Back in February 2016, I chronicled the story of the mankad from its earliest recorded account as a “successful bit of legerdemain” by John Kinloch back in 1862 to Keemo Paul’s premeditated breaking of the wicket during an U19 WC group match more than 150 years later. Things have moved on since then, bringing schools, league and recreational cricket in line with the international and first-class game. Though the moaning has kept a precarious nail hold on a foggy, misty-eyed past.
The Update
The MCC Laws sub-committee reviewed the Laws again after the Keemo Paul incident and revised (the then) Law 42.15 to pretty much follow the changes put in place by the ICC in 2011. The new Laws were released on 11 April 2017 and came into force on 1 October 2017, in time for the new season in the southern hemisphere. The new wording was incorporated into the ICC Playing Conditions across all formats on 28 September 2017.
The current edition is now known as the 2017 Code of the MCC Laws of Cricket. Here is how Law 42.15 (now Law 41.16) looked before the change:
Bowler attempting to run out non-striker before delivery
The bowler is permitted, before entering his delivery stride, to attempt to run out the non- striker. Whether the attempt is successful or not, the ball shall not count as one of the over.
If the bowler fails in an attempt to run out the non-striker, the umpire shall call and signal Dead ball as soon as possible.
Here is how it looks now:
Non-striker leaving his/her ground early
If the non-striker is out of his/her ground from the moment the ball comes into play to the instant when the bowler would normally have been expected to release the ball, the bowler is permitted to attempt to run him/her out. Whether the attempt is successful or not, the ball shall not count as one in the over.
If the bowler fails in an attempt to run out the non-striker, the umpire shall call and signal Dead ball as soon as possible.
The change returns the mankad to the recreational bowler’s armoury and puts the batsman at risk if he or she attempts to steal a run at any time before the ball would normally be released. The difference between “before entering his or her delivery stride” (meaning when they land their back foot) and “when the bowler would normally have released the ball” could be several metres or more in favour of an overzealous non-striking batsman.
MCC have also changed the Law heading to underpin its intention that the cross-hairs should be firmly fixed on the batsman seeking to steal a run.
None of this will directly affect international cricket or first-class cricket, where the ICC position, also adopted by the ECB, has operated for years. But it will affect recreational cricket around the world. It should also reinforce how the lawmakers’ regard what David Hopps called the living landscape of acceptable behaviour for the whole game.
This latest is the third review of the Law by MCC since 2012, each having upheld the mankad as being within the Laws of Cricket and not contravening the so-called Spirit of Cricket. It is to be hoped that the new change will once and for all rid the game of the notion that running out the non-striking batsman is somehow sharp practice. It is not and it never has been.
In an interview with All Out Cricket’s Adam Collins, Fraser Stewart, MCC laws manager – who I spoke with when preparing my 2016 article – explained that the Laws sub-committee had also considered the vexed question of whether the bowler should first give the batsman a warning. While Stewart, couching the committee’s thoughts in terms wistfully obiter dictum and determinedly not ratio decidendi, suggested “we might still hope that perhaps the fielding side might choose to have a quiet word before doing this sort of dismissal,” he went on to underpin with an amplified, iron-clad, copper-bottomed certainty that there was no need for a prior warning.
Personally, I would rather he had not given such slender hope to what the Adelaide News alluded to in 1947 as the poor intelligence of batsmen who fall foul of the rules. But Stewart and his sub-committee have got the substantive issue absolutely right.
The Throwback
You’d think nothing could be clearer. Yet within days of the change, the Australian press reported “the son of Test great Merv Hughes has become embroiled in a Mankad controversy in Melbourne this weekend,” in circumstances remarkably similar to the Keemo Paul incident.
The club skipper, Dylan Kight, was reported as saying –
It’s controversial, obviously, but it’s one of those things with all the new MCC laws they’ve brought in.
That is one of the ones they’ve brought in where to the new law you don’t have to give the batsman a warning anymore as such.
The worst thing about the whole situation is the umpire gave it out, but then the umpire had to turn and ask [the fielding captain] whether he wanted to stick with the appeal or withdrawal the appeal.
Kight claimed the team had a massive run-down on the new Laws pre-season, while demonstrating that the Trumpian massiveness of the run-down had little bearing on the profundity of their understanding. All the clarity reinforced by the change has done nothing, in this instance, to rid the sport of this lingering misconception. If controversial means a run-out batsman and his team taking exception to being exposed as numbskulls for contravening the rules, he may have a point. But controversial in any sensible sense, it is not. At least the son of Test great Merv Hughes knew enough to break the wicket.
Nor did the bowler ever have to give the batsman a warning. Stewart in his interview refers to this being a convention, but as my earlier piece shows, it is very hard to build a case for there ever having been any such convention. A harsh observer might conclude that, at best, it was a phantom concoction put about by the squealers on the wrong end of a run out and well-intentioned folk who wished the game was played on an utopian, sunlit upland. But let’s give MCC’s definitive ruling a line of its own:
It is within the Laws and Spirit of Cricket to execute a mankad without a prior warning.
But Kight is right that the worst of it was the response of the umpires. By inviting the fielding captain to withdraw the appeal they perpetuated an imaginary notion that the bowler had done something underhand, was somehow in breach of the spirit of cricket, guilty of an act so mean that they were compelled as the on-field conscience of the game to intervene lest the sky fall in and the planet grind to a standstill.
Umpires Graham Slater and Viv Kumar may have meant well, but whether through low-grade defiance or thoughtless do-goodery, their misguided intervention ignored the thinking that underpinned the Law change and undermined the message rolled out by MCC and every other regulatory board. Let’s also give that message a line of its own:
It is unfair for a batsman to attempt to steal a run.
Physician, heal thyself
Barely a week later, Karachi-based journalist Faizan Lakhami reported another mankad, this time during a Quaid-e-Azam trophy match between WAPDA and Peshawar in Abbottabad.
WAPDA were four runs from a win and nine wickets down, when Peshawar’s Taj Wali mankaded the non-striker Mohammad Irfan, who was too early out of his ground. The on-field umpires invited Peshawar to withdraw the appeal. They declined and the game ended with Peshawar gruntled and WAPDA less so.
Moaner-in-chief was WAPDA’s skipper, the convicted match-fixer and cricket felon Salman Butt, displaying an astonishing lack of self-awareness and choosing buzz words that unwittingly extracted maximum, jaw-dropping irony –
What’s the point of having a law that goes against the spirit of the game and makes opponents apologize for following …
We had four beautiful days of cricket with Peshawar yet when the gentlemen’s game ended, no one shook hands or cared to see the other team off.
It took Butt two years to acknowledge and publicly apologise for his role in the 2010 spot-fixing scandal, yet just a few minutes to wrongly condemn the mankad as against the spirit of cricket. Virtue signalling does not sit well with Butt.
The villains of the piece here, though, as in Melbourne a week earlier, were the on-field umpires. Just as Ned Ludd set about smashing stocking frames in 18th-century Nottingham, so Ahmed Shahab and Faisal Afridi were guilty in Abbottabad of undermining the newfangled Law and attempting to keep alive them old ways. These invitations to the fielding side to withdraw a mankad appeal are misguided and serve only to heighten any sense of misconceived injustice felt by the losing side when the invitation is declined. Umpires must be required to embrace the Laws as they stand and end this nonsense and the mixed messages once and for all.
This piece has been updated to reference the latest mankad dismissal in Abbottabad, and also, after consultation with MCC Laws Department, to remove the earlier nexus suggested between Law 41.16 and Law 41.17. There is none.
© Tregaskis, October 2017
DropInPitch 