England v South Africa series shows no-ball law conundrums still matter | The Spin | Sport

England v South Africa series shows no-ball law conundrums still matter | The Spin | Sport

The first two Tests between England and South Africa have offered any number of statistical contrasts. England dominated the first and won at a canter; South Africa dominated the second and won at a gallop. England’s apparent superiority in the opening encounter was however aided by the fielding of their opponents, who as the series started resembled a rabble of slipshod calamity-fiends, determined to turn the first day into a slapstick comedy.

In the first innings of the first Test the tourists bowled 13 no-balls. In the second innings, bowled by England, there were three; in the third there was one; and in all five innings since there has not been a single no-ball bowled. What happened on the first day of the series was, then, a bizarre collective anomaly. Morne Morkel bowled Ben Stokes with a no-ball, the record-breaking 13th dismissal he has had chalked off for overstepping in his Test career; Joe Root was caught way out of his crease after skipping down the track to Keshav Maharaj, but the spinner too had erred. While superficially straightforward, Law 24.5(a)(ii), as the relevant rule is snappily titled, continues to test bowlers’ techniques and umpires’ eyesight.

Since the 1960s, when the no-ball laws were changed to make it easier for umpires to spot them and harder for cheats to cheat them, there has been an intriguing alteration in the number of no-balls being called in Test cricket. The change saw a massive and sustained spike in calls: when the Ashes were contested in England in 1961 there was only one in the entire series (to be fair that was a bit of an outlier: of all England home series it is one of the eight with fewest no-balls, and the other seven were all played in the 19th century. Still, in the 1956 Ashes there were a not-too-dissimilar six); when Australia next visited in 1964 there were 38. From there the number kept rising: in the 2005 Ashes series there were 223.

To put it another way, in the 1950s the average Test featured 5.25 of them; in the 1960s, as the impact of the new law started to be felt, there were 10.67; in the 1970s there were 25.36, which was where it plateaued for a while: in the 1980s there were 24.90; in the 1990s 26.97; and in the 2000s 23.49. And then television umpires arrived, and standing umpires stopped looking. In this decade the number has dropped to 9.61, and continues to fall, dipping to 8.05 in the last three years.

As it stands umpires are effectively punished for checking. If they remain silent and the ensuing delivery is indeed a no-ball and yields a wicket, the decision can be checked and the dismissal overturned with no reputational damage. If they speak out and the delivery turns out to have been legal there is no comeback for the bowling side, and the umpire gets the blame.

At the start of last year, in a Test match between Australia and New Zealand in Wellington, Adam Voges was on seven when he was bowled by Doug Bracewell. The on-field umpire, Richard Illingworth, called a no-ball â€" incorrectly, it transpired â€" and Voges was reprieved; he went on to score 239. “Richard was distraught afterwards,” the match referee, Chris Broad, said. “I think when anyone is proved wrong in any decision that they make it’s embarrassing. There can be nothing done about it. It was called â€" that’s the end of the matter. Richard is a Yorkshireman, he shrugs his shoulders and gets on with it.”

The flipside of that coin has been witnessed often enough. Perhaps most notoriously, England needed to score 369 runs in the final innings to beat Pakistan at Old Trafford in 2001, or bat through the final day to secure a draw (they started the morning on 85-0, with Michael Atherton and Marcus Trescothick at the crease). In the end, after a wild final session in which eight wickets fell, they got within seven overs of the draw before losing their final batsman. Their cause was hardly helped by a collapse from 201-2 to 230-8, during which four successive wickets â€" Nick Knight, trapped lbw by Wasim Akram, and then Ian Ward, Andrew Caddick and Dominic Cork, all dismissed by Saqlain Mushtaq â€" fell to no-balls which the umpires failed to call, the last three all missed by David Shepherd.

“We lost four batsmen to no-balls because the umpires were rightly concentrating on the business end of things,” said the batsman Graham Thorpe, a forgiving sort, at close of play. “They were looking for bat-pad catches and sometimes it’s not humanly possible to keep an eye open for everything. However, when you analyse the game, we lost four batsmen we shouldn’t have. Maybe we should be looking at the whole way we use technology in cricket. Pakistan were bowling no-ball after no-ball. Maybe that’s something the third umpire could help police.” Matthew Hoggard, another member of the England team, said that he had “a lot of sympathy with the umpires because there were so many players around the bat they had enough on their plate. The disappointing thing was that the no-balls were so blatant surely the third umpire could have had a word.”

The incident had a serious impact on Shepherd. “Shep hurried away from the ground, near to despair,” we wrote in our obituary, after he died in 2009. “He decided on the spot to end his career as a top umpire, and only the daily phone calls from friends, Lord’s, players and umpires persuaded him to change his mind.” The man himself said that in the aftermath “some wonderful people helped me through that. I got letters and messages from others I’d never met and I received kindly words at the ECB. I listened to them all and decided to stay.”

It was in July 1962 that the law was changed so that, instead of a bowler’s back foot having to land in the bowling crease, the front foot had to land inside the popping crease. The change was intended to end the habit of dragging the back foot forward before delivery, which was allowing bowlers to release the ball with their front foot a couple of feet beyond the popping crease. “The conference will have earned the gratitude of all batsmen,” the Guardian wrote when the ICC passed the motion. “Fast bowlers may be disconcerted and their control affected slightly for a time. They should quickly adapt themselves. The new procedure seems better and fairer.”

But when West Indies toured England the following year they refused to adopt the new procedure. “I sense among players and umpires gathering resentment at the unending changes in the laws,” the Times wrote the following April, as the tourists trained alongside Middlesex in the nets at Lord’s. “If it is not the follow-on, they say, it is the placing of the field; if it is not the dragging of the feet, it is the bending of the arm. Yesterday the players were not the only ones to be shaking their puzzled heads. The umpires were in difficulties as well. To be able to see whether a bowler is cutting the popping crease with his front foot an umpire’s inclination is to stand well up to the stumps. He is required, simultaneously, to see whether the bowler is no-ball on the return crease. And at the same time, he has to set himself to give his decisions at the other end. His job, it seems, grows increasingly complex.”

There has been no significant revision of the law since, though Sir Donald Bradman, Richie Benaud, Alec Bedser and the Australian umpire Robin Bailhache all criticised the current version, with three main arguments recurring.

Ian Chappell, for example, has frequently argued that the law should be changed to allow umpires to make better decisions. “The front-foot law detracts from the time the umpire has to focus on the striker’s end for a possible decision,” he wrote. “A return to the back-foot law would allow umpires more time to focus on the decision-making process, which should bring improved results.”

In 2015 the Australian selector Rod Marsh argued that the law should be changed to avoid injuries to umpires. “Put yourself in the umpire’s position when a batsman with a massive weapon runs at the bowler and smashes a straight drive at about chest height,” he said. “I, for one, would want to be standing back as far as possible. By reverting to the back-foot law the umpire has a chance to stand at least two metres further back.”

Bob Woolmer, in his book The Art and Science of Cricket, argued that the law should be changed to avoid injuries to bowlers, who by landing their front feet in the same spot wear a hole in the crease, and then continue to land their feet at force on the uneven ground. “This meant that, at delivery, where the largest force goes through the body was where the bowlers were off balance,” he wrote. Last year the Australian journalist Doug Ackerly published a book on the subject, Front Foot: the Law that Changed Cricket, which expanded on the link between the no-ball law and bowler injuries.

There is no sign of a change in the law, but there will soon be another massive change in its application, at least at the highest level. During the one-day series between England and Pakistan last year the third umpire ruled on no-balls, leaving the on-field officials to concentrate on other business. In May the ICC’s cricket committee watched a presentation about the trial, at the end of which they “recommended that the third umpire should call all no-balls in international matches using instant replays”.

That series, as it happens, featured â€" albeit by a small margin â€" more no-balls than any other five-match one-day-international series played anywhere in the world in this decade, a taste of what is to come. The next chapter in the no-ball story will feature the technology-assisted elimination of error and oversight, and unless or until bowlers respond to the change by altering their own techniques, an accompanying proliferation of no-ball calls, back to 1990s levels and probably beyond. For all its simplicity, Law 24.5(a)(ii) continues to confound.

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