Reluctant Five must accept risks of reality

The England cricketers who are agonising over whether to tour India should realise that successful sportsmen have certain responsibilities

Back in the 1980s, when many of America's baseball stars were routinely bouncing between the clubhouse and the local de-tox centre, the players' union chief Marvin Miller passionately rejected the idea that his members had any other role in society beyond playing sport. "Being an example to kids is not part of the job. That is the responsibility of parents," said Miller.

It is a point not without some validity, but what happens when you are both a sportsman and a parent and, indeed, given the way the world is going, maybe a candidate for Father of the Year?

The question certainly came to mind the other day when looking at a picture of one of English cricket's Reluctant Five, the spinner Ashley Giles, and his son Anders. The boy was seated on his father's lap and had on his head an England cap, which, naturally enough in that he is 18 months old, came down well over his left ear. Giles, who says that he is agonising over the decision to tour India because of family considerations, perhaps portrayed a touch of embarrassment. That was an impression which may have been false, but my instinct is that the odds are that it was not, at least not unless the modern professional sportsman's immersion in his own privileged and often disconnected world has become total.

One day Giles may well be asked by his son to explain the picture, how it came about, and what made him so reluctant to get on a plane to India. He will presumably say again that it all came out of his concern for Anders' mother, who was six months pregnant, and that though the evidence was overwhelming that security would be strong, and danger extremely limited, he had never been a gambler and he did not intend to take any risks at that delicate point in the history of his young family. Anders may be touched, even impressed, but if he takes the story too much to heart will he ever have the nerve to step outside his own front door?

By then, though, it might not even be an issue, especially if the families of servicemen and women continue to command acres of newsprint to express their horror that their loved ones might just get involved in something as disagreeable as war – and policeman pull in astronomic damages for the "trauma" of doing their jobs.

Giles is of course a free man and perfectly entitled to make the decisions he considers right for himself and his family, but what is surely mystifying is the attempt make some kind of virtue of an abandonment of duty. Yes, duty; the duty of all of us to carry on our business at a time when everyone is suddenly thrust on to his or her own section of the front line of a troubled world, whether it is a tube station or a mail sorting office or a transatlantic flight. What the Reluctant Five are saying, in the face of Imran Khan's assertion that they would be in more danger in England than India, is that they are inclined to step back from the realities of the world for a little while, and if this is no reason to send them an envelope containing white feathers nor is it a matter for congratulation.

What it is more than anything is fresh evidence that the modern professional sportsman has come to expect an ultimately cosseted existence from, as the chief sports writer of The Times, Oliver Holt, put it to the nation on breakfast time TV yesterday, "the cradle to the grave." For his pains, Holt was lectured by the BBC's amiable and generally admirable presenter and former war correspondent Jeremy Bowen on the impossibility of a mere journalist relating to the pressures and exposure faced by someone going into the emotional furnace of a cricket stadium in Calcutta or Bombay. With impressive restraint, Holt contented himself with pointing out that it was not the issue. Generations of English cricketers had survived the experience. Security at hotels and airports was the concern, and short of allocating to each player a detachment of Bengal Lancers the Indian authorities could scarcely have offered more.

What we are left with, at a time when half the Chelsea team refused to travel to Tel Aviv for a single match and one of their star players, Emmanuel Petit, complains of feeling "tired" during the course of a match, is the strong sense of a sports world detached from the rigours of real life. The baseball man was right about the tendency to expect too much of our leading sportsmen, to forget that an ability to hit or kick a ball does not necessarily make you a paragon of virtue. But that is not the same as saying that the successful sportsman does not have some responsibilities.

These certainly do not require the careless risking of his life, but perhaps do include a need to display generally some of the qualities which have made him so famous on the sports field, assets like composure and nerve at moments of pressure. The Reluctant Five are demanding a trip abroad without any risk at a time when there is worry enough at everyone's hearth. It is not exactly an heroic stance. But then heroes tend not to stay home.