Jonathan Wilson

Why unfairness makes cricket special

It's the only sport that expects its athletes to perform feats they are bad at, and where the conditions can turn a match on its head. Let's not lose that

Jonathan Wilson
Jonathan Wilson
01-Dec-2015
Botham: among the reasons why cricket ought to endlessly recycle the storylines of the '80s  •  PA Photos

Botham: among the reasons why cricket ought to endlessly recycle the storylines of the '80s  •  PA Photos

I don't like change. I never have. If it was up to me, Ian Botham would permanently be taking his mullet for a charity walk, Manchester United would be underperforming with predictable inconsistency under a manager who spent more time on the sunbed than the training pitch, and David Taylor would still be snooker's world No. 16.
I just about acknowledge the ageing process as inevitable, but sport ideally should be reproducing the storylines of the mid-eighties. Richard Ellison should be winning Ashes Tests single-handed; Vasily Rats should be belting 25-yard drives into Mexican nets; Sandy Lyle should be fluffing chips, beating his head on the ground and then winning the Open.
There's a short story written jointly by Jorge Luis Borges and Adolfo Bioy Casares that imagines a world in which sport has been abolished and replaced by radio commentators reading out scripts. The older I've got, the more sensible this seems. Imagine the sense of well-being of getting up in the morning to find out what's happening in the Test in Adelaide.
"What's happening in the cricket, Dad?"
"England 217 for 5. Broad got a ton, then there was a clatter of wickets, Botham was out for 8 off three balls, and now Richards is in with Gower, who's made a classy 42."
Life's not fair and merit comes from making the best of the hand you're dealt. Cricket, better than any sport, reflects that
No side would ever be dismissed in double digits. No side would ever score 650 for 4. Everything would be relaxing and normal. You'd get a new character every now and again who'd get a pair, score a scratchy 36, then be out in single figures. People would ask whether Derek Randall could still do a job, then they'd go back to Bill Athey and all would be well. Every now and again Botham would take 5 for 18 after a legendary barbecue to win a game improbably, or Australia would do something daft like leaving out Greg Ritchie and picking only four specialist batsmen, and everybody would moan about Test cricket having jumped the shark, before acknowledging it was remarkable Botham still took wickets bowling at 58mph.
Graeme Hick could live forever in glorious potential, never quite achieving his residency. Paul Downton would still just be the wicketkeeper who was a little bit unlucky to be dropped. James Whitaker would be nothing more than a perpetual 12th man, emerging every now and again to take an awkward catch at cover.
It's true that there would come a point when it would be difficult to maintain the fiction that Gladstone Small was still a tyro in his mid-twenties, or that John Emburey was about to turn 30, but nobody really thinks too hard about how old James Bond or Bart Simpson are, do they? West Indies would still be impossibly formidable. Australia would still be rubbish. And cricket would become the comfort blanket it was before it was beaten into excitingness by massive bats.
All of which is a lengthy prelude to saying I don't like what they have done with the toss in the County Championship (which, for those who haven't seen the news, is to give the visiting captain the choice of fielding first or having a traditional toss to try to eliminate greentop result pitches and so encourage surfaces that turn).
My first thought is that the best way of getting dry tracks in England is to play the bulk of games in July and August rather than April, May and September, but the demands of various short-form tournaments have apparently made that impossible. Plenty of people who know far more about these things than I do will make the practical arguments, so I won't dwell on them.
But my prime objection is a moral one. Cricket isn't like other sports - or at least other sports in their modern incarnations. Other sports take athletes who are excellent at what they do and pit them against each other, doing that thing at which they are excellent, in the best possible conditions. Sometimes cricket does. But it's the only sport that features people doing a thing that - relatively speaking - they are terrible at, pitted against excellence, or in significantly sub-optimal conditions.
That's most obviously seen in tailenders batting, but it's also there in making batsmen bat on a greentop or making bowlers bowl on a shirtfront. Adaptation, working out the conditions, doing the best you can in the circumstances, all that's a key part of the mental side of the game. Thirty runs in one game can be worth 100 in another. A spell of 10-3-20-1 can be worth more than 10-3-38-4.
Life's not fair and merit comes from making the best of the hand you're dealt. Cricket, better than any sport, reflects that. Get inserted on a damp overcast morning that's followed by three days of hot sunshine and getting away with a draw is a greater achievement than winning the toss and batting on a firm track that disintegrates. That imbalance, that unfairness, is built into the game; it's a key part of the mental challenge of cricket. Mess with that, as this change to the toss does, and you're messing with something far more fundamental than it may at first seem.
While the authorities are working that out, I'll be scanning the world snooker rankings for signs of the Silver Fox making a comeback.

Jonathan Wilson writes for the Guardian, the National, Sports Illustrated, World Soccer and Fox. @jonawils