Gentlemen & Players

To walk or not to walk? That was the question yesterday. Stuart Broad hit a cricket ball and the Australian captain caught it - even in the garden, aged 7, that is out. It's in the laws of the game [yes LAWS, not rules] behind the biggest of them all: that the players should always uphold the spirit of the game. In club cricket you often get umpires who are on the same side as the batsman, ex-players who still love to be involved. Umpiring or scoring are chores to younger members and there ARE a lot of laws to remember, as well as being able to count up to six. As a result of this, you can get 'howlers'.

A 'howler' is a rank bad decision e.g. an l.b.w. given out when the batsman has clearly hit the ball, or given out caught when he clearly hasn't. I played in a match [my last in fact] when an opposition batsman was caught behind the wicket off a thick edge which everybody heard - the umpire was the batsman's father, he went on to score the winning runs. I also played in league matches where the opposition insisted on their umpires officiating the whole match - they were very generous with l.b.w. decisions, sometimes raising the finger-of-doom before the appeal was made.

Henry Blofeld, the Test Match Special commentator, epitomises the era of the game when if a player nicked one and was caught, he walked off the pitch without forcing the umpire to make a decision. After yesterday's incident he was asked if he always walked and recalled the only time he didn't. The umpire gave young Henry out and approached him at an interval, "Blowers, don't ever do that to me again!"

Ironically it was the australians who invented NOT walking - ex England captain Michael Atherton was caught behind in Australia and didn't walk, one of the Aussies asked him why not, "When in Rome, dear boy, when in Rome..." - but this doesn't excuse what happened yesterday. In the split second after hitting the ball, Stuart Broad would have thought "I'm out." For those who've never played, that's a sinking feeling in the pit of the stomach; at sunday club level it means your day's fun is over and unless you bowl you're sentenced to hours of self-recrimination and FIELDING [urgh]. At Test level it means the old enemy have carte blanche to send you on your way with some choice words about your manhood, parenthood etc. Broad decided not to walk. Even if he'd been given out he is notorious for asking for decisions against him to be referred to the third umpire - a man sat in front of a tv, fed various views of each incident to help his on-field colleagues. It might have been a no-ball, but this is the only thing that could have saved him. Unfortunately for Australia, they had used their two chances to 'go upstairs', otherwise Broad would have been despatched eventually.

Broad didn't break any rules, but he broke the first law of cricket; it's understandable WHY he did and I think we should be reluctant to judge him too harshly. England can point to two 'howlers' from the first innings; Jonathan Trott was wrongly given out l.b.w. and young australian Ashton Agar was stumped on 6, survived a review and went on to make a game-changing 98. This is irrelevant, it would have sent a message to young players and sunday players up & down the country to respect the umpire and respect the spirit of the game - I wish he had walked.

P.S.
At lunchtime yesterday, in the Test Match Special commentary box, the cricket-loving band The Duckworth Lewis Method [named after an equation used to estimate a one-day innings total when rain-affected] played two songs - 'Gentlemen & Players' and 'It's Just Not Cricket' - the second of which had free-form vocal help from Henry Blofeld himself.