The game of Cricket is unusual in having Laws rather than rules; and this oddity bolsters its association with ideas of gentlemanly conduct and fair play.  There is a whiff of moral order about the noble game.  And so too with the misdemeanours within cricket.  There’s none of the shin-hacking of soccer or the punch-up of rugger, just that raffish possibility of a spot of cheating — you know the sort of thing, not quite letting on that the ball grazed the ground as you caught it, or making a little clicky noise as it passes the bat without touching it, just in case the old hatted umpire might drift into fallibility and raise the finger...

Quite rightly, the Umpire’s word is the last word. 

In the present fandango about Warren Hair this simple structure has been badly dented, firstly because the statistics of some of his decisions seem to suggest bias in the way he administers doubt and decision, and secondly because he has recently allowed the Pakistani petulance at one such decision to cost the paying public their entertainment. 

As for the first case, this needs scrutiny.  The second case is plain tosh, however; the duty of the Umpires cannot be guided by questions of entertainment or we would have a case to let jolly old So-&-So carry on batting past a decision against him just because he’s in such cracking good form, gad-sir.  When in his last Test, Bradman needed one run to have an average of 100, the entertainment lobby would have had the Umpire call a belated no-ball to the one that got him for a stunned duck;  but no, the moral voice of honour within the game left him marching back to the pavilion on an average of 99.99, movingly mortal after all.

No, the problem in the latest fandango is in the conception of the Laws; in particular in the moral framework, if I can call it that, of Law 42 Paragraph 3.  Take as an example the way Leg Before Wicket works; there you are, prodding forward or flashing the blade madly and doof!, not the hallowed sound of leather on willow but the Goons FX noise of a sock of sand on the conk — the ball has hit your pad.  Given out, you harrumph and walk, later to see on the computerised replay that injustice was a couple of inches wide.  Well, too bad, all part of the game, you say, clenching your pint; it goes both ways.  Umpires make mistakes.

However, when the Umpire awards 5 runs, as Law 42 allows him to do, let’s imagine he has made a mistake, that the scuffing was from the edge of the seating as the ball came down from a six a few balls ago, and so on, in this case his mistake is nonetheless not only an accusation, but an anonymous one.  He may not know who it is he thinks scuffed the ball but even if he knows, he is not obliged to name the player.  What’s more, the penalty is daftly meaningless – I mean, scuffing the ball like mad may well be well worth giving away 5 runs if in the meantime the wild unpredictability of each delivery has wobbled the batsmen’s confidence.

It is in this way that the Law is unworkable, since it constitutes allowing an accusation to be carried with no requirement for either the burden of proof or even that the culprit be named.  And, as a haphazard glance through a book picked from my loo shelves at random, Dickie Bird’s “White Cap & Bails”, reveals, they’ve been up to this lark for ever, it’s no surprise...

Of course, if the Umpire spots so-&-so working the seam with a bottle-top or scuffing the side with his zip while pretending simply to be doing that rub-a-dub-dub they do on their trouser front, fine: a culpable infringement deserving some sort of penalty.  (You can’t just send the saboteur off, the most apt penalty, since it may not be a bowler you send off for doing the sabotage and in any case a change of bowling may have been on the cards in any case; it probably has to be the awarding of runs and of course replacement of the ball.)  But if the Umpire has only the state of the ball to go by might it not simply be better to give the Umpires the right at any time in the game to replace the ball with a ball in similar condition?  Indeed, under Law 42 he has that right.  Why go further? 

Alternatively, in the name of entertainment, maybe all reasonable scuffing and seam-tweaking should simply be allowed?  Caveat batter.  Play up!

© Jonathon Brown