Cricket: time to lighten up?
What a curious way for umpires to behave, said Mike Atherton in The Times. Last Friday, in England’s Second Test against Pakistan, the sky had become rather overcast. So they halted play: the rules state that if “bad light” makes playing on dangerous, the cricketers must come off. The floodlights were on full-beam; on an adjacent pitch, Pakistan’s Twenty20 players were enjoying a practice match without any lighting. But no matter: rules are rules. The next day the same thing happened: even though there was just some light rain, “bad light” was called; not a single ball was bowled. By the time the Test ended on Monday, in an inevitable draw, less than a day and a half’s play had taken place.
“Cricket is one of the most innovative sports in the world,” said Simon Hughes in The Sunday Times. Think of all the developments of the last 30 years: “coloured clothes, white balls, floodlights, neutral umpires, Hawk-Eye, T20”. Yet no one has found a way to keep playing “when the dark clouds roll in”. It’s not as if bad light poses unique challenges, said George Dobell on ESPNcricinfo. We accept that players can “struggle to follow the path of the ball” if the sun is shining: “Was it safe when Jofra Archer was bowling at 96mph last summer?” A simple solution to all this would be to introduce a pink ball, as it’s easier to see in gloomy weather.
Still, floodlights have proved a boon to the game since being introduced to Tests in the early 2000s, said Simon Wilde in The Times. In most cases they enable the game to be played in overcast conditions, and because such conditions help the ball move, this has proved “overwhelmingly favourable to the faster bowlers who seam and swing the ball around”. As a result, this has been a summer of tense, “tightly fought, lower-scoring games”.