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Opinion
If you’ve ventured over to cricket Twitter in the last few weeks, you’ve no doubt stumbled across the raging Mankad debate.
A lot of great points are being made, and even more rubbish ones are getting air time – it’s Twitter after all.
But amid the hysteria, it’s mostly just normal cricket fans like you or I who want the best for our game, whether we’re sitting down to watch two brightly coloured teams we’ve never heard of in some league we read about that one time, or it’s the first morning of the Ashes or Border-Gavaskar Trophy.
We just want to watch great cricket (and read about it on The Roar after the day’s play).
Calls for video umpires to start signalling short runs on non-strikers who leave early, or issuing penalties to the batting team when a runner leaves before the point of delivery, or the ICC to alter the laws and playing conditions that currently police the Mankad dismissal, or even imploring bowlers to provide an official warning before considering taking the bails at the non-striker’s end are getting louder with each fresh dismissal.
The only way to truly deal with cricket’s biggest story of 2023 (so far!) is to let it rip – like we have been.
Give it a couple months, let the inevitable media storm following a few successful non-striker run outs on the world stage play out, and it will never happen again as non-strikers finally learn to stop straying out of the crease early.
Let. It. Rip.
This is a solution for everybody, no matter which side of the debate you find yourself on. If you are on board with the Mankad, then you will revel in delight as a few successful dismissals result in professional cricketers the world over finally stopping the practice of backing up too early after a few harsh lessons are learnt.
If you are categorically against the Mankad, this is your solution too. The best way to stop it is to get the non-striker back in their crease, then sit back and enjoy Mankad-less cricket for the rest of time. (After all, “it’s simple Chalk, stay in your crease mate!)
If the non-striker stays in their crease until after the point of delivery, this dismissal becomes impossible.
Cricket has done this before when changing laws.
In 2017, the ICC determined that ‘fake fielding’, a fielder wilfully attempting to distract or deceive either batter while in the field, was against the spirit of the game and outlawed it.
Marnus Labuschagne was the first fielder to be penalised under the new law (Law 41.5 for those playing at home), in a domestic one-day game for Queensland that same year. The long-accepted practice of a fielder chasing the ball, and then sliding and pretending to pick it up to try to get the batters to hesitate while running between the wickets literally stopped overnight once our boy Marnus and his teammates were penalised, and the practice hasn’t happened on the world stage since (Quinton de Kock may have got away with a bit of deliberate deception as a keeper in a 2021 ODI, but let’s not let the truth get in the way of a good story here).
Marnus Labuschagne (Photo by Jason McCawley – CA/Cricket Australia via Getty Images)
It really is that simple. Let the punishment play out (or, in this case, the non-striker losing their wicket) and the behaviour will be altered in due course. And quickly – it will be a long time before Virat Kohli or Steve Smith are run out as a non-striker a second time if they let their guard down and leave the crease early in the dying stages of a World Cup knockout match.
The NRL has pulled this off with the crusher tackle and head-high contact in recent seasons. League fans endured a miserable couple months each time as every man and his dog was sin binned or sent off… And then it pretty much stopped.
It’s almost as if professional athletes, who are the very best at what they do, can make adjustments as they go.
We will look back on this current debate with amusement in years ahead – the solution to the so-called Mankad issue is so blindingly simple, it beggars belief: stay in your crease. Problem solved. Forever.
If we need a few martyrs to help get the message across, so be it.
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