Ball tampering: the Hadlee formula would work best

So many have been guilty of ball tampering for so long, yet so few have paid for it that it may be time to revisit Law 42.3 which deals with changing the condition of the ball.

It is useful to remind ourselves here that the Australian captain Steve Smith and his co-conspirators deserved punished not for ball tampering itself, but for plotting to cheat and thus bringing the game into disrepute.

Cricket has an in-built problem. Thanks to covered wickets, quality of bats, and often, short boundaries, the bat has tended to have the advantage over the ball. Mis-hits have carried for six, although this may be countered by pointing out that bad balls have sometimes claimed wickets. But the former has to do with the bat, the latter with the batsman.

For at least two decades now, Sir Richard Hadlee has been advocating that ball tampering, or at least a version of it as we define it today, be made legal. This, coming from a bowler is not surprising. It is a way of righting the balance.

What Hadlee recommends is that the ‘tampering’ should be restricted to the use of fingernails to pick the seam or scratch one side of the ball. Tapes and sandpaper and bottle caps continue to be a no-no. Likewise other foreign substances like Vaseline and lip ice and the current favourite, sugary saliva.

Reverse swing is nothing new

It is a myth propagated by some players and the media that reverse swing is possible only with a doctored ball. Also that it is a recent phenomenon discovered by the Pakistani fast bowlers Imran Khan, Wasim Akram and Waqar Younis.

Reverse swing has existed before. What has changed is the intense scrutiny by television cameras which has helped us analyse it in greater detail.

Michael Holding, part of the great West Indian fast bowling heritage, has said that only the description ‘reverse swing’ is new. In a recent interview to a tabloid, he repeated what he has said often before: “What we used to do was shine the ball and after a while it would stop swinging in the direction it was intended to. We didn’t necessarily try to analyse what was taking place and all we did was turn the ball around. When the ball starts swinging towards the shine we would just put the shine towards the direction in which we wanted the ball to go. Simple.” His colleague Malcolm Marshall, Holding said, reverse swung the ball regularly.

Cricket balls deteriorate; the shine fades away, the surface gets rough. That happens in the normal course of events during a game. It is in attempting to hasten the rate at which the ball deteriorates that bowlers break the law.

Accelerating the process

What external aids do is accelerate the process. What ought to take 30 or 40 overs of natural wear and tear is sought to be accomplished in half that time by sandpaper or other means.

“Most bowlers do it” was a defence for the exploits of Cameron Bancroft in the recent Cape Town Test that brought the whole business into startling relief. This is probably true, but cannot be an argument in favour of breaking the Law.

Over the years questions have arisen. Did Bob Massie use lip ice on the ball en route to taking 16 wickets on debut for Australia when he swung the ball “like a boomerang” according to one report? Was John Lever’s use of Vaseline in a Test in Indi part of a long English tradition? After all, as medium pacer Derek Pringle wrote, “Any English bowler worth his salt would have picked the seam at some stage during his career,” making it all seem natural and inevitable.

Imran Khan’s bottle top was the most famous hastening agent till Bancroft’s sandpaper recently. Bowlers have been known to sew on sandpaper to their trousers or rub the ball on the metal on their zippers. Innovation is the essence of the cheating game.

Dos and dont’s

Yet, there is call for examining what may or may not be used. It shouldn’t be the umpire’s duty to check every fielder’s mouth for mints and lozenges at regular intervals. If spit and sweat are allowed on the ball to shine it, why not finger nails to scratch it? After all, while the former extends the period of conventional swing, the latter merely welcomes reverse swing prematurely.

Most laws have evolved over the years. A major reason has been to restore the balance between bat and ball. Leg before did not exist in the original laws, for instance, and later when it was included, umpires had to judge intent. While this law has evolved, batsmen have adjusted their game accordingly. With the introduction of technology and the third umpire, it has become more sophisticated.

Ball tampering remained in the books, but was largely ignored for years. Technology has brought it into our drawing rooms. Perhaps it is time to distinguish between altering the ball ‘naturally’ and through artificial means. Allow the former, punish the latter.