Off-side: The grey zone of greatness

The Hindu

17-07-2025

As the sun sank at Lord's in a haze of tired white flannel and sweat, Zak Crawley, as if auditioning for Richard Linklater's Before Sunrise, wandered off twice before Jasprit Bumrah could bowl. He then called for the physio after a glancing blow to the glove. And one over quietly disappeared into the English dusk. The host walked off with 10 wickets intact, and Shubman Gill, visibly frustrated, offered a round of sarcastic applause.
What Crawley did was gamesmanship. A performance with just enough ambiguity to avoid a reprimand.
The next day, Akash Deep — tailender, rookie, and possibly hoping for the same Oscar nomination — tried the same trick. He gestured for attention, stalled for time, and hoped to escape one last over from Ben Stokes. But unlike Crawley, he failed. The England captain ended his brief stay at the crease, leaving India at 58/4 going into the last day of a fascinating Test match.
This was sport's legal grey zone — a space full of performative cramps and raised eyebrows. While sportsmanship is about fairness and restraint, gamesmanship is essentially its sly twin — rule-abiding on the surface, but underneath, just petty opportunism and loophole hunting.
Crawley's act — or Glove Gate — danced on that tightrope.
Unsportsmanlike behaviour, though, is something else. It's Dennis Lillee kicking Javed Miandad, Trevor Chappell bowling underarm to stop a six. It's Diego Maradona's 'Hand of God' goal at the 1986 World Cup.
In tennis, Novak Djokovic is the unofficial king of strategic disruption. He has taken medical timeouts mid-match, often when losing, sparking accusations of gamesmanship. During the Wimbledon quarterfinal against Jannik Sinner in 2022, Djokovic, two sets down, vanished for a bathroom break and came back a different player. He won in five sets and went on to clinch his seventh All England title.
A 2021 Wall Street Journal analysis found Djokovic wins 83.3 per cent of sets — 10 out of 12 since 2013 — immediately after bathroom breaks. It's higher than his overall career set winning percentage at Grand Slams (78.6). The ATP, in 2022, implemented stricter regulations, limiting players to one break per match for a maximum of three minutes (plus an additional two minutes for changing clothes), and only at the end of a set.
What Crawley and Djokovic share is the ability to game the structure — not break it, just bend it to suit their end.
And so, we arrive at the dilemma: is sporting greatness just measured in numbers — 24 Grand Slams, a Test hundred, a final-day escape. Or do we factor in the way they navigate the in-betweens? The pauses. The loopholes. The moral shade of performance.
Do we love our champions for what they win, or how they win it?
That, perhaps, is the loneliest line in all of sport. Not the crease or the baseline, but the one between winning, and winning good.