Ball tampering

In a quiet week for cricket, the subject of ball tampering has come to the fore after Marcus Trescothick admitted to using a humble mint to change the consistency of his saliva which he then applied to the ball. I’m assuming he applied it to one side to maintain a shine. Now those with a soft spot for the larger part of antipodean cricket will be thinking back to the 2005 Ashes and thinking hmmm… But you can stop right there as he used the technique in the 2001 which England lost convincingly.

So was it illegal? Going by the letter of the law, yes it was. But how on earth do you police the consistency and make up of a players spit? Take a swab before the beginning of each session? And what sort of stuff keeps the shine on the ball? Something of a grey area really.

There are three basic goals in ball tampering depending on the stage of the innings. At the beginning of the innings you want to retain the shine on the ball (or rather one side of it) as long as possible to assist conventional swing. Once the ball is around 40 odd overs old, in the more abrasive environments, the un-tampered ball will become scuffed assisting reverse swing. Obviously the earlier you can affect the reverse swing, by scratching up the ball, possibly with suitably sharp objects such as fingernails or bottle tops, the longer the fielding side have to bamboozle and bowl a team out. The third main way to change, or in this case retain the performance of the ball is to pick or pinch the seam up so that the bowler can hit the seam making the ball deviate off the pitch. There is a good article on the merits and penalties of the various different methods on the CricInfo site.

Of these ball tampering methods, scratching and the scratcher are the easiest to spot these being very much physical elements against which to enforce any offence. Picking the seam too is a very obvious thing to be seen doing especially with the many many cameras present at top level international cricket. The less obvious is using foreign substances to shine the ball. Where do you cross the line from cleaning the ball and artificially retaining its shine? By the letter of the law, does the shining of the ball on a bowler’s trousers, as every bowler does, fall foul of the laws of the game? It probably doesn’t, but how far removed is this from Marcus Trescothick’s actions with his minty fresh spit? Who knows. Whether it is right to do it or not, it gives a bowling side some small solace in the increasingly batsman friendly world of cricket.

My season of going to the cricket comes to an end on Sunday with the 4th ODI of England vs South Africa at Lords, before which I have a trip to Northampton to see Northants take on Glamorgan in the LV County Championship, day 3 of 4. Earlier this year on discovering that a close friend had never seen any top level British sport, I made a pact to take him to top(ish) level football, cricket and rugby before he gets married in January next year. I think he will enjoy tomorrow’s day in the sun the best of the three, having been nonplussed by Wolves vs Ipswich at the back end of the 2007-2008 season.