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It was while sitting in the White Line Wireless box of dreams, commentating on the World Twenty20, that I was reminded of the darkness that still lingers over the game of cricket.
For while it is undoubtedly the best and noblest of all sports, it has yet a fatal flaw, a weakness that gnaws from within and prevents it from achieving its own colossal potential.
The darkness that blights our beautiful game has a name, and its name is leg byes.
I will not say it’s time to get rid of the leg bye, because it was time to get rid of the leg bye two hundred years ago. It is a deformed, loveless creature, a thing that should never have been, and whose every appearance during a game of cricket stands as a grotesque mockery of all that is lovely and good.
Let us examine the means of scoring runs that are available to a cricket team. They may score runs off the bat: a reward for participating in the central purpose of the game, hitting the ball. They may score runs via no-balls or wides: a penalty for error on the part of the bowler. They may score runs in the form of byes: a punishment for wayward bowling and/or slack wicketkeeping, or if you like, a reward for the batsmen’s quick thinking in taking advantage of that slackness.
Or they may amass runs by means of the leg bye, a reward for… missing the ball.
A leg bye occurs if, and only if, the batsman has been comprehensively beaten by the bowler. A mishit may bring runs, but the batsman has at least in that case managed to get bat on ball. A leg bye is the result of a total failure to lay wood on leather.
This most accursed of sundries can also only be attained when playing a shot, so there’s no question of batsmen achieving leg byes by judicious use of the pads – if a leg bye is taken it’s because the batsman has played and missed, or tried to get out of the way and failed.
And that’s the point: a leg bye is a mark of failure, yet it provides advantage to the team whose player has just failed. Dig around all you want in the spirit of cricket, that’s a principle you’re not going to find anywhere.
The leg bye also lacks the element of initiative and speedy reaction that can at times characterise the bye. A ball that strikes the pad or body might fly anywhere, through neither fault of bowler nor design or batsman, and so there’s no credit in taking a run when a ball has flown into a gap as a result of ineptitude.
And while a bye might also be the consequence for a wicketkeeper whose skills fail him, a leg bye is not. The ball evades the field because it’s rebounded off the failing batsman, not because the keeper has forgotten to stay down.
“Oh,” I hear you snivel, “but the leg bye is a vital part of our game. It’s traditional, it’s a cherished element that it would be heresy to tamper with!”
I don’t actually hear you snivel that, of course. In fact, I assume that you are probably people of reasonable adult intelligence and so would not talk such abominable nonsense at all.
The leg bye is, at best, a cricketing appendix. It serves no purpose and it never has, unless you count the encouragement of incompetence to be a purpose. The only argument in its favour is that it’s always been there, and besides the fact that this is also the argument in favour of Eric Abetz, the fact is that when people sit down to wax lyrical over the rich history and boundless beauty of cricketing culture, none of them are speaking reverently of long summer days on the village green, rejoicing in the gentle pleasure of the leg bye.
PG Wodehouse never wrote a story about his love of leg byes, and neither did Neville Cardus. The leg bye is merely a disreputable hanger-on to the joys of cricket, not a member of them.
I’m not saying the leg bye is the only change cricket needs to make. We could also do with bat thickness restrictions, a resolution to stop calling every ball a millimetre outside leg stump a wide, and an end to the dumb rule where if you touch the boundary rope and the ball at the same time, it’s four. But baby steps, as they say: let’s deal with the long-festering issue of the leg bye before we put the finishing touches to cricket’s perfection.
I am begging the authorities in charge of the game to move immediately to abolish this unsightly blemish on cricket’s face. I am begging all who love the game to lobby and harangue those authorities until they do so.
We must give cricket the purity it deserves, and stop giving batting teams the runs they don’t.