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If I may step up on the soapbox, the biggest blight in the game of Test cricket currently is this practice of umpires holding potentially outgoing batsmen on the field while they check for a no-ball.
To clarify, it’s not the overturning of wickets found to be taken with a no-ball that gets my goat, rather the hole that the umpires are digging for themselves every time they send a decision upstairs.
I’ve never had any sympathy for bowlers overstepping, as a now-former batsman myself, and I completely agree that this is a flow-on of the chronic number of no-balls that bowlers send down at training.
When my former club teammates showed no inkling or interest at training to fix the problem after it was pointed out, I used to make a point of standing in the umpire’s position and calling no-balls so that no-one was in any doubt who was cocking up.
And it is a cock-up, too. You bowlers, if I can generalise, go to great lengths to step out or even measure your run-ups, but the no-ball issue remains.
If you can’t manage the small detail of keeping some part of your front foot behind the popping crease as you’re required to, then taking wickets is something you won’t need to concern yourself with.
So, for every bowler out there, at whatever level you’re playing: get it bloody right.
Four dismissals were knocked back during this First Test in Brisbane, and all of them were no-balls, but the question remains why the umpires are not calling the no-balls as they see them.
This for me is the issue. The umpires are obviously seeing enough to decide to send the delivery upstairs when a dismissal is on the line. So why don’t they just call the no-ball as they see it?
The question that most commonly comes up is “How many batsmen were out on no-balls before DRS?” But I come at this from a different direction.
How many no-balls are being let go by umpires who only make the decision to call them if a wicket appears to have been taken?
Take any of the examples from this Test and think about it. If instead of chopping onto his stumps, Hashim Alma had smashed the ball to the cover boundary, umpire Asad Rauf would’ve stood there signalling a four, but knowing in his mind that he’s missed a no-ball.
It becomes a double standard. Essentially, the umpires are relying on the DRS to correct the calls they don’t have the confidence to make live. Some no-balls will only be called if a wicket falls, otherwise they will be knowingly ignored.
Just think about that last point for a bit.
International cricket umpires are not calling things as they see them in play. If it’s inexcusable for bowlers to overstep in the first place – and it is – then surely it’s also inexcusable for international umpires to not call things as they see them.
For me, there is only one solution, and that’s the remove no-ball review completely.
I understand the difficulties umpires face in seeing where both feet land, and then what happens up at the batsman’s end (as Channel Nine went to lengths to illustrate in the Tea break yesterday). Surely, though, being able to see and adjudicate all that occurs in play is part of reaching the highest form of the game as an umpire.
Remove the review, and leave the no-ball calls to the umpires in the middle.
Yes, some no-balls will be missed, and some calls might even be wrong, but that is the human element of umpiring. There would still be very few occasions where a batsman has later been shown to have been dismissed from a no-ball (Shane Warne holing out on 99 more than ten years ago against New Zealand in Perth remains the most obvious recent example).
More importantly, we’d be backing the top umpires to call what they see.
Anyway, the Test…
I’d reckon Australia head to Adelaide now with a fair chunk of the momentum out of this first Test. It’s a fair conclusion that losing all of Saturday to rain cost both sides a result, but both were also able to show enough to assure us this will be a cracking series.
I had always thought it would come down to the respective batting line-ups in this Test. Despite claims that South Africa were sporting the best attack ever, or whatever bowling coach Allan Donald labelled them, I had a hunch that both pace attacks were in similar form and might cancel each other out.
And I still can’t shake the feeling that Graeme Smith buggered up by taking four quicks into the Test, then winning the toss and batting.
The known quantities of Hashim Amla and Jaques Kallis set up the match for South Africa, but their bowlers couldn’t seal the deal after having Australia 3/40.
From there, the batting of Ed Cowan, Mike Hussey, and particularly Michael Clarke took the game away and put it in the position we were left with yesterday, where even if the chance was the faintest of faint, only Australia could’ve won.
Just on Clarke, the four he put back over the bowler’s head to bring up his 250 is an early contender for the shot of the summer, and was all the more impressive for the fact the bowler was Dale Steyn.
With all that in mind, a draw was probably a fair result, and the second Test in Adelaide starting on November 22 is now even more heavily anticipated than it already was.