Wanted: Circuit-breakers for cricket

That is why, in spite of some wonderfully skilled players, the one-day matches in Pakistan are leaving me a little cold. The cricket there is an allotrope, no longer bat vs ball but a slightly different looking bat vs bat. It is like separating Mike Tyson and Lennox Lewis, putting them in adjacent rings and judging who wins by the number of punches they can inflict on a defenceless eleven year old.

Well as the batsmen have played, and Inzamam and Tendulkar have served us some sumptuous delights, the pitches have been so benign that you cannot help thinking that this series comes out of the George Bush School of Conflict. Take away your opponent8217;s weapons and pretend to be heroic as you pound him mercilessly. That is what the groundsmen and administrators have done to this series. Bowlers are being bullied, their weapons are being taken away from them and two nations are watching a public flogging.

A couple of years ago, perturbed by the fact that ordinary pinch hitters were slogging established bowlers, the ICC introduced the one bouncer per over rule. It was the only time in the history of one-day cricket that the requirement of a bowler to a contest had been considered. It made an immediate impact in countries that made sporting pitches.

The rule still applies but the pitch, the surface on which a bowler plies his skills, has been taken away from him. The bowler no longer has the tools with which to present a challenge to the batsman, the contest is gone, the plot is gone.

That is why I was delighted Sourav Ganguly asked for the boundary rope to be pushed back at Rawalpindi. A 65 yard boundary means the 30 yard circle is halfway to the fence and that cannot be acceptable. This year in Australia they were pulling the boundary rope in by upto 20 yards sometimes. So you8217;ve got benign pitches, field restrictions, heavier bats, faster outfields and smaller boundaries. Now all they need to do is to determine where the bowler pitches the ball and the game we see in the middle will be no different from the game my son plays on his video screen. It was harder to score runs in book cricket.

In four innings so far we have had scores of 349, 344, 329 and 317. Even stock markets, like our electrical installations, have circuit breakers. And I think one-day cricket needs a circuit-breaker very urgently. We complain that the standard of bowling is going down, I8217;ll be surprised if anybody wants to be a bowler anymore. Football isn8217;t widening the goalposts for more goals, basketball isn8217;t bringing the hoops down to six feet.

Golf is making courses tougher so the contest between man and course can become more exciting, athletics insisted on javelins being changed because they were going too far. One-day cricket needs to do something before it totally ceases to be a challenge between bowler and batsman. Even the mighty dinosaurs became extinct, these are mere bowlers and the groundsmen are hunting them down.

Bowlers need to run in thinking they are going to get a wicket, batsmen need to be apprehensive as they await the delivery of the ball. Spectators need to wonder, with every ball, which of the two is going to win this battle of the wits. 280 needs to be a very good score, 300 a rare celeration of batting skill. Bowlers need to be able to tell their captain that they will defend 250. Even that is five an over.

Even as the world moves towards a free market approach, this is one area where we need a protectionist policy. If the batsmen have to be Shahrukh Khan and the bowlers have to be the buffoons that get bashed around, maybe we should go to the movies instead.