Guards Club.  Or the Sydney Sixers or the Melbourne Storm.

Other forms of drama do not even come close to that of sport.  And in some cities – Melbourne is one – geographical sites and monuments have a status in the community that is unique. 

I am writing this not long after more than 90,000 people jammed the Melbourne Cricket Ground for a Taylor Swift concert.  It was apparently a great show – but it did not have the matchless intensity of an AFL Grand Final, or a Boxing Day Test Match.  Events like those are integral to the life of a city.  They are part of its fabric.

So, this is our timed relief from the nuisance trappings deployed to get up our noses while we try to keep our heads above the water.

But we live in age where very little is sacred, or immune to the banality that we suffer every day from the way others dictate how we are to run our lives.  And no sport is immune from the vice of interruption by technology as mandated by robots.

The Australian Football League has largely escaped the infection.  But for many, including me, cricket and both forms of rugby have been badly spoiled by television replays to question decisions of umpires.  The worst offender is Rugby Union, but cricket is not far behind.  It is rare for person batting to accept an LBW decision from the umpire.  What does this tell our children?  In rugby, people can be sent off after a drumhead court martial – where the accused is not heard.  You can get endless replays of an adult cricketer doing a soft shoe shuffle around the boundary rope.  Or did the foot of the winger infringe on the white powder as he hurtled toward the try-line?

The moral is you cannot accept the word of the player – all is subject to the mechanical surveillance of those in charge.  Some of them repose in ‘the Bunker.’ 

A paragon of sport, the prime of Australian manhood –  a decent bloke – nicks a ball on the way through to the keeper.  He knows that, but  with a straight and sulky face, he just stands his ground on the off chance that technology may get it wrong.  So much for the fantasy of the ‘spirit of cricket’.  And where does that put him in the pantheon of the heroes of the kids in the backyard?

Of course, any match, or battle, may swing on mere millimetres.  There is such a thing as chance.  It is inevitable – unless you subscribe to the metaphysics of the Medieval Schoolmen, or the religious doctrine of predestination that everything occurs according to God’s plan (in which case we will not run into you at the footy).

But what is the point of trying to measure chance so finely?  The battle of Gettysburg, like any battle, could have gone the other way if by chance just one bullet had deviated by one degree in its arc and taken out Colonel Joshua Chamberlain.  Our football games involve heavy body contact between highly trained athletes.  There will be hundreds of them during any one game.  Why do we reserve the microscope for just a few?

The referral to technology off the ground takes away the spontaneity of the game and adds an aura of unreality to it.  It can destroy momentum which is fundamental in all these sports.  Through no fault on its part, a team on the charge can be brought to a halt.  It is a little like the Safety Car in Formula 1.  It is an element of caprice that can have far more effect on the game than the issue it has been invoked to resolve. 

The only soccer match I have seen live was at the MCG many years ago in front of about 90,000 desperately keen Australians.  We only had to beat Iran in a replay.  We were comfortably well off at two nil – but Iran came back to draw the game, and we missed out on a berth at the World Cup.  I know little of the game, but on reflection, the whole mood of the game changed, when we were ahead, after it was stopped for some time to get rid of a mad streaker.  I remain convinced that his intervention was decisive as the game then unfolded.

What is called ‘the rub of the green’ is part of the game, and therefore a part of life.  It is absurd to say that luck plays no part in these contests – or the contest of a battle.  When we speak of things happening by chance, we refer to the way things happen without any plan or cause.  To seek a veneer of certainty where a given result may neither be necessary nor desirable is as sensible as kids making it up as they go when playing tippety-run on the beach.  We are I think defiling integral parts of our communal life.  This is another threat to our humanity.

And we belittle the umpire.  Once again, a human is over-ruled by machines.  In my professional life, for thirty years I made decisions affecting people’s lives that were reviewed in detail and in public on appeal.  Some involved amounts that could wipe people out.  The review process never worried me – although it does intimidate a lot of judges.  But I don’t know how I would react if I made a decision that was reviewed on the spot in front of 90,000 people – and I was told to reverse my decision because it was ‘wrong’.  And how, then, do you persuade kids to accept the verdict of an amateur umpire?  For that matter, how do you get people to aspire to the position?

So, the forces of what Ken Kesey called the ‘Combine’ now get to us even in our time off.  Put differently, Big Brother is everywhere.  We play or engage in watching sport to celebrate our capacity for grace and power.  We must now endure being reminded of our ordinariness, if not impotence.  And I fear that ‘experts’ and technology are now striking at the essence of what we call sport.