How to rehabilitate cricket: lock them all up

Lock him up: celebrations like Mario Baoltelli's will be a thing of the past. Picture: GETTY

It was, as many have said, A Sad Day For Cricket. On the other hand, it was a good day for the hang ‘em and flog ‘em merchants, who wanted books thrown, keys chucked away, levers pulled themselves, and seemed largely happy that porridge would be served. Personally, I’m not sure I’d wish a spell in Feltham Young Offenders’ Institution on my worst enemy – even on Anthony ‘Nipple Cripple’ Jackson, junior school bully par excellence. And especially not in a country where the convict didn’t speak the language, but many think that Mohammad Amir and the rest have got the least of what they deserved.

Elsewhere today, Neil Warnock wants the Chelsea fans who chanted a cryptic, although despicably-intentioned, chant about Anton Ferdinand to be locked up for two years. 24 months, for shouting? It wasn’t even on Facebook.

But perhaps this is the solution to all sport’s problems, big or small: just bang everybody up, all the time, for anything. Given the amount of free space in prisons, and their superb work in rehabilitating offenders, a hardline approach is clearly what is needed to save sport as we know it.

I suggest that the England ODI team’s top-order batsmen could do with a short, sharp, shock after their efforts with the bat in India. If 18 months in Parkhurst can’t get Craig Kieswetter working the ball around against the spinners, I am not sure what can.

And why should cricket be the only sport to benefit from this excellent jail-based system? Perhaps Andy Murray might not go on the defensive so readily in Grand Slam finals if he’d had three character-building years fighting off armed robbers with a sharpened toothbrush in the showers at Wormwood Scrubs. Would Rooney be corrupting the nation’s youth by swearing on television cameras if he was doing a ten-stretch in Pentonville? Of course not, unless he was being filmed for a fly-on-the-wall documentary by Channel 4. Lock them up: it’s the only language these pampered millionaires understand.

So, yes, a sad day for cricket – but from the tragedy, a glorious sporting future might emerge. One where ill-discipline and play-acting and bad language and handling the ball in the ruck are a thing of the past, because even the slightest infraction is punishable by a custodial sentence. The people best placed to dispense this firm but fair justice are, of course, our Premier League referees. And once Mario Balotelli, or a generation of future Mario Balotellis, find themselves using a bucket for a toilet and sharing a cell with a homesick, amorous, 350-pound safe-breaker called Len, the evil of over-celebrating a goal will be eradicated from the game forever. Let cricket be the guide: only prison can set us free.