Mythologizing the ‘spirit of cricket’

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Editor's note: A team lost a cricket match, and a nation lost its collective marbles. Cricket has a peculiar genius for manufacturing controversies out of thin air—but even by the standards of the sport, the aftermath of the 3rd ODI between the women’s teams of England and India was an outlier for the cognitive dissonance displayed by the commentariat. Unless you were on a Mars mission or something, you know what happened. And you know the context—England needed 17 runs to pull off a consolation win after losing the first two ODIs; India needed one wicket to complete a shutout. Charlie Dean, the batter on the burning deck while her team imploded around her, wanted the strike. She took a head start to sneak a single and was run out at the non-striker’s end. It is worth pointing out—as @PeterDellaPenna did in this exhaustive forensic examination—that the batter had been doing this, often egregiously, throughout her innings. Peter chronicles 69 previous occasions in the innings when Dean was out of her ground, often by a distance, and often even before the bowler …