Fishing in the Bay

Maybe one-day cricket is not real cricket. Certainly it began as pure entertainment. There are several differences in the rules for the short form of the game. For instance, leg side bowling is not allowed, which doesn’t really bother me much though it does seem unnecessary. But I do have a major problem with a quite different one-day rule. And it is an ethical problem not a technical one.

Penalties for slow over rates.
In limited over games, teams that fail to complete their 50 overs within the allotted time are penalized. How? If they finish say 48 overs before the required time, then they still have to bowl the extra 2 (going over time) but they will only receive 48 overs when it is their turn to bat. The same penalty is not applied to the team that bowls second. One example of many where the result was probably affected is HERE. In the domestic competition teams are docked table points.

Why are they penalised? The motivation for this rule is to allow TV programmers to better predict the end of the innings so that they can sell the very lucrative advertising time in the period between innings. The motivation then is 100% financial. And the ACB are prepared to vandalise the game by tampering with the result just to please their TV masters.

Never mind Warney and Mark Waugh giving tips on the weather. This is match fixing for financial gain pure-and-simple. If the ACB really want to address the financial problem caused by slow over rates then the appropriate method is to use a financial incentive. They should simply subtract the value of the lost advertising time from the player contracts. (There are already fined but the amounts are unrelated to the financial loss).

* Perhaps this rule no longer applies as when I google it the latest example I can find is 2002.

You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.