cricket season
Andy Capostagno Cricket
It may have escaped your attention, given the number of series and tournaments going on around the world, but the cricket season begins this week. The national side have just returned from a gold medal performance at the Commonwealth Games, of course, and not long before that they were ending the four-month tour to England amid something approaching acrimony.
At the end of this month another version of the national side will be playing in a big- money one-day tournament in Bangladesh, but be that as it may, the cricket season, that is to say the South African domestic cricket season, is upon us.
Again, it may have escaped your attention because most of our provinces have been engaged in friendly matches for at least a fortnight. In addition, the likes of Gary Kirsten and Nic Pothas were involved in the Club Championships played in Pretoria last week. But if the season can be said to have a definite beginning it is on Friday October 2 in, of all places, Fochville, where North-West play Western Province in the Standard Bank League.
It goes without saying that the match will be televised, although what is more important in terms of developing the game is that it will feature the new, improved eye in the sky. The third umpire has been with us for six years now and it has already reached the stage where it’s difficult to remember how we got along without it for so long.
And now, after the vicissitudes of umpiring in England this winter, the third umpire will take a further step towards taking total control of the game.
It is a truism throughout major televised sports that the men who control the whistles welcome any assistance that they can get. Supersport is practising on under-21 matches with the goal of foisting TV refereeing on next year’s rugby Super 12. The experiment in domestic cricket is an effort by the United Cricket Board to get the third umpire’s expanded brief accepted in all televised cricket sooner rather than later.
It will inevitably succeed, although there are certain to be teething problems. The new brief allows the men in the middle to refer close catching decisions to the third umpire as well as the established run outs, stumpings and line decisions. There will be problems. In 1992 at the Wanderers, West Indian umpire Steve Bucknor failed to ask the newly installed eye in the sky to determine a close run out. Jonty Rhodes survived and went on to rescue the innings in association with Brian McMillan. Television replays showed that Rhodes was out and Bucknor was forced to apologise by the match referee, Clive Lloyd.
The point was that Bucknor, in his own mind, was sure Rhodes was in, and in the new dispensation similar errors will occur before the umpires work out a rule of thumb in their own minds and among themselves. For instance, Hansie Cronje’s dismissal in England, lbw to a reverse sweep, was only revealed on
the fourth replay, on super slomo, to be incorrect. It took that specific camera and that specific angle to show that Hansie had hit the ball with his bat.
The fear of all sports administrators dealing with new technology is that it will slow down the game and the Hansie dismissal is a case in point. Cricket is slow enough without waiting five minutes for the definitive answer. It cannot afford to ape American Football which stops the game, sends on the clowns and goes to commercials while the umpires debate. That system makes a game that has but one hour of actual playing time last from three to four hours in total, depending on how much advertising has been sold.
Cricket, as it approaches the millennium, is at the crossroads. Ali Bacher realised that fact many years ago and even the MCC seem to be realising that not all the dinosaurs perished in a hypothetical dust cloud, if their vote this week to allow women members to enter the Lords Pavilion is anything to go by.
If the MCC decision is a result of millennial zeitgeist then the expanded role of the third umpire perhaps comes from the same source. The next thing that needs to happen is the restructuring of test cricket and, perhaps more urgent still, the restructuring of the first class game in domestic competitions around the world.
The Supersport Series, the old Currie Cup, does not get underway until the end of the month, but if it does not produce something more stirring than the fare served up last season, even fewer people will rise from their couches to eat potatoes at provincial grounds. All of which is unnecessarily pessimistic, because the start of the cricket season is always a time of wonder and renewal and boundless optimism. That and the return of rain to the highveld.