Mexican Wave Madness

It’s been a couple of years since the world renowned Australian fun police banned Mexican waves at cricket events but it still baffles some people when they hear about it today.

Well the other day I was baffled, shocked even, to learn that at the recently concluded test in Tassy you receive the sort of punishment you would expect for running onto the field and tackling a player , just for starting a Mexican wave.

That’s right, fans heading out to Bellerive have been warned that these instigators will receive life bans. It has to be the most over the top and wrong penalty possible.

Let me just note that I fully understand why the wave was banned. It is not always harmless fun as most people believe. Objects got thrown into the air as a part of the wave – some filled with undesirable waste – and that absolutely is a problem.

But their solution to fix this is wrong. The Mexican wave itself is not the trouble, it is what is done as a part of it. So don’t kick out the wave starters, chuck out the idiots throwing stuff in the air. Flash it up on the screen, “Patrons who throw stuff will be ejected”, it will seem a lot more reasonable to the crowd than “Innocent people who just want to have a bit of harmless fun and start a Mexican wave will be ejected”.

Besides, the current wave ban probably just encourages more people to start them, just to stick it up authority for making such a stupid rule.

It is not like it is any harder to police. Identify a troublesome area and spot the people throwing stuff. Definitely no harder than singling out an individual from a group of wave starters and punting them. It’s time the authorities used their brains a little and did their best to keep crowd safety as a priority without trying to ruin the fun of going to the cricket.

And as a little fun, here is some footage of a guy at the cricket who, while being kicked out from our bay, decided he had nothing to lose and so started a pretty successful Mexican wave. Marvellous stuff.