Jun 20, 2003

Cricket administrators keep doing funny things: Now it is the turn of the LBW again. The plan is to draw lines on the wicket to help the umpires get it right(Guardian Report). I can foresee a lot of practical problems with this: lines will get rubbed out, so will they keep painting it in the middle of the innings (you ought to have the lines perfectly in to make it fair), will the batsman or fielders have a right to draw the umpire's attention to inspect the line to see if the ball landed on the line like in tennis ;-)? More seriously, it makes life easy for batsman against spinners, takes another chunk out of the human element of the game. If you wanted to make it so fair, why not draw a line on the batsman's pad/trousers indicating what the height of the stumps is when he is in stance, to adjudge the height.

No comments: