Cricket and wardrobe malfunctions

It was great news for New Zealand just before the game against Sri Lanka began. 27 and 56 were fit. Then, after winning the toss and choosing to bat, 7 said 70 and 50 would have to sit out. Confused already? New Zealand, known around the world as the Black Caps, for their distinctive black gear, simply had numbers printed on the back of their shirts, not names, as is the common practice for teams around the world.

The International Cricket Council, though, said that there was nothing in their rules or norms that stipulated that teams needed to have the names of players on kit. “The teams are required to give us the squad numbers of each player,” an ICC spokesperson told Cricinfo. “There’s nothing that states that players have to wear their names on their shirts.”

But for anyone who has played sport at any level, it’s a pleasure to wear a shirt bearing your names. I won’t easily forget the thrill of being handed my No. 7 shirt, with Vasu on the back, when I made my school’s football team as a kid. Scores of matches later, and now years since kicking a ball, the jersey is still around, tucked away safely in a loft. So it was a bit surprising to see New Zealand out in the middle with just numbers, and no names on their shirts.

Could it be that the team wanted to leave individualism behind, and just focus on being a unit, and wearing the black shirts that identified them as the New Zealand cricket team? Could it be that the board and its players were locked in some merchandising squabble, a la Indian cricket, and the players were launching some sort of protest in this manner? Or could there be some deep cricketing superstition at work here? As the wickets tumbled, and the procession of players to and from the pavilion continued, the mind wandered, inventing reasons for this odd sartorial move.

Sadly, though, as is so often the case in cricket, the truth came in the way of a good story. “We had a wardrobe malfunction,” Lindsay Crocker, the manager of the New Zealand team, said. “On some of the shirts the names fell off, and so we decided to take them all off, rather than have some shirts with names and others without.” How ironic that the lettering of the names should not stick to shirts on a day when the pitch was given a coating of polyvinyl acetate, an industrial adhesive, to hold it together. Perhaps the New Zealand team can have a word with Andy Atkinson, the ICC pitch expert whose brainwave it was to take glue to the wicket, and borrow some for their shirts.