A bad bit of ball control
QUESTION Other than cricket, are there any examples in sport of ball tampering?
BASEBALL is similar to cricket in that the pitcher can alter one side of the ball to affect its flight. He can do this legally by changing his grip on the ball and with the spin he creates when he throws it.
A pitcher who’s willing to break the rules can create other effects by doctoring the surface of the ball.
The most common form of tampering is the spitball. This involves applying saliva, Vaseline or dirt to the ball to affect its flight and/or visibility when thrown. There’s a long tradition of the ball shiner in cricket, using a sucked sweets to give the ball a sugary coating.
Spitballs were once legal. However, in 1920, a stray spitball killed a Cleveland Indians player, 29year-old Ray Chapman. New York Yankees pitcher Carl Mays, who delivered the ball, was a notorious spitball pitcher: ‘No pitcher in the American League resorted to trickery more than Carl Mays in attempting to rough a ball in order to get a break on it which would make it difficult to hit,’ said umpires Billy Evans and William Dineen.
Banned in 1921, spitballs never went away. In 2006, Detroit Tigers pitcher Kenny Rogers was accused of rubbing pine tar on the side of the ball to achieve swerve. Tim Coleman, Cirencester, Glos.
IN THE 2011 Rugby World Cup in New Zealand, England golden boy Jonny Wilkinson was accused of ball tampering.
He’d had an uncharacteristically poor tournament with the boot and blamed the quality of the balls. During England’s 67-3 thrashing of Romania, it emerged that England coaches illegally swapped the game ball for their own version before Wilkinson took his kicks without seeking permission from referee Romain Poite.
Ballgate saw Jonny Wilkinson’s mentor Dave Alred and fitness specialist Paul Stridgeon banned from entering Eden Park for the game against Scotland.
In his autobiography, Wilkinson said the match balls were a ‘joke’ owing to their inconsistent movement: ‘Again and again, I’m hitting the same kick every time, but it’s non-match ball straight through the middle, match ball to the right.’ Paul Watkin, West Drayton, Middx.
QUESTION Which evolved first: the cell wall or the DNA nucleus?
THE cell wall evolved billions of years before the DNA nucleus. It is thought the Earth was formed 4.6billion years ago, and life-building chemicals, such as amino acids and DNA (the complex spiral chemical that carries genetic information), evolved in the primordial soup around 3.8billion years ago.
These were enclosed in a membrane to form early life. It took another 1.5billion years for complex cells with a nucleus, containing the cell’s genetic information, to evolve.
In 1953, scientist Stanley Miller performed a ground-breaking experiment. He sent an electrical charge through a flask of a chemical solution of methane, ammonia, hydrogen and water. This created organic compounds including amino acids. Miller’s experiments demonstrated the plausibility of the spontaneous synthesis of organic molecules such as DNA, providing the basic materials from which the first living organisms arose.
All life that is known to exist on Earth today is based on DNA genomes and protein enzymes. Yet many evolutionary biologists believe this was preceded by a simpler life form based on another replicating molecule called RNA.
Whether you subscribe to this hypothesis or not, what we know is that these molecules were synthesised 3.8million years ago and the first cell is presumed to have arisen by the enclosure of a selfreplicating RNA or DNA molecule. These early, simple, single-celled organisms were surrounded by a membrane and a cell wall, with a circular strand of DNA containing their genes.
It took around another 1.5billion years for the complex eukaryotic cell, the basis of multi-cellular life, to evolve. They are thought to have arisen from symbiotic union, where one organism devours another and the two exist in harmony.
It is thought the nucleus itself evolved this way between 2.2 and 1.7billion years ago, long after the evolution of the cell wall. Jan Wishart,
Edinburgh.
QUESTION The opening credits of TV’s Call The Midwife show a street of terrace houses and a huge ocean liner in view. Is this a genuine picture?
SEEING the picture of the ship, the Dominion Monarch, at the end of Saville Road in London’s Docklands brought back many memories.
My mother and I boarded it on April 28, 1946, to join my South African father in Cape Town. We travelled from North Shields and it was my mother’s first visit outside the north-east of England.
At Tilbury, where it was raining profusely, we went on board and were placed in a dormitory with bunks lining the bulkhead.
The adjoining dormitory held Italian PoWs, being repatriated to Naples. On arrival, one of them was found to have smallpox, so they had to be vaccinated, which took all day. A reception committee waited to greet them, with a small band playing the well-known Neapolitan song O Sole Mio continually.
At Port Said, we took on East African troops bound for Mombasa. There, we were ashore and bought bananas, which we overate, to our dismay. No one in the UK had seen bananas for years.
On arrival in Durban, we were met by soprano Perla Gibson, who stood on the shore and sang through a megaphone.
My mother said it sounded like the Christmas carol Angels From The Realms Of Glory, which touched her heart.
After another five days on a train, we arrived in Cape Town via Bloemfontein and my mother was so relieved to see my father. Christopher Pinn, Sittingbourne, Kent.
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