Law Before War

Winston Churchill is quoted to have said “Better jaw, jaw, jaw than war, war, war”. It is ironical that the English in general and Churchill, a descendant of the Marlboroughs, in particular, should have come to be among the most ardent advocates of non-violent means of resolving disputes. Or maybe not. Too much blood on the hands, perhaps, eventually leads to Lady Macbeth – out damned spot! The essence of diplomacy and of law is convention. Natural language is an imprecise tool. Where interpretations differ, conventions step in.

Which brings us to one of the great inventions of the English - cricket. The phrase “it’s not cricket” has come to capture the English love of convention; “sound fellows” play by the rules, keep a straight bat etc. whereas “bounders” do not. At the centre of cricket is a classic convention – the interpretation of the Leg Before Wicket (LBW) rule. Cricket’s dirty secret is the way that the distinction between “sound fellows” and “bounders” has been somewhat blurry over the years.

Despite the merriment made of the LBW rule by those ignorant of cricket, it is a perfectly sensible concept. In cricket, the batsman defends a “wicket” which consists of three sticks (“stumps”) evenly spaced with two small pieces of wood (“bails”) joining them at the top. A batsman is “out” when the balls strikes the wicket and causes at least one bail to fall off. This called “bowled out” .The width of the wicket is nine inches and the height 28 inches. LBW occurs when a ball that would have bowled out a batsman hits one of the batsmen’s legs (which are covered in protective pads).

The accepted convention on LBW is that, except in very unusual cases, a ball striking the front pad of a batsman making a full front-foot stroke cannot be judged with certainty to have hit the stumps. Geometry makes this a very a sensible convention. The front pad of even a short batsman playing a full forward stroke is about seven feet in front of the wicket. In contrast, a back-foot stroke would find the batsman’s legs about one to two feet in front of the stumps. It is not difficult to judge if a ball would have hit the wicket with certainty in the latter case but extremely difficult in the former.

Most of the time the LBW rule has worked but very so often the “bounders” push the envelope. What is more interesting is how “sound fellows” have reacted. The most egregious case is that of Pakistani umpires from about the mid 1950s to mid 1980s. It was virtually impossible to for a Pakistani batsman to be out LBW. The greatest beneficiary of this policy was Javed Miandad; his test average puts him in the exalted over 50 bracket but outside Pakistan he only averaged 45.5 versus 61.4 in Pakistan. (Incidentally, most of the other over-50s class have very little difference between their home and away averages – e.g Tendulkar; home 58.1, away 56.6.) On the other hand, visiting batsmen had to be wary of letting any delivery hit their pads. The most extreme case of this was Gary Sobers in 1958, after his record-setting 365 not out the previous year in the West Indies.

Which brings us to the current Ashes series. As much as I would like to join the chorus proclaiming this as a famous victory and the series “one of the greatest” my joy is marred by the following series of numbers: 0,3,2,0,0,1,2,0,2,1; 2,1,3,1,2,2,4,2,4,0. These are the LBWs given against England and Oz, respectively, (separated by the semicolon) in the five tests. Overall 21 LBWs against the cobbers and 11 against the Poms (18:8 after the first test, won by Oz), out of 90 and 93 dismissals, respectively. Empirically LBWs represent about 10-15% of dismissals in general. England’s total is about the average expectation but Australia’s is way beyond statistical variation. 21 LBWs can only be explained by biased umpiring. 21 LBWs are as likely on a random basis as 1; would anyone not think that a team that had only one LBW in five tests was not the beneficiary of some strange umpiring?

Why are the Aussie not whingeing? Is it a conspiracy? I think it’s far more subtle. The two teams are quite close, it turns out, but I think “everyone” understood the shot in the arm for cricket in England from an exciting series, preferably won by England. So, an LBW here or there helped along and the Aussies have gone along with it. Sound fellows don’t rock the boat.