Cricket has undergone rapid and progressive change during the Covid-19 pandemic, although superficially it may appear to have remained largely the same.
Despite the cancellation of many international matches due to the shifting worldwide regulations and lockdowns, the sport’s changes at first seemed relatively minor: the lack of large crowds in stadia, a ban on the use of saliva on the ball, and the replacement of international umpires with locals.
However, many more intransigent fans bitterly resented such changes to the rules, especially the prohibition of applying bodily fluids to the ball. This strange custom is designed to shine one side of the cricket ball more than the other to induce it to swing mid-air when bowled at a fast pace, thus deceiving the batsman with its trajectory. The ban on this method of ball shining has thrown the entire discipline of swing bowling into doubt, and was therefore deeply begrudged by both players and enthusiasts of the game. Australian fast bowler Mitchell Stark, one of the most skilled swingers globally, warned that the ball-by-ball contest between batsman and bowler, one of the most relished parts of the sport, could become “pretty boring” as a result.
The issue of cricket ball maintenance had already been under fierce debate following the Australian ball-tampering scandal of 2018, where the illegal use of sandpaper to rough one side of the leather by wicket-keeper-batsman Cameron Bancroft provoked international outrage and consternation, as well as resulting in year-long bans for Bancroft, Smith and Warner which crippled the Australian test match team.
In addition, the cricket ball needs to be sanitised whenever it left the field (so whenever a batsman hit the ball past the boundary), to maintain the integrity of the players’ bubble of isolation. Thus, the cricket commentator’s vernacular has changed from “he’s hit that one out the park” to “we’ll need to get the sanitiser out for that one”.
The lack of crowds in stadia was also a heartfelt loss, not least for professionals. The audience often has a significant impact on the course of a game, and acts as a ‘twelfth man’ or auxiliary member of the home side. Indeed, the crowd atmosphere was so badly missed that replacement crowd noises were included over the on-field action for home viewers, though some argue that the unique atmosphere an audience generates cannot be artificially imitated.
The topic of umpiring is a touchy and uncertain one in cricket, as the umpire has autonomous jurisdiction over whether a batsman is out or not out; sometimes this decision can be extremely difficult to make with the naked eye, so both sides have a limited number of reviews, where they can use ball-tracking software and infrared cameras to confirm or overturn the umpire’s decision. Since international umpires have been replaced by local, less experienced ones, the reliability of the on-field decisions was somewhat cast into doubt, though to compensate for this the ICC – the governing body of cricket –increased the number of reviews per innings to three in five-day matches, and to two in one-day and twenty-over matches.
Although other sports such as tennis use electronically aided decisions as the rule rather than the exception which seems to be more logical, cricket’s outlandish review system is very much in keeping with the spirit of the game: as the saying goes, “the umpire is right even when he’s wrong”.
Written by Edward Gertler
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