When Mitchell Johnson is asked about his intense confrontation with a young Ben Stokes on the fourth day of the 2013 Adelaide Test, it doesn’t take long for the former superstar fast bowler to grumble about an “absolute crap” change to cricket.
Johnson was famously white-hot during the 2013-14 Ashes, snaring 37 wickets at an average of 13.97 and a strike-rate of 30.5 to lead Australia to a 5-0 whitewash.
Stokes, 22 and on Test debut, was dealt a dose of Johnson’s ferocity when the two collided on the pitch during the final session of day four in Adelaide. As the redhead scampered through for a run, Johnson held his ground on his follow-through and the two men clashed. A staring contest ensued, prompting umpire Kumar Dharmasena to plant himself between the pair and usher Johnson away.
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Johnson and Stokes were charged by the umpires but the International Cricket Committee opted against taking disciplinary action.
“At first it’s like, ‘Ah, hang on a minute. What’s this young debutant doing?’,” Johnson recalls in an interview with Wide World of Sports on the cusp of the 2021-22 Ashes.
“But then you’re like, ‘Nah, this awesome, he’s on here, he wants it, you can tell, you can sense it, you can see it’.”
It was then that Johnson began to air his frustration, revealing he objects to officials trying to police argy-bargy, deadly stares and sledging out of the game.
“People want to see a bit of heart,” Johnson says.
“There are obviously lines that you don’t cross … (but) I think that should still be part of the game.
“I get annoyed.
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“That happened towards the back end of my career. You’d follow through and umpires were like, ‘Get back to your mark, don’t involve yourself in staring at a player’. And I’d be like, ‘What do you mean? I’m not doing anything; I’m staring at a player’. It’s a whole part of my body language. It helps me play the game.
“It happens with the batters, as well, if they were to come down and say something.
“I just think it’s ridiculous. It really is.”
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Cricket’s technology boomed throughout Johnson’s career.
Hot Spot (2006), DRS (2008) and LED stumps and bails (2012), more commonly referred to as ‘zing bails’, were all introduced during Johnson’s 256-match international career spanning 2005 to 2012.
Hawk-Eye was introduced five months before the left-armer made his Sheffield Shield debut, in a match between Queensland and Western Australia in November 2001.
Johnson’s reason for the crackdown on fervid on-field antics is the use of stump microphones, introduced in Kerry Packer’s World Series Cricket in 1977.
Sledges made over the first 100 years of international cricket, Johnson argues, were much worse than those of today.
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“The thing is, if you have a look back in the history of the game, there would be worse sledges going around. But we have all the stump mics (now), we have everything going on,” Johnson says.
“So sledging-wise, it’s harmless. It really is harmless. It’s about trying to take the batsman off their game. You may have heard something in the paper with a certain player, like Joe Root, working on something. So you just get into his head about that. That’s what the guys around him would do, as well, like the ‘keeper and the slips. They might be saying something like, ‘He’s working on trying to get his front foot across more’. Little things like that. It’s really not that bad.
“The TV crews would love it when you get face to face with a batsman. You’ve just bounced them and you give them a bit of a stare. You’re in their face a little bit, but then you move on … It really is harmless.
“I’ve just never understood why it’s changed and I don’t know where it’s come from.”
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Fresh in the minds of cricket fans is the sledging Tim Paine fired at Ravichandran Ashwin late on day five of this year’s SCG Test.
Perhaps the spiciest line of the tirade was Paine‘s: “At least my teammates like me, d–khead”.
The comments of the former Test captain led to outcry.
“It is crap, it is absolute crap,” Johnson says.
“It’s frustrating … I just think it’s ridiculous that people blew up about that.
“I definitely am passionate about sledging and confrontation and that sort of stuff, and I think it’s part of the game.”
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