The Law catches up with Cricket: Changes to the game
For all its rapid latter-day modernisation, Cricket lives with such a hidebound past that, sometimes, plain common sense comes across as a radical new idea.
The updates to Cricket’s rulebook, announced by Marylebone Cricket Club on Monday, are mostly obvious and certainly commendable in themselves but, with this caveat: Why so long?
1. RESTRICTION ON THE THICKNESS OF BATS
Length and width have always been limited, so, a limit on depth only makes sense. Most of this century, bats have been evolving to look and act more like Neanderthal clubs. Authorities, happy with the merrymaking, turned a blind eye, but could no longer. The game is predicated on a balance between bat and ball but, the scales had tipped hopelessly. Mishits over mid-off for six prove nothing, except that the boundary is too small and the bats too big.
2. IN IS IN
It was the only ever misapplied letter of the law that meant a batsman was given out if, after diving for and making his ground, his bat “bounced” into the air at the very moment the stumps were broken. It reached the point of farce late last year in a New Zealand-Pakistan match, when New Zealand’s Neil Wagner’s momentum had carried him beyond the stumps, yet, because neither bat nor feet still were touching the ground as they were broken, he was given out.
Surely, a batsman has only to make his ground, not stake it, put up a sign and call out “wicket leave”, before again raising his toe or the bat’s. And so, henceforth, it is. Reason has prevailed.
3. MORE SCOPE FOR MANKADING
This was long overdue, and is still incomplete. Previously, the bowler could run out the non-striker only before beginning his delivery stride. Now he has until what would normally be the moment he releases the ball. It will make batsmen warier when backing up.
But really, why is backing up permissible at all? If a bowler transgresses by even a millimetre at the popping crease, he costs himself at least a run and possibly a wicket. Yet, operating from the same crease, a batsman can make a head-start on a run and, if he is too gung ho about it, by convention, expect a gentlemanly warning from the bowler the first time, before running him out the second. There is no equivalence.
And while we’re at it, why not lose the name Mankad? It dishonourably perpetuates the name of Vinoo Mankad, who twice ran out Australian opener Bill Brown this way, when India toured Australia in 1947. Don Bradman had no issue with it, and Brown was annoyed, not at Mankad, but himself, for his carelessness.
But that is beyond the MCC’s remit
4. SANCTIONS INCLUDING SEND-OFFS, FOR OFFENSIVE BEHAVIOUR
This brings Cricket more into line with more sports, and not before time. In the Australian context, “hard but fair” had become a self-mocking shibboleth, or worse, a finger raised to authority. It is not just Australia. If the new laws were in now, Indian Captain Virat Kohli would not play again this side of Diwali. He may have to be mindful of new rules for ”send-offs”.
5. GENDER NEUTRAL NOMENCLATURE
More bowlers, more generic “fielders” but, “batsman” will survive. In this, the MCC might have tripped over itself, in its efforts to leap into the 21st century. English suffers for a lack of gender-neutral third-person pronoun but, it is not bereft. What is wrong with “fieldsman” and “fieldswoman”, as applicable? It is well and good to be gender-neutral but, sport can and never should be gender-blind.
At least, we will be spared “batters”. Like fish, we will be grateful.
Courtesy Sunday Morning Herald
Bats are getting bigger and bigger
On the hop: Neil Wagner is run out after his bat got caught in the turf.