To 'Assinine' Laws

A lot has been said but very little done to address the striking imbalance between bat and ball in cricket. It is too easy to score at over a run a ball these days, especially on sub-continental flatbeds.

It is similar to the imbalance between defending and attacking in football - there, changing the offside rule so that there is atleast daylight between the striker and the last defender before he striker gets called offside would make a big difference to goalscoring.

How are bowlers expected to take wickets in 42 degree heat at Chepauk on a grassless flat track? Let them fiddle around with the ball a little bit, as long as its with their hands. Sure, lift the seam, what the hell? Bob Woolmer called law 43.2 an ass recently. Mike Selvey writing on the subject in the Guardian gives a few examples of 'ball tampering' incidents and allegations in the past:

Remember the old tale of a first-class English umpire, once no slouch himself as a seam bowler, who having inspected a ball with a seam that had been picked so hard it would have sliced carpaccio, threw it back to bowler with the comment that if he didn't get a five-for with it he wasn't worth a light. It was cricket's equivalent of driving at 80mph on the motorway.

Selvey does go on to suggest that 'tampering' only became an issue after the Pakistanis started getting reverse swing, starting with Sarfaraz Nawaz and Imran Khan in the 70s and 80s and then with Wasim and Waqar in the 90s, thereby putting a racial and maybe political spin on it. All possibly true, of course, but that is a topic which this blog is not at all about. We do not condone race and politics.

Andrew Miller writing in Cricinfo agrees that the 'Dark arts need to be brought into the light'. He argues, among other things, that what qualifies as ball tampering is often lost in nuance:

Pakistan's underlying grievances, however, stem from the double standards inherent in ball-tampering. As anyone who has ever played the game knows, a bit of spit and polish is perfectly acceptable, essential even, but a bit of scratch and scour ... well that can only be the devil's work.

Finally, the most vilified man in the incident - Darrell Hair - finds himself a supporter at long last in Harry Pearson writing in the Guardian blog. He takes particular exception to the "Mini-Hitler" accusations directed at Hair, emnating from Pakistan:

As to whether Hair is a "Mini-Hitler" all I can say is: I hope not. After all, the 53-year-old from North Sydney weighs 18 stones. If he is a miniature version of the fascist leader, then Hitler must have been even more of a colossus in reality than he was in his own fervid fantasies, standing atop the Reichstag swatting at allied aircraft like an unsavoury version of King Kong.